Abstract:
The Civil Peace Service (CPS) is a new instrument for civil conflict management. In this thesis, the reasons for the federal government decision in 1999 to support the CPS are examined. The first aim is to support the further extension of the CPS, the second is the valuation of the methodological approach. As there are only few explanations for this case that can be deduced from foreign policy theories, common sense explanations are also used.
Two of the five explanations examined get confirmed. Firstly, the party policy explanation argues that the moral concepts aggregated in the parties that were elected in 1998 lead to the support of the CPS. Secondly, a few members of parliament of the newly elected government parties had been involved in the civil conflict management community. According to the utilitarian liberal explanation, they firmly supported the financing of the CPS in order to get re-elected.
The other three explanations do not get confirmed. The norms that were responsible for the decision according to the constructivist explanation already existed prior to 1999. Moreover, some implications of this explanation can not be observed. The de-nationalization explanation is hardly testable. The veneer explanation does not get confirmed because the government did not try to 'sell' the CPS to its critics.
The methodological result is satisfactory. It is possible to test specific common sense explanations in a way similar to the testing of those explanations deduced from theories. But the latter deliver more reliable statements that can be generalized more easily.