This thesis examines the diary of Ellen Wallace, a woman who lived in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, during the American Civil War. A diligent diarist, Ellen recorded not only the workings of her farm and household, but also her interactions with slaves, her worries about secession, and her shifting views on President Lincoln, emancipation and the war itself. At the start of the war, Ellen was a staunch Unionist. By war's end, she was a Confederate. This thesis will examine the factors that contributed to Ellen's changing political ideals and how she sought to reconcile her opposing beliefs. Ellen occupied a role rarely discussed in Civil War scholarship: not a member of the southern paternalist society, or a northern abolitionist. Ellen was a slave‐owning woman who supported the Union cause.

The thesis pinpoints the responsibility of external powers in the tragic course of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as their influence on the policy making its leaders, from 1997 to 2001. It points out that, given the country’s geostrategic position in the heart of Africa and its immense natural resources, foreign governments play the preeminent role in the shaping of its destiny, particularly during the abovementioned five-year period marked by the two Congo Wars. This role had been blunt in the demise of Mobutu’s 32 year-long reckless, kleptocratic regime, as a consequence of the shift, by the United States of America aiming to safeguard its hegemonic interests in Central Africa, of the strategically pivotal pawn from Zaire to Uganda in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. Thus, craving a great influence in the continent and sponsored by multinational companies from North America, Belgium, Australia and South Africa, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, along with his ex-subordinate Rwandan Deputy President Paul Kagame, patronized in October 1996 the Alliance of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), a Congolese rebel group led by Laurent Kabila and committed to oust Field Marshal Mobutu who bit the dust on 17 May 1997. The superseding AFDL reign will be mainly featured by the takeover of key positions of the state authority by Rwandans and Ugandans (keeping President Kabila in the thrall of his two eastern mentors), the throttling of the democratic process, the conditioning by major powers of any funding of Kinshasa’s triennial development programme to the Kabila regime’s observance of democracy, human rights and a UN investigation of the mass killing of Hutu Rwandese refugees on the DRC’s soil. That international community’s stance infuriated the Congolese leader who reconsidered all mining contracts signed with multinationals, developing anti-West discourse, promoted South-South cooperation, and expressed Rwandans and Ugandans from the Congo. The Western-backed Rwanda and Uganda bounced back by undertaking a military toppling of Laurent Kabila; but they reaped a fiasco because of three factors: intervention of Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad and Sudan siding with Kinshasa; dissention within the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD); and tension between Kigali and Kampala that initiated the creation of a new rebel group: the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC). The stalemate brought about by this situation and the involvement of the UN, the OAU, the SADC, the US, France and Belgium compelled the warring parties to conclude the Lusaka Agreement, setting up a roadmap for the war end, the inter-Congolese dialogue, a new transitional government, and an electoral process toward the democratic rebirth in the DRC. However, the Lusaka Agreement will be implemented thanks to the rise of Major General Joseph Kabila, after the assassination of his phantasmagoric father Laurent Kabila, paving the way to the Third Republic.

This dissertation studies the cultural traces of the experience of fear in relation to the social and cultural legacies of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. By applying the theoretical and narratological insights afforded by the horror genre and through the figure of the monster, the research identifies and analyzes alternative memories of the traumatic past, exploring the experience of fear within film and literature to reveal and claim an unrecognized approach to the representation of the war, with key critical findings and implications regarding the shaping and interpretation of the Spanish social imaginary of this event in this most persistent of cultural debates. Chapter II, explores the maquis in Luna de lobos (1985) by Julio Llamazares, tracing the human involution of a group of men that seeking refuge from Francoist repression become monstrous shells of themselves. It pursues this degradation to rethink the locus of the monster, finding it in the monstrous policies of the regime, that demands the exorcism of the resistance movement—the ultimate Other—rendering it ghostly by community and family as the cornerstone foundational violence of a new society. Chapter III, delves into the cinematographic representation of monsters and monstrous elements in Pa negre (2010) by Agustí Villaronga. It studies the competing narratives in postwar Spain that turn a child of the defeated into a monstrous regime supporter, a process that suggests the origins of contemporary society as the monstrous traces of Francoist society. It analyzes the features that render its protagonist, first, a monster in the eyes of the new regime—along the lines of the classical monster—to later on, through disappointment, shame and betrayal, a monster to his family and social class—thus becoming a modern monster. Chapter IV tackles a cinematographic allegorical representation of the past in Balada triste de trompeta (2010) by Álex de la Iglesia, a tour de force that attempts to be a total narrative of the war, a collage of historical memory through the monstrous moments that define Francoism. The fusion of elements from “esperpento”, horror and melodramatic national romance render a unique postnational satire.

Thesis advisor: Brinton Lykes / In the 20th century, conflicts in Latin America between government armies and guerrilla groups escalated into devastating civil wars. During these wars, the armed forces frequently classified children as enemy targets. This paper will discuss the civil wars waged in Guatemala from the 1960s to 1996, and in El Salvador, between the years of 1979 to 1992. Similarities and differences between the conflicts in these two nations will be examined to explore the use of violence against children in Latin America, including how they were tortured, killed and forced to join guerrilla or government forces. An analysis of these two wars reveals the government and army’s intention to destroy community, trust, culture, and every aspect of normal life. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Afghanistan has been one of the most protracted conflicts modern era, but theories of civil war onset fail to explain the war’s causes or its patterns of violence. This thesis examines the origins of the post-2001 period of the conflict through the perspective of state formation; although many civil wars today unfold in newly-forming states, the processes of center-periphery relations and elite incorporation have been little studied in the context of political violence. The thesis first describes how Afghanistan’s embeddedness in the international state system and global markets undermined the nascent state’s efforts to centralize and bureaucratize, leading instead to warlordism and neopatrimonialism. Second, it demonstrates that the development of an insurgency after 2001 was due not to ethnic grievance or rebel opportunities for profit, but rather to the degree to which local elites were excluded from state patronage. Third, it examines the role of ideology and social position in the Afghan Taliban movement. The dissertation seeks to offer a theory of political violence in Afghanistan that can, mutatis mutandis, help explain key features of civil war in newly-forming states.

Conflict between returning and non-migrant populations is a pervasive yet frequently overlooked issue in post-conflict societies. While scholars have demonstrated how out-migration can exacerbate civil war, less is understood about what happens when the same populations return. This dissertation interrogates how legacies of forced migration influence conflict dynamics in countries-of-origin. I argue that return migration creates new social divisions in local communities based on where individuals lived during the war – in-country or abroad. These new cleavages become sources of conflict when institutions – like land codes, citizenship regimes, or language laws – provide differential outcomes to individuals based on their migration history. Using ethnographic evidence gathered in Burundi and Tanzania between 2014 and 2016, I demonstrate how refugee return to Burundi after the country’s 1993-2003 civil war created new identity divisions between so-called rapatriés and résidents. Local institutions governing land disputes hardened competition between these groups, leading to widespread, violent, local conflict. Consequently, when Burundi faced a national-level political crisis in 2015, prior experiences of return shaped both the character and timing of renewed refugee flight. By illuminating the role of reverse population movements in shaping future conflict, this study demonstrates why breaking the cycle of return and repeat migration is essential to conflict prevention.

This dissertation interrogates writers’ references to “constancy” during the English civil wars, reading the debate surrounding this vexed and multifarious term as indicative of a broader examination of constancy as a concept. Through generic case studies of the emblem book, prose romance, epic, and country house poem, I show how writers used constancy’s semantic and contextual slippage to participate in key debates of the civil wars; Hester Pulter, Percy Herbert, John Milton, Thomas Carew, Mildmay Fane, and Andrew Marvell deploy constancy as they intervene in civil war polemic surrounding kingship, property ownership, liturgy, and England’s relationship with the wider world. These cases, I argue, show the interaction between writers’ reevaluation of constancy and their reevaluation of inherited literary traditions. In interrogating constancy, writers articulate and even inspire innovation in literary genre, thereby demonstrating not the destruction of literary form during the civil wars, but writers’ ability to accommodate established literary tradition to dynamic religiopolitical circumstances.

Within the body of scholarly interpretation of the British Civil Wars (1642-1651), there is an absence of research into the politicisation of rituals of power and the struggle between monarchy, parliament, and the army to command these symbolic forms of authority. My thesis examines the performances of rituals as the methodical enforcement of political authority during the First Civil War (1642-1646). In synthesising notions of court culture and performances of political discourse, it traces the constriction of royal ritual, parliamentary subversion of monarchical rituals, and the rise of politico-military ritual, culminating with Charles I’s surrender on 5 May 1646. Situated within existing interdisciplinary research that explores the communication and image of power, this thesis examines (1) the battle to control symbols of political power, (2) polemical interpretations of the conflicting use and ownership of these performatives, (3) the efficacy of these performative acts among a divided public. It highlights the ways in which such performances limited the public to the role of audience, despite the apparent inclusiveness of many ritualised events. This enables a close reading of ritual performances and the subsequent literature produced around the events. It also calls upon the close reading of literary and non-literary texts that can be described as ‘virtual performances’ of ritual, most notably Charles’ royal entry into London (1641), and the funeral of the third Earl of Essex (1646).

Spain in My Heart: Songs of the Spanish Civil War. 2014. Written and compiled by Jürgen Schebera. Bear Family Records, book, CDs (7), DVD, BCD 16093.

This dissertation is a social and cultural history about the ways that African Americans contributed to national debates about race, slavery, and emancipation by constructing and performing their own representations of slavery for the public. Scholars often portray these larger debates as a contest of ideas among whites, but African Americans played an important and still understudied role in shaping the white public’s understandings of race and slavery throughout the nineteenth century, especially in the North. Moving from from the 1830s to the early 1900s, my dissertation identifies several critical moments when African Americans, especially former slaves, gained new access to the public stage and seized opportunities to represent their own identities, histories, and experiences in different forums. Chapter One focuses on the unique contribution that fugitive slave activists made to the abolition movement. I place the published slave narratives in a larger performative context that includes public appearances and speeches; singing and dramatic readings; and oral testimony given in more private settings. In contrast to the sympathetic but frequently disempowering rhetoric of white abolitionists, fugitive activists used their performances to construct a positive representation of black manhood and womanhood that showed slaves not as benevolent objects in need of rescue but as strong men and women ready to enter freedom on equal terms. Chapter Two focuses on the Civil War, when runaway slaves had new opportunities to communicate their understandings of slavery and freedom to the Northerners who sent south during the war, as soldiers, missionaries, and aid workers. “Contraband” slaves’ testimony revealed the prevalence of violence and family separation, as well as slaves’ willingness to endure great hardship in pursuit of freedom. Contraband men and women also worked to publicly assert their new identities as freedpeople when they preemptively claimed the rights of citizenship and power over their own bodies. Their testimony and actions challenged white Northerners to embrace emancipation as an explicit Union war aim. Chapter Three of my dissertation examines black performance on the formal stage, 1865-1890s, by focusing on three groups of black performers: African American minstrels, the Hyers Sisters Dramatic Company, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Capitalizing on Northerners’ increased interest in slavery and “authentic” black performers, these groups offered their own representations of slavery and emancipation to the public, sometimes disrupting whites’ romanticized image of the “old plantation” in the process. During an era when the country moved toward reconciliation and reunion, these performances kept the issue of slavery before the public and, in some cases, contributed to an emancipationist memory of the war which challenged contemporary Northerners to protect the rights of freedpeople. My final chapter focuses on the autobiographies written and published by formerly enslaved women post-1865. My analysis of the women’s narratives as a body of work challenges the prevailing notion that post-bellum slave narratives were focused on regional reconciliation and the writer’s successful life in freedom. Women writers continued to remember and represent slavery as a brutal institution and revealed the ways that it continued to shape their lives in freedom, challenging contemporary images of the “old plantation” and devoted, self-sacrificing “Mammy.” Through their writing, these women represented African American women as central actors in stories of resistance, survival, and self-emancipation. With sustained attention to the deeply gendered nature of these representations, my dissertation sheds new light on the unique ways that African American women participated in these larger social debates and contributed to the public’s understanding of race and slavery before, during, and after the Civil War. Moving beyond the traditional periodization of U.S. slavery and emancipation and the typical focus on actors within a single, organized social movement, my project uncovers the breadth and diversity of African Americans’ public representations of slavery and freedom in contexts that were simultaneously social, cultural, and political. Using a broad range of published and unpublished archival materials, my work reveals African Americans’ distinct contribution to national debates regarding slavery’s place in the nation and the future of the men and women held within it.