Leiden University Student Repository

Uzorka, Benjamin (2023)

The incongruency of legitimacy and legality in military intervention

Bachelor thesis | Security Studies (BSc)

Illegal military intervention that is considered legitimate is harmful to the international community and its laws and enforcement systems. Yet the occurrence of such events has increased over the years and is not expected to drop. Therefore, this study examines what stateidentity elements lead to states supporting such illegal intervention committed by a third state. A crisp set qualitative comparative analysis has been conducted in which combinations of four conditions are investigated, which are: prosperity, right-wing ideology, corruption, and military capabilities. These conditions affect the extent to which states have an interventionist approach and have been applied to the case study of the Iraq war of 2003. One of the main findings is that the conjunction of right-wing political ideology and relatively high levels of corruption resulted in states considering the Iraq invasion legitimate. Another remarkable finding is that this study could not find a combination of solutions...Show moreIllegal military intervention that is considered legitimate is harmful to the international community and its laws and enforcement systems. Yet the occurrence of such events has increased over the years and is not expected to drop. Therefore, this study examines what stateidentity elements lead to states supporting such illegal intervention committed by a third state. A crisp set qualitative comparative analysis has been conducted in which combinations of four conditions are investigated, which are: prosperity, right-wing ideology, corruption, and military capabilities. These conditions affect the extent to which states have an interventionist approach and have been applied to the case study of the Iraq war of 2003. One of the main findings is that the conjunction of right-wing political ideology and relatively high levels of corruption resulted in states considering the Iraq invasion legitimate. Another remarkable finding is that this study could not find a combination of solutions that can account for all cases of support for illegal military intervention.Show less

Author

Uzorka, Benjamin

Faculty

Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs

Supervisors

Meer, A. van der

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en