Showing 1 - 3 of 3 Items
Education Amid Stabilization: The Varied Effects of Military Intervention on Public Schooling in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso
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.
Enemy Combatants and Unitary Executives: Presidential Power in Theory and Practice During the War on Terror
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Rohini Kurup
Access: Open access
- In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration decided that suspected terrorists and those determined to have aided terrorists would be detained and classified as “enemy combatants.” This was a largely new category of prisoners who were neither prisoners of war protected under international law nor civilians. They included noncitizens and citizens—those captured on foreign battlefields and on American soil. They would be detained by the United States, held indefinitely without charge or access to a lawyer, and subject to trial by military commission. The administration’s enemy combatant policies were based on a theory of inherent executive power—that the Constitution gave the president vast and exclusive powers, which allowed him to act unilaterally without Congressional interference or judicial review. This thesis charts the development of and challenges to the enemy combatant policies to understand how they were conceived and what their implications are to the American political system. I argue that by appealing to a theory of inherent executive power to create the policies, the administration subverted traditional checks on presidential power and undermined the rule of law. Ultimately, the dismantling of some of the enemy combatant policies, largely a result of court rulings that challenged the administration’s premise of power, signified a reining in of executive authority. Yet, many aspects of the administration’s counterterrorism apparatus remained past Bush’s years in the White House, leaving a legacy of expanded presidential power for future presidents.
Who We Are: Incarcerated Students and the New Prison Literature, 1995-2010
Date: 2013-05-01
Creator: Reilly Hannah N Lorastein
Access: Open access
- This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring poetry, essays, fiction, and visual art created by incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program at San Quentin State Prison. By engaging the first person perspective of the incarcerated subject, this project will reveal how incarcerated individuals describe themselves, how they maintain and create intimate relationships from behind bars, and their critiques of the criminal justice system. From these readings, the project outlines conventions of “the incarcerated experience” as a subject position, with an eye toward further research analyzing the intersection of one's “incarcerated status” with one’s race, class, gender, and sexuality.