This project is designed to take an in-depth look at drug court, the most common form of specialized courts. This project will further elaborate our understanding of team decision-making. The fact that the drug court is collaborative rather than adversarial has been hailed as one of the key innovations that makes drug court better able to respond to addiction than the traditional criminal justice system. So far, very little work has been done on how the team members work together in the court. I will show that, among team members, there is ambivalence over how to understand addiction and what to expect from clients. In addition to this conflict at the organizational-level, I will also show that staff members experience conflict with each other over why and how punishment should be used. I conducted a four-month case study of a drug court located in a medium-sized city in the southwestern United States. I supplemented this case study with observations at a second drug court located in small city in the same state. Based on this research, I will show that the drug court staff experiences conflict over how to treat addiction effectively. I will then argue that the drug court staff’s conflicting expectations of clients actually encourages lying about rule-breaking behavior. Finally, I will focus on negotiations between the judge and counselors as they respond to troubled clients. By focusing here on the tensions that arise in the daily work of drug court, I will show that there are some essential problems in drug court design that still need to be worked out at ideological and practical levels. By shining light on these conflicts, I hope to help drug court practitioners to think about how we can improve on the program. / text

This project examines the literal and literary bodies associated with the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka as they are represented in literary, journalistic, and anthropological accounts. These texts are populated by historical personages and fictional characters spun from imagination or based on actual people who serve as representatives of those who live in the day to day reality of violence. The goal of this project is to offer a re-visioning of the power relations between the aggressor and victim, the victor and vanquished, in violent conflicts. Island of Blood: Frontier Reports from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Other South Asian Flashpoints, a memoir by Anita Pratap, and The Terrorist, a feature film by Santosh Sivan, illustrate how Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, fashioned his own absent or invisible body and the bodies of the suicide bombers as the focal point of Tamil nationalism. Prabhakaran developed the cult of personality around himself by fostering an aura of mystery and employing religious symbolism. In particular, feeding emerges as the quintessentially nurturing function misappropriated by this malignant maternal figure Prabhakaran. The other category of bodies is comprised of the victims: the dead, the raped, and the other defiled bodies that are anomalous in military conflicts. These are the profaned and violated bodies. In Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, the unidentified bodies of human rights violations provide forensic evidence for legal proceedings and in turn attain sanctified status as the survivors use their remains to build legal cases against the atrocity. Their mute presence serves as a powerful amplifier for the survivors. A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies has as its focal point an ethnically incited rape and murder. During intergroup conflicts rape is often used to weaken the enemy group’s integrity. However, I argue that When Memory Dies challenges this norm and suggests that those who are considered threats to group integrity, whether they be minorities, outcasts, unwed mothers or raped women, could paradoxically be the agents of social integration, especially in the time of unrest. / text

Ethnic conflict is a persistent and vexing problem for the world today. The intercommunal violence during these conflicts not only significantly alters the social and spatial geography in these regions for decades, but also frequently involves external actors who magnify the social conflict. It is within the urban areas that the impacts of violence are often most acute and deleterious to the once functioning system. Ethnic conflict transforms many urban areas into “divided cities” in which barricades and armed posts dominate the landscape. With this paradigm of conflict in mind, the overarching purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to examine how and why certain peaceful societies devolve into intercommunal conflict, and 2) to outline how ethnic conflict ultimately, and often irreparably, transforms an urban area into a “divided city.” In this dissertation, Nicosia, the ethnically divided capital of Cyprus, serves as the primary case study used to illustrate the process of social devolution from ethnic conflict to a militarily fortified urban division. The three main research questions are asked concerning Nicosia’s division. 1) What historic factors contributed to the progression and intensification of the social and spatial cleavages that appear in the urban landscape today? 2) To what extent is the urban divide diagnostic of the overarching ethnic conflict on Cyprus? 3) How is Nicosia’s urban division similar to or different from other “ethnically” divided cities and how might this comparison help further the general understanding of the causes and consequences of these entities? These three questions help frame Nicosia within the context of the larger social conflict on Cyprus as well as assist in developing linkages with other divided cities. As articulated throughout this study, Nicosia is a “model” divided city that typifies how the historically-laden process of ethno-territorial polarization can manifest itself in the physical and social geography of a contested region. In the end, divided cities epitomize the “worst-case-scenario” outcome of ethnic conflict and once the urban divisions take root, they prove exceptionally challenging to remove from the social and physical landscape. / text

published_or_final_version / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Preparing for Genocide: Community Work in Rwanda How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, before the genocide, regularly used by the local political elites for spreading propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that a one standard-deviation increase in the number of rainy Saturdays resulted in a 20 percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence.   Mobilizing the Masses for Genocide Do political elites use armed groups to foster civilian participation in violence or are civilian killers driven by unstoppable ancient hatred? If armed groups matter, are they allocated strategically to maximize civilian participation? How do they mobilize civilians? I empirically investigate these three questions using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide. To establish causality, I exploit cross-sectional variation in armed groups' transport costs induced by exogenous weather fluctuations: the shortest distance of each village to the main road interacted with rainfall along the dirt tracks between the main road and the village. Guided by a simple model, I come up with the following answers to the three central questions: (1) one additional armed-group member resulted in 7.3 more civilian perpetrators, (2) armed-group leaders responded rationally to exogenous transport costs and dispatched their men strategically to maximize civilian participation and (3) for the majority of villages, armed-group members acted as role models and civilians followed orders, but in villages with high levels of cross-ethnic marriage, civilians had to be forced to join in. Finally, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that a military intervention targeting the various armed groups could have stopped the Rwandan Genocide.   The Legacy of Political Mass Killings: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide We study how political mass killings affect later economic performance, using data from the Rwandan Genocide. Our results show that households in villages that experienced higher levels of violence have higher living standards six years after the genocide. They enjoy higher levels of consumption, own more assets and agricultural output per capita is higher. These results are consistent with the Malthusian hypothesis that mass killings can raise living standards by reducing the population size and redistributing assets from the deceased to the survivors. However, we also find that the violence affected the age distribution in villages, raised fertility rates among female survivors and reduced cognitive skills of children.   Ethnic Income Inequality and Conflict in Africa This paper shows that income inequality between ethnic groups increases the likelihood of ethnic conflict in Africa. To establish causality, we exploit variation in rainfall over each ethnic group’s homeland. One standard-deviation increase in ethnic inequality increases the likelihood of ethnic conflict by about 66 percent. Our results have important policy implications to the extent that global climate change might affect different regions differently and thus increase inequality and conflict.

Post-conflict army reconstruction is an important element of security sector reform (SSR), tracing its origins to at least 1980, before the SSR concept itself was formulated. Reconstruction of security forces is an important element in wider postconflict reconstruction, and for political reasons, an army has almost always deemed necessary. Since 1998, SSR itself has been increasingly conceptualized, with principles for SSR having been laid down by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since 2004. Yet SSR faces a host of philosophical and practical problems, perhaps the greatest being the gap between theory and practice (Chanaa's 'conceptual-contextual divide'). To make SSR efforts more successful, the underlying principles need to be revised and amended. Post-conflict army reconstruction experience since 1980, and associated academic study, military doctrine, and work by international organizations (particularly the OECD) can provide a basis for such revision. This thesis aims to survey post-conflict army reconstruction activities since 1980, draw overall lessons from that review and field study in Liberia, and propose amendments to the SSR principles on that basis. / © Cranfield University, 2011

This study has the principle goal of showing that Christian institutions and practices are powerful forces for social management within the Tongan community, and, more precisely, that congregations are a primary means for facilitating social control, cooperation, competition, and conflict management. My ethnographic research, including discourse analysis, reveals the distinct nature of conflict management in a range of situations within the congregation and community. Comparison of a number of congregations of different denominational affiliation exposes the factionalization as well as the unification within and among congregations. The study of conflict management processes reveals that congregations are the primary institutional social force in Tongan communities are the primary means for organizing labor, distributing resources, and delegating responsibility for a wide range of activities. Congregations' management of conflicts engenders the expression of opposing beliefs and viewpoints within and between congregations, fuels an ongoing process of congregational identity, and furthers the means by which religious groups are agents of cultural transformation in regard to definitions of self, family, kin group, and community.

What explains minority-state urban conflict across Europe? When, how and why do some localities seem more prone to turn the political expression of grievance into a blood sport, while others avoid this fate altogether, even when faced with similar internal and external conditions? To answer these questions, my argument challenges existing interpretations of minority-state relations based on "national models" of integration, cultural variables and minority inequality. Instead, I find that it is the entrenchment of local political elites and their strategic foundational social alliances with minority populations that ultimately condition the likelihood of violent confrontation and the ways in which it is managed at the local level. / Government

Studies indicating that women as leaders and negotiators have a pacifying effect on interstate conflict stand in contrast to the reality of women's active involvement in civil conflict through armed rebel groups and insurgencies. This dissertation seeks to provide insight into this apparent paradox by analyzing how and why women become involved in rebel groups, drawing on insights from feminist and IR theories to create a gendered theory of rebellion. Hypotheses developed from this theory are examined using new data on women's participation in rebel groups from 1990-2008. These tests are supplemented with qualitative analysis focusing on the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Among the findings, data on rebel organizations in the post-Cold War era show that women are active in over half of all armed insurgencies, a level of activity much greater than what is recognized by current scholarship in international relations. The analysis also indicates that economic and ethnic- or religious-based grievance motivates women's participation, but disputes theories that portray rebels as profit- or power-seekers.

This paper engages operationalized discourses from economics and political science on resources and conflict using anthropological theory and ethnographic techniques. Current trends among civil war scholars locate grievances as ubiquitous constructs or rhetorical tools, irrelevant in causal analysis. This de-emphasis generates an unsavory menu of options for governments seeking to eliminate domestic conflict in resource-rich regions rationalizing grievance-generating human rights abuses.In "developing" resource-rich regions the historical trajectory of indigenous populations is placed in conflict with a development agenda that serves state interests. Grievances are central to the conflict over identity within the affected communities in a struggle for national affiliation or disaffiliation. In the absence of a pluralistic political system grievance-motivated political imperatives combine with political isolation to generate political unrest. As grievances are central to understanding cultural change and social unrest, pluralistic institutions and human rights protections have "realpolitikal" value in securing stability in resource-rich regions.