R2P from Below: Does the British Public View Humanitarian Interventions as Ethical and Effective?

One of the major barriers to the implementation of the Responsibility to Protect principle is the lack of a political will. Public attitudes towards intervention will have a crucial impact on elite willingness to prevent mass atrocities, yet we have little understanding of the factors that influence those attitudes. This article provides the first examination of UK public perceptions about the moral justifiability and effectiveness of humanitarian interventions. The article shows that decisions about justifiability and effectiveness are very different. Attitudes towards justification were more easily explained suggesting that judgements about effectiveness are more contextual and less easily accounted for by individuals’ background characteristics and attitudes. Experiences with both Iraq and Afghanistan have contaminated public perceptions of both the ethics and effectiveness of humanitarian interventions. Although the public is broadly supportive about the justifiability of humanitarian interventions they are extremely sceptical about the likelihood that those interventions will be successful

Relationships Between Religion and Intolerance Towards Muslims and Immigrants in Europe:A Multilevel Analysis

This paper examines relationships between religiosity and intolerance towards Muslims and immigrants among Europeans living in non-Muslim majority countries by applying multilevel modeling to European Values Study data (wave four, 2010). Thus relationships across 44 national contexts are analyzed. The analysis found large between-country differences in the overall levels of intolerance towards immigrants and Muslims. Eastern Europeans tend to be more intolerant than Western Europeans. In most countries Muslims are less accepted than immigrants,—a finding which reflects that in post-9/11 Europe Islamophobia is prevalent and many still see Muslims with suspicion. A key result is that believing matters for the citizen’s attitudes towards Muslims and immigrants. Across Europe, traditional and modern fuzzy beliefs in a Higher Being are strongly negatively related to intolerance towards immigrants and Muslims, while fundamentalism is positively related to both targets of intolerance. Religious practice and denominational belonging on the other hand matter far less for the citizen’s propensity to dislike the two out-groups. With the only exception of non-devout Protestants who do not practice their religion, members of religious denominations are not more intolerant than non-members. The findings are valid for the vast majority of countries although countries differ in the magnitude of the effects

Personal, Interpersonal, and Political Temperaments

Are political liberals generous? Are political conservatives conscientious? Are generous people personally agreeable? Research in behavioral genetics and elsewhere increasingly indicates a biological basis for the manner in which people behave in personal, interpersonal, and political situations, but this biological basis does not mean behavior in these three very different contexts is correlated. In this article, using an original data set obtained from nearly three hundred subjects, the authors are able to test for the degree to which personal, interpersonal, and political temperaments are related. As expected, the overall correlations are quite low. Standard personality traits do not predict political attitudes, and neither political attitudes nor personality predicts the extent to which subjects are generous in interpersonal situations. Human behavior is partially biological, but the systems involved in shaping political behavior seem to be largely but not completely distinct from those involved in shaping personal and interpersonal behavior