Motive and mission: an assessment of U.S. state-building efforts in the post-Cold War era

Post-Cold War international relations have been largely defined by the security and humanitarian challenges posed by weak and failing states. Great power states, in turn, have come to increasingly accept state-building as a legitimate cause for the use of military force. In this study, I employ process tracing and statistical analyses as means of assessing the links between foreign policy decision makers motives for state-building, the subsequent commitment of resources to the intervention, and the ultimate outcome of the engagement. I find that the scope of state-building motives is positively correlated with resource commitments. In turn, I find that resource commitment levels are positively correlated with state-building outcomes.