As demonstrated by the recent crisis in Syria, the international community is failing to respond effectively to refugee crises around the world. With the civil war in Syria and the massive influx of Syrian refugees into neighboring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey, as well as many countries in Europe, the efficacy of the international human rights regime in responding to complex humanitarian emergencies has once again come under question. In January 2015, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) declared that Syrians overtook Afghans as the largest…
Based on the rational choice theory, this essay develops a theoretical approach to explain how an individual's expected utility of protesting is affected by the probability of having a new government, together with the expected costs, expected benefits, and the probability of retributive consequences for protesting. The essay argues that the probability of having a new government is positively correlated with the opposition's ability to coordinate. By modeling how these variables interact, this essay revises the concept of "threshold", or point where the expected net benefits exceed the expected…