Date Thesis Awarded

5-2016

Access Type

Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only

Degree Name

Bachelors of Arts (BA)

Department

Government

Advisor

Marcus Holmes

Committee Members

Amy Oakes

Victoria Castillo

Abstract

This paper seeks to address the question, “How do women negotiate international crisis and what are their outcomes?” To do this, I derive hypothesis from both the realist and feminist theories to test in three case studies of prominent women leaders in the 20th-21st centuries. I analyze qualitative case studies on Margaret Thatcher, Dilma Rousseff, and Angela Merkel, in which I test variation in negotiation style affecting outcomes. In addition to assessing their early influences and overall negotiating styles, I look at the specific cases of The Falkland Islands Crisis, the NSA Surveillance Crisis, and the Ukraine Crisis negotiations. I find that Merkel and Rousseff embraced collaborative approaches, while Thatcher consistently used a confrontational approach. I also find that collaborative approaches tend to result in better outcomes for all parties, while a confrontational approach creates winners and losers. Overall, this offers more support for feminist theory than realist theory.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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