Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Douglas Porch, Karen Guttieri. Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-68). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs), June 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Letitia Lawson, Karen Guttieri. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

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The War on Drugs has lead to the incarceration of millions of people. Between 1965 and 2000 the prison population in the United States swelled by 600 percent. There are currently more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. As astonishing as these current prison population figures are, they are also deceptive in that they mask the systematic targeting of poor black communities. Critics claim that the boom in U.S. prison population has gone unnoticed because the war on drugs has been fought primarily in African Americans communities. From this view, mass incarceration in America is just another system of racial oppression, which has roots in slavery and Jim Crow legislation. Since the start of the war on drugs more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug-related crimes. With this report, I have documented the cycle of incarceration that U.S. Drug War policies have created in the communities that inmates leave behind. / text

The Kashmir dispute has led to two wars (1947-1948, 1965), serious military encounters (1999,2001) between India and Pakistan, as well as a militant and nonmilitant separatist movement seeking independence for Kashmir (1989- ). While this conflict has been subjected to sustained analysis by academics and journalists, Kashmir's centrality to the public culture ofIndia, explored here through a study of Hindi cinema, has received little to no attention in the considerable literature on the area. The articulations of Kashmir in Hindi cinema - as a paradise on earth, sacred site of Hinduism, home ofIndia's spiritual and syncretistic traditions, pivotal to the idea of an eternal Indian civilization - help to reveal the attachments that guide 'Indian' claims on Kashmir. This study addresses the question of how, why and in what ways Kashmir is presented as a 'special' region in Hindi cinema. In doing so it initiates a discussion on region and religion in Hindi cinema, scholarship on which has long prioritized the 'nation'. As India's only Muslim-majority regional state, divided between India and Pakistan, Kashmir became a symbol of Indian secularism, a fact that is often reiterated in political discourse, as well as in academic research on the Kashmir dispute. Paradoxically, this symbol of Indian secularism, it is argued, is a site for religious contestations in Hindi cinema. The synonymy between Indian and Hindu in Kashmir films rests on the disavowal of a 'Muslim' Kashmir, so as to allay a Hindu majoritarian anxiety about a Muslim majority region in post-partition India. Therefore, the abstract equality of secularism, and the neutrality of 'national culture' remain merely 'ideals' in India's dominant form of public culture, namely Hindi cinema. The representations of Kashmir in Hindi cinema make explicit the regional and religious contestations over the national and the secular, providing a far more diverse account of history, culture and politics in India than is commonly acknowledged by 'official' discourses, mainstream historiography, and nation-centred (film) scholarship.

Shakespeare's Unwritten Contract With His Audience, A Study at His Professional Practices proposes that Shakespeare had a manifesto tor the theatre as rigorous as that of Ben Jonson whose writings leave lIS in doubt as to how he saw the function of drama and the dramatist. This thesis concentrates on the plays Shakespeare wrote after he became a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594 - when he could exercise more control over his work than his unattached contemporaries. It argues that of equal importance to what Shakespeare wrote are the choices he had, but which he chose not to exercise. Alone of his contempories he wrote no authorial address to his audience or readers; his professional output was unlike any other Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright and so was his use, or avoidance, of common theatrical devices and conventions. This thesis undermines the conventional theory of a 'War of the Theatres' and proposes that there was a much longer and wider literary debate than has hitherto been recognised and that Shakespeare was actively involved in that debate. Further, it argues that Hamlet was his main contribution to this debate and that Hamlet is essentially a play which expresses Shakespeare's manifesto for the theatre. Evidence for the argument is culled from Shakespeare's contemporary rivals, from pre-Elizabethan drama, from my knowledge of stage magic and from such details as the number of neologisms which appeared in the language during the period 1596-1602, when Shakespeare was the sole survivor of the first generation of identifiable London playwrights and was therefore the man against whom new writers, such as Jonson and Marston, had to measure themselves.

This study is an examination of landed society in the/ar North-West of England between the outbreak of Edward Ill's wars with Scotland in 1332 and the end of the first stage of the Wars of the Roses in 1461. Although violence within regional society both in terms of involvement in Anglo-Scottish relations of the period and domestic violence in the form of gentry feuds and - at a larger scale - magnate feuds during the Wars of the Roses, constitutes a major part of this thesis, rather more peaceful concepts are also explored. Firstly, it is necessary to define the extent of the region as a whole, debating whether there are any boundaries more meaningful than those political and administrative boundaries provided by county units; this is followed by a prosopographical reconstruction of the composition of landed society: the significant peerage and greater gentry families. It will be argued that in the far North-West the topographical patterns created by physical geography are of far greater significance than shire units for the greater gentry families of local landed society. This point is demonstrated by an analysis of gentry identity in terms of attendance at the county court, and - more importantly - in property and marriage settlements, which indicate the importance of sub-county units, especially in the small 'mini-county' of Lancashire North of the Sands (the Furness and Cartmel peninsulas). Examination of the construction and composition of magnate retinues and affinities - the Lucy, Percy, Neville, Clifford and Lancastrian affinities in particular - also suggests a similar conclusion. The theme of the final two chapters - Anglo-Scottish relations - tackles the supra-county level, in terms of how far south the Border mattered in the far North- West and considers the cultural and architectural phenomenon ofpele towers in the region. At both sub-county and supra-county level, the importance of physical geography over the 'longue duree' is very clear indeed.

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