Showing 1 - 10 of 14 Items

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Arjun S. Mehta

Access: Open access

At the intersection of international relations, comparative politics, and war consequence studies, this paper seeks to evaluate the effects of supportive foreign military intervention on education provision in three neighboring Central Sahel countries: Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. In the wake of a Tuareg insurgency and a 2012 coup d’état in Mali, the proliferation of jihadist violence in the tri-border Liptako-Gourma region has been met by a proliferation of foreign interveners. Does stabilization— the form of intervention in the Central Sahel— improve education provision, as measured by diminishing jihadist attacks on schools and school closures due to violence? This paper hypothesizes that where there is a larger scale of intervention, there is more security— and thus an environment more conducive to education provision. Although insecurity in the three Central Sahel countries has shared origins, each country has a distinct scale of intervention. In placing Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso on a spectrum of stabilization (from largest- to smallest-scale), this paper conducts a comparative test to determine how intervention affects education provision. Qualitative and quantitative data analyses reveal that, while a larger scale of intervention (in Mali) guarantees neither better security nor more favorable education provision, the absence of intervention (in Burkina Faso) facilitates unfavorable security and education outcomes. This paper concludes that destabilizing security-centric conceptions of stabilization may lead to more lasting peace and more accessible education in the Central Sahel and beyond.

Date: 2016-05-01

Creator: Kelsey J Freeman

Access: Open access

Date: 2019-05-01

Creator: Duncan Gans

Access: Open access

Date: 2019-05-01

Creator: Connor Rockett

Access: Open access

Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this study tests the hypothesis that state intervention in agrarian economies causes peasant movements to engage in broad-based contention, on regional and national levels. The study traces the connections between government land and agricultural institutions and the characteristics of rural movements that make claims on them. Case studies of regions of Tanzania, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ethiopia show the ways in which rural movements are constructed in response to the political and social environments in which they arise. That is, the comparisons demonstrate that the character of political authority and social organization are important determinants of the form taken by peasant movements.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Artur Kalandarov

Access: Open access

This paper evaluates the validity of three concepts from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War as they relate to contemporary military conflict. Utilizing the Soviet and American Wars in Afghanistan as case studies, the paper also offers a model for comparative conflict analysis by expanding upon Clausewitz’s culminating point concept. It argues that – despite limitations to Clausewitz’s theory of war – his concepts of culminating points in military operations, mass and concentration, and changing war aims provide useful insights into counterinsurgency military failures. Chapter One identifies the Soviet and American culminating points. Concluding that the concept of a culminating point is not applicable to the means and objectives of insurgents, it expands upon Clausewitzian theory by presenting an effectual substitute: the Counterinsurgent Acceptance Point. This is the author’s idea, and it is defined as the moment at which the counterinsurgents first publicly call for negotiations with the enemy. As the first public acknowledgment that the insurgents have denied the counterinsurgents a strictly military resolution to the conflict, it marks a crucial shift in the political framework of the war and is a fitting antithesis to the culminating point. Chapters Two and Three show how an inadequate troop presence and unclear war aims harmed Soviet and American efforts in Afghanistan. The development of insurgencies in both wars are studied to pinpoint when both country’s leaderships failed to adopt a Clausewitzian view of war, despite calls to do so by General Colin Powell in 2001 and Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov in 1979.

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Joseph B. Lancia

Access: Open access

My thesis discusses the cultural, political, and social dynamics of mountains with separate Indigenous and Western names and identities. Centering on Aoraki/Mount Cook—the highest peak in Aotearoa New Zealand—I integrate personal experiences as ethnographic data through narratives, mainly of my time hiking while studying abroad in New Zealand and during the two recent summers I spent exploring Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Through its name, Aoraki/Mt. Cook maintains Indigenous Māori and Western perspectives: Aoraki being a Māori atua (god) and Captain James Cook being a significant colonial figure in the Pacific. The slash upholds both identities while ensuring that they exist together. These dynamics are explored in depth and extended to mountains in places including Colorado, Alaska, and Australia. While discussing Rocky I rely heavily on Oliver Toll’s Arapaho Names & Trails (2003) which contains a substantial collection of Arapaho knowledge of the area and I give strong attention to Nesótaieux (Longs Peak and Mount Meeker). Additionally, I look at Mount Blue Sky, Denali, and Uluru/Ayers Rock to discuss mountains that have had formal name changes and how legacies are maintained through toponyms. With discussing varying identities and perceptions of each example and the knowledge held in names I encourage readers to do research into local Indigenous knowledges to further their and others’ understandings of places. I emphasize the concepts of historical silences, the revealing of knowledge, and the importance of language to articulate that Indigenous knowledge might be difficult to find but is never truly lost.

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Matthew Cesar Audi

Access: Open access

Since the late 1800s, people have immigrated to the United states from Lebanon and Syria, and the community’s racial and ethnic position within the United States has been contested ever since. Previous research emphasizes that while people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are legally classified as “white” on the U.S. Census. However, many people from the region do not identify as white, and they often face discrimination or threats of violence. For people of Arab and Christian backgrounds this is further complicated because they are a part of the majority through their religion, but part of a minority through their ethnic background. In addition, media depictions of MENAs tend to be homogenizing and stereotypical. This thesis attempts to fill a gap in literature on Christian Lebanese American identities by conducting ethnographic interviews with Lebanese-Americans from a variety of generations. It pulls from theories of diaspora and race, emphasizing the importance of context and migration trajectories when understanding Lebanese American identities. My findings demonstrate wide-ranging diversity in how Christian Lebanese-Americans understand and articulate identity due to three major factors: divergent migrant pathways in multiple countries, generational difference given changing racial politics in the U.S., and generational difference given the impacts of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East upon young Lebanese-Americans.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Laura H.C. Howells

Access: Open access

Digital authoritarianism is on the rise around the world and threatens the data privacy and rights of both domestic and international Internet users. However, scholarship on digital authoritarianism remains limited in scope and case study selection. This study contributes a new, more comprehensive analytical framework for the study of Internet governance and applies it to the case studies of China and Russia. Special attention is paid to the still understudied Russian Internet governance model. After thorough literature review and novel data collection and analysis, this paper identifies relative centralization of network infrastructure and the extent and pace of change in governance as the most notable differences between the two models. These points of divergence may be explained by two theories; the varieties of authoritarianism hypothesis posits that different political systems face persistent and unique constraints to governance of the digital realm. The development trajectory theory argues that each country’s technological development path foreshadows the systems’ capacity for and extent of governance. This study is among the first to distinguish between Internet governance strategies of authoritarian regimes.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Olivia Giles

Access: Open access

This honors thesis analyzes human rights campaigns to end the practice of state-sponsored torture in Syria during the presidency of Bashar al-Assad. It compares the 2000 Damascus Spring and the 2011 Arab Spring using the concept of the “contentious spiral model.” The model is based on the elements of the original “spiral model” introduced in The Power of Human Rights (1999) and the factors of contentious politics discussed in Dynamics of Contention (2001). It suggests that human rights movements that emerge from uprisings need effective mobilization by domestic and international actors. Sustained pressure from both sources should gradually force the state to make concessions until there is an absence of human rights violations. The study uses research on social movements and international politics in Syria, in addition to data on the practice of torture, to suggest that human rights campaigns to end state-sponsored torture in Syria have been unsuccessful because of the interference of Assad’s foreign alliances. These countries have helped the regime backlash against the opposition during uprisings, which has led to the fracturing of the movement. During the Damascus Spring, this interference took the form of shifting the world’s focus to other regional issues, and during the Arab Spring, Syria’s allies directly supported the Assad regime militarily, financially, and legally.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Katherine Davidson

Access: Open access

Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign during the U.S. elections represented the first large-scale campaign against the United States and was intended to cause American citizens to question the fundamental security and resilience of U.S. democracy. A similar campaign during the 2016 U.K. Brexit referendum supported the campaign to leave the European Union. This paper assesses the policy formation process in the United States and United Kingdom in response to 2016 Russian disinformation using a bureaucratic politics framework. Focusing on the role of sub-state organizations in policy formation, the paper identifies challenges to establishing an effective policy response to foreign disinformation, particularly in the emergence of leadership and bargaining, and the impact of centralization of power in the U.K. Discussion of the shift in foreign policy context since the end of the Cold War, which provided a greater level of foreign policy consensus, as well as specific challenges presented by the cyber deterrence context, supplements insights from bureaucratic politics. Despite different governmental structures, both countries struggled to achieve collaborative and systematic policy processes; analysis reveals the lack of leadership and coordination in the United States and both the lack of compromise and effective fulfillment of responsibilities in the United Kingdom. Particular challenges of democracies responding to exercises of sharp power by authoritarian governments point to the need for a wholistic response from public and private entities and better definition of intelligence agencies’ responsibility to election security in the U.K.