Title: Jaunty Vaasa-lads and lazy boys – a study of masculinity and patriotism in the Civil Guard in Vaasa in relation to the Finnish Civil War of 1918. This paper deals with the subject of expressions of masculinity in relation to patriotism and nationalism as a part of the mobilisation of the so called white side in the Finnish Civil War of 1918. With regards to how this was expressed in the local Civil Guard in the town of Vaasa. The focus   lies on the construction of an ideal masculinity within this specific Civil Guard as expressed            in the Guards own documents of different varieties, during the events in the spring of 1918 and at the one year anniversary of its outbreak. The study is first and foremost based on Joan W. Scott's theory of gender and it's constitutive and interrelated elements, particularly that of culturally available symbols and subjective identities. It also takes into consideration views on masculinity, nationalism, and patriotism as described by George L. Mosse and others. This paper argues that the whites presented a desirable masculine ideal of the ultimate warrior that resonated in different ways in the examined material. This ideal may have been one way to keep mobilising the white forces against the real but also at times exaggerated threat posed by the red forces. There has also been a discussion in earlier research regarding this mobilisation and whether or not the whites mislead the Ostrobothnian volunteers and soldiers into believing that they were fighting russians instead of their own compatriots. This paper has found some evidence of the exaggerated demonization of the reds, and therefore also some tendensies of presenting them as Russians and Bolsheviks. This study has also shown that to be willing to sacrifice oneself for the nation and stand strong against its enemies, both internal and external, seems to have been what the ideal man was perceived to be by the whites in the examined Civil Guard. As well as it was also how he should act if he had the nations best interest in mind and fought for the continued Finnish independence. Keywords: Finnish Civil War, Civil Guard, Finland, masculinity, patriotism, 20th century, nationalism, gender

According to the Colombian Ministry of Defense nearly 17,000 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) demobilized between 2003 and 2013, this dissertation examines the way the Colombian states uses sophisticated consumer marketing strategies and military intelligence tactics to persuade insurgents to abandon the armed struggle. Through an ethnographic analysis of the Program for Humanitarian Attention to the Demobilized and the lives of ex-combatants, this dissertation analyzes the changing definition of demobilization and the feedback between late capitalism and counterinsurgency. / Anthropology

That slavery was largely excised from the cultural memory of the Civil War in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly by white Americans, is well documented; Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory moves beyond that story of omission to ask how slavery has been represented in U.S. culture and, necessarily, how it figures into some of the twentieth century's most popular Civil War narratives. The study begins in the 1930s with the publication of Gone with the Wind--arguably the most popular Civil War novel of all time--and reads Margaret Mitchell's pervasive tale of ex-slaveholder adversity against contemporaneous narratives like Black Reconstruction in America , Absalom, Absalom!, and Black Boy/American Hunger , which contradict Mitchell's account of slavery, the war, and Reconstruction. Spanning nearly seven decades, this study tells the story of how cultural productions have continued to reinterpret slavery. Focusing primarily on novels and films but also drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, private journals, and court records, each chapter explores how slavery is represented in a particular historical epoch and highlights each narrative's contribution to the creation of cultural memory, particularly its conformity to earlier works or its revision of antecedents. In addition, Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory traces representations of slavery through recurring themes such as hunger, disease, marriage, and madness and seeks to understand how the narratives in question comment directly on the concept of memory. Among the topics discussed are the Civil War centennial; how Margaret Walker's Jubilee relates slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s; the controversy over The Confessions of Nat Turner; the Roots phenomenon, and the copyright lawsuit filed against the publisher of Alice Randall's unauthorized parody, The Wind Done Gone. The study concludes in 2005, with March, Geraldine Brooks's reimagining of Little Women, and E.L. Doctorow's The March, about Sherman's campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas. A pattern emerges in the final chapters that shows recent authors conjuring, in order to revise, elements of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone With the Wind.

My dissertation focuses on the impact of oil trade ties and network on political instability: democratization, civil war onset, and coups. Oil is an important resource to most states, while a few states, especially autocratic states, can produce and export it. This implies that the break of oil trade ties may strategically or economically damage oil-importing states more than oil-exporting states. In the three essays of my dissertation, I argue that oil trade ties allow oil-exporting states to resist to external pressures and encourage oil-importing states to support important oil exporters in order to avoid losing access to a much-needed commodity. In order to measure the effect of oil trade ties on three political instability problems, I employ centrality indices in weighted networks of network analysis. Based on the centrality indices, I measure the effect of oil-importing states on oil-exporters’ abilities to resist international pressures and to obtain external support, and examine how an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties affect its three political instability phenomena: democratization, civil war onset, and coup risk. Empirical results reveal three ways in which an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties might affect its political instability; an autocratic oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties reduce external democratizing pressures and hinder democratization; an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties attract external prewar support for its government, and reduce the likelihood of civil war onset when the exporter experiences external prewar support for its government; an oil-exporting state’s oil trade ties reduce the likelihood of coup.

This thesis inquires into anti-humanist trends in Lebanese literature of the civil war and post-war period by examining the limit concept of the animal in three novelistic works: Beirut Nightmares [Kawābīs Bayrūt] (1976) by Ghādah Sammān, Yalo (2002) by Elias Khoury, and The Tiller of Waters [Ḥārith al-miyāh] (1998) by Hudá Barakāt. Marking a departure in previous critical work done on this body of literature, which has been dominated by trauma theory as an analytical framework, this thesis employs an innovative synthesis of narrative theory and affect theory to describe how the authors utilize narrative to humanize the war experience, thereby mitigating the effects of contingency and fragmentation on the narrative subject. After the collapse of the state, the human being is separated from its political form, leaving it perilously exposed to acts of violence. It may also, however, carry out aggressions on its fellow man with impunity. Both of these terrible aspects of man’s nature in wartime are understood conventionally as exposing a beast within man, since they radically undermine the precepts of moral value and self-sovereignty that constitute the pillars of humanism. Through acts of “composition” the first person narrators of these novels strive to insulate their affective core from participating in ambient currents of violence, which are viewed as a kind of contamination understood as “becoming-animal.” While implicating the subject in a participation that is other-than-human, these animal becomings are also, following Deleuze and Guttari, ways of attaining a new vitality and escaping the hierarchical symbolic power of logos. Use of this animal figure allows the authors to rethink the human in ways that does not assume a fixed humanist ontology. For Sammān, the animal represents a principle of vitality that allows her protagonist to overcome human sources of inertia, such as melancholic memories or ingrained habit, thereby preserving the authentic voice of the writerly self. For Khoury and Barakāt, the animal permits them to foreground the figure of the subaltern who stands in a minoritarian relation to logos. They also propose a post-humanist ethos of co-presence based on the affective subject’s receptivity and vulnerability; its capacity to both affect and be affected. / text

This paper examines how ex-combatants of El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war view post-war processes of reconciliation. I demonstrate that contrary to dominant understandings of ongoing political polarization in El Salvador, perpetuated by Salvadoran political parties, many former army and guerrilla combatants are coexisting in the same communities and working together in various ways. I show how the Salvadoran Peace Accords and the apparent political polarization has opened a space for the recreation of social networks and the creation of communities in post-war societies. I call this process “grassroots peacemaking,”emphasizing the everyday negotiations of remembering and creating new social relations in a nation torn apart by war and violence. / text

This project looks at the ways the Biafran Government maintained their war machine in spite of the hopeless situation that emerged in the summer of 1968. Ojukwu’s government looked certain to topple at the beginning of the summer of 1968, yet Biafra held on and did not capitulate until nearly two years later, on 15 January 1970. The Ojukwu regime found itself in a serious predicament; how to maintain support for a war that was increasingly costly to the Igbo people, both in military terms and in the menacing face of the starvation of the civilian population. Further, the Biafran government had to not only mobilize a global public opinion campaign against the “genocidal” campaign waged against them, but also convince the world that the only option for Igbo survival was an independent Biafra. Thus it is not enough to look at the international aspects of the war, or to consider the war on a strictly domestic level. By looking at both the internal and external factors that shaped the Biafran propaganda machine and the Biafran war effort and how these efforts influenced international support and galvanized internal resolve to continue fighting, we can see how the Biafran war effort was able to last for twenty months after the fall of Port Harcourt. Recent scholarly and political work, uncovered documents, and the new plethora of memoirs on the Civil War provide us with a veritable treasure trove of data and analysis with which to study the issue of Igbo nationalism and a unique opportunity to create a new vision of secessionist conflict in Africa. This work will thus provide a step in moving away from the long accepted “Tribalism” paradigm that has so long pervaded not only the study of post-colonial Civil Wars in Africa, but more importantly, the discourse in looking at ethnicity, violence and national identity across the continent. Further, by analyzing the ways that the Biafran propaganda machine operated on a nationalist level, we can see the effects of Biafran secession on the broader Igbo national consciousness and the Igbo national movement, as well as on subsequent political movements in Nigeria. / text

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