The Westphalian state system—i.e., the global division of power in to roughly 195 sovereign nation-states—is proving inadequate in the face of rapid globalization. As our world becomes increasingly integrated, the political tools of the past, which uphold division and absolute autonomy, cannot offer a viable vision for the future. This is particularly salient in the case of global climate change: our commitment to statehood and international competition is preventing us from seeing the ways in which we are deeply interconnected, effectively imperiling current and future generations. Indeed, how should we respond to the 200-250 million climate refugees that will be displaced in the next 50-70 years due to climate change? What duties of justice are they owed? In this project, I assess the social contract tradition in political theory which offers the main philosophical grounds for the contemporary state system. I argue that, for a number of different reasons, social contract theory fails to offer a desirable framework for the new global political order necessitated by globalization. A theoretical framework that recognizes the ways in which humans are fundamentally in nature, and thus widens the scope of justice, offers a more promising alternative for regulating global cooperation. Indeed, if we, the human race, see ourselves as a unified group playing a small part in the larger play that is the global ecosystem, then our vision will clear and we will begin to see the appropriate duties of justice that we owe to each other, nonhuman animals, and nature.

When open-air drug markets, the geographic clustering of street-level purchasing and selling of drugs illegally, are introduced into urban environments with high levels of poverty, low levels of education, and gang networks, they act as a tipping point for lethal violence. Drug markets create economic incentives to utilize spatial and interpersonal relationships among gangs for generating income, increasing intense competition between and within gangs. Seattle is an optimal city to examine due to the availability of data and low overall homicide rate, making homicide hotspots even more curious. I evaluate my hypothesis systematically by conducting a bivariate and trivariate regression analysis, utilizing homicide, gang territory, and drug market data. I found that open-air drug markets are positively associated with homicide clusters. Further multivariate regressions will be completed that control for multiple factors where homicides are likely to occur, including poverty, education attainment, population density, neighborhood residence stability, gender, age, and race. This project is important for both scholars and policymakers, as a causal explanation for concentrated violence, or hotspots, will contribute to literatures on urban politics, crime, criminology and help identify ways to decrease the national homicide rate.

Over the past century, most of the highly debated political issues evaluated through a religiously influenced moral lens, such as gay marriage and abortion, have gained legislative support and restrictions were ultimately ruled unconstitutional. With this rise in progressive politics, why has the United States continued to criminalize sex work, another moral topic where women’s bodies and sexuality are heavily regulated? Many Western countries similar to the United States, including Germany, have legalized prostitution in order to support labor rights for sex workers. This paper seeks to examine why sex work is not legal in the United States. Germany will be used as a case study to distinguish why the United States continues to criminalize prostitution. By evaluating American and German history, I conclude that past and present patriarchal laws and culture, molded by a lasting religious influence, have heavily shaped the lens through which Americans view sex and sex work, and therefore establish prostitution laws. In conjunction with a religious and patriarchal society, the creation of the nonprofit sector allowed religious congregations to further their ideals and use philanthropic work as a way to eradicate sex work. Men and women alike capitalized on this philanthropic movement to ensure that sex workers did not disrupt traditional family values and erode the morality of the nation. This fight against sex work has shaped the current goals of anti-prostitution organizations, where human trafficking is conflated with prostitution. This perspective that human trafficking and sex work are interdependent has convinced politicians that legalizing prostitution would lead to an increased demand for human trafficking. Powerful faith-based groups have brought this issue to their congregations and lead anti-sex trafficking organizations and lobbying efforts in the United States. Religious influence on the government has prompted the moral lens through which sex work is viewed and regulated.

Previous research on campus sexual assault has found higher rates of sexual assault committed against members of sororities as opposed to non-affiliated women. Despite this finding, there has been limited research on this topic. This thesis observes the relationship between honor codes that prohibit drinking within the Greek Community on campus and rates of sexual assault. I seek to fill a gap in scholarship by conducting a study of honor codes within the University of Washington Greek Community in order to determine if gender based honor codes increase student vulnerability to sexual assault. I hypothesize that honor codes that restrict drinking are not meeting their intended purpose of preventing students from drinking but rather that they force students to do so outside of their home, which places students in more vulnerable situations. Additionally, I hypothesize that gender based honor codes increase student vulnerability to sexual assault. In order to test these hypotheses, I utilize a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collected from surveys and interviews with students at the University of Washington. I also employ feminist theory and previous research on sexual violence within Greek Communitites. My findings indicate that gender differentiated restrictions on drinking within sorority honor codes reinforce gender structures that have been fonud to perpetuate sexual assault and make sorority women drink in spaces where they may be at a higher risk of sexual assault. 

Ireland generally does not come to mind when debating military doctrine or civil-military relations; nevertheless, the Irish military has seen battle both abroad and at home since the British relinquished their legal domain over the nation in the 1920’s. Despite this short history, the nature of Ireland’s civilian relationship with its Permanent Defence Forces, or Óglaigh na hÉireann, is worth inspection due to its professional respect for civilian authority and successful minimal force policy which can serve as a comparison to our own military in the United States. This research uses political scientist Samuel Huntington’s terms of formal authority and informal influence to assess the success of the Irish Permanent Defence Forces via the quality of its relationship to both the Irish Parliament and the general Irish civilian population. I measure the formal relationship by the level, unity, and scope of influence, whereas I measure the informal relationship by group affiliation, economic resources, post-military occupations, and level of prestige. Following analysis of these several factors, the paper concludes that the informal de-politicized and formal subordinate role of the Irish military serves the state as a successful instrument of defense. The Defence Forces hold fairly little informal influence in terms of prestige, post-military occupations, economic resources, and group affiliation, yet this may serve in the best interests of the state. It has little to no formal autonomy to manipulate political affairs, yet very structural, stable control over the breadth of its own military responsibilities with internal avenues for releasing tension or for incurring incremental, thoughtful administrative change as necessary. The Irish military is constantly reminded of its subordination to the civilian government while at the same time accorded a fair degree of autonomy over its own regions of authority. These factors combined have created a peaceful and efficient civil-military relationship within Ireland.

This paper aims to explain how both the Donald Trump campaign for President of the United States and the Leave campaign in support of Brexit achieved national electoral success. Both stunning political victories initially shocked global markets and people across the world alike. In this paper, I aim to understand their electoral successes within the broader context of growing populist, nativist, and isolationist sentiments in western democracies. I argue that both the Trump campaign and the Leave campaign mobilized broad feelings of resentment in white, economically stagnant, deindustrialized communities scattered across their respective countries to augment their bases, build their political coalitions, and achieve electoral success. I rely mostly on qualitative methods and some quantitative data to conduct rigorous case studies on different British and American communities with the presence of deindustrialization serving as the independent variable. I intend for these case studies to show that the combination of deindustrialization and lingering effects of the global recession in predominantly white communities led to increased susceptibility to populist appeals to feelings of economic resentment. Further, in economically dynamic but demographically comparable cases where deindustrialization is not present, the same populist appeals were substantially less successful. The key implication of my work is it demonstrates the saliency of populist, nativist, and isolationist political appeals to white voters in deindustrialized communities in western democracies, and the ability to build a successful political coalition based off feelings of resentment and economic anxiety.

This project examines the relationship between government use of technology through mass surveillance and the individual's right to privacy. In what some have called the “Big Brother” age of democracy, states often use mass surveillance technologies such as drones, wiretapping phones, intercepting internet communications, and other forms of secret surveillance. States argue technology aids efforts to combat security threats to the state, keep the public safe, and prevent crime. Individuals and NGOs argue that these practices can violate their rights to privacy. In a global age marked by global terrorism threats and a broadening use of mass surveillance technologies, the right to privacy is often portrayed as the loser. International courts are beginning to change this dynamic. This projects analyzes the emerging field of mass surveillance case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to understand the role of individuals, states and courts in shaping this area of law. Cases were selected directly from the ECtHR Factsheet titled "Mass Surveillance" and a specific emphasis is placed on cases with a significant domestic impact. The findings bring into question dominant understandings of state power, and reveal the court does not hesitate to uphold individual and group privacy rights in the face of state opposition. Yet the findings also warn that rights to privacy are not absolute in the global “war on terror” and in the new “Big Brother” era of mass surveillance. In a field that will only continue to grow with a surge of technology, this project has important implications for future relationships between privacy and state security.

Despite the separation of church and state, religion and the religious beliefs of legislators have influenced the outcomes of elections since the founding of the United States. Measuring variation in the relative religiosity of congresses has not been possible because of the lack of available information. Nonetheless, religion has played a central role in campaigns. Political campaigns have claimed time and time again that they need to restore order in Washington D.C. and cite the religious beliefs of the candidate as evidence that they will be able to do that. This study examines whether or not that argument is persuasive to voters. To move beyond previous literature, this project has collected original data and has quantified the religiosity of congress by examining senatorial webpages and the rate with which they use religious terms on their webpages. This will be compared to survey data in the senator’s states. A multivariate regression has tested if there is a statistically meaningful association between voters’ concerns about public safety or economic conditions will lead to the election of senators that appear to be more religious. A relationship between public concerns about safety or economic concerns would indicate that voters are persuaded that a candidate’s religious beliefs make the candidate more qualified to restore order.