Thesis (M.Admin.(Public Administration)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / Abstract in English. Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: Freie Universität Berlin, Diss., 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Royal Institute of Technology, 2004. / Errata sheet inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis and M.A. in Security Studies (Security Stabilization and Reconstruction))--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2007. / Title from title screen (viewed Feb. 5, 2008). Thesis Advisor(s): Guttieri, Karen ; Simons, Anna. "September 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-122). Also available in print.

This thesis seeks to unfold the concept of the ‘degree zero art’ as an artistic and cultural project as manifested in the practices of two very different artists, Milan-based Piero Manzoni (Soncino 1933- Milan 1963) and Rio-born Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro 1937-1980), during the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the clear contrasts between their works and their very different cultural formations, the thesis focuses on these artists in order to show how their practices align around the challenge to aesthetic categories, stylistic labels and political frameworks employed by much recent critical literature. In order to discuss intellectual and critical structures developed to narrate varieties of North American conceptual practices, this thesis proposes a new interpretative frame: a ‘degree zero aesthetics’, creating a transnational dialogue between the work of Manzoni and Oiticica. Borrowing from the understanding of zero proposed by the German Zero group at the beginning of the sixties, I argue that the idea of zero denotes a fresh start and constructive will; it therefore explains the process of erasing and rebuilding from scratch that has characterised the post-war generation. Alongside the process of construing an aesthetic around the notion of ‘zero’, this thesis aims to deconstruct popular sites of discourse around the tropes of ‘participation’ and ‘politics’, critically readdressing the historiography surrounding these themes. Lastly, this project attempts to discuss the literature on both artists, who have become paradigmatic of certain key movements and moments in Latin American and European art respectively, and in recent elaborations of global art histories.

Master of Arts / Department of History / Andrew Orr / The end of the Second Boer War in 1902 gave rise to cultural and political action of Afrikaners within the colonial governments and among the South African people. These actions caused a rise in Afrikaner cultural and political nationalism. Though the British emerged victorious from the war, resentment for the British Empire was widespread in the South African colonies due to brutalities suffered by the Afrikaners during the war. This resentment would later be channeled by Afrikaner leaders and used as a political weapon. The British wished for appeasement with the Afrikaners and established terms at the end of the war that Afrikaner leaders were able to use to further Afrikaner culture through politics. The military victory for the British influenced many Afrikaners to trade violence for political and cultural means of resistance. Throughout the years 1902-1924 the Afrikaner people established strategies through politics, literary publications, and new political groups, developed in the years 1904-1908, to advocate for Afrikaner nationalism and cultural equality amongst the British in areas of law, commerce, and education. The war showed the futility of military resistance against the British, but inspired many to push for political and cultural resistance, unification, and eventual dominance. Afrikaner nationalist dominance in South Africa began with the efforts of the Afrikaner leaders and people in 1902 after the Second Boer War.

Since the late 1980s Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes have been an integral part of post-conflict reconstruction. This was especially true of Sierra Leone's post-conflict reconstruction which has frequently been hailed a 'multilateral success story' by the international community. Nevertheless, within Western-authored DDR literature there is a widespread but little interrogated assertion that, in post-conflict contexts, resettling former child soldiers with their families is always the best option for social reintegration. Family members, it is argued, are most able to provide the psychosocial support that former child soldiers require in order to successfully make the transition to civilian life in the aftermath of war. Using an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach and drawing on empirical research undertaken in Sierra Leone, this thesis questions the universality of this assumption. The thesis analyses conceptual understandings of family and childhood in DDR policy and locally in Sierra Leone focusing on their implications for child soldier reintegration. It also examines the immediate and long-term effects of DDR's policy of family reintegration for child soldiers' social reintegration with a view to determining whether the current approach is indeed always 'in the best interests of the child'. Finally, the thesis examines the effect of local family dynamics on the wider post-conflict reconstruction effort and vice versa. The thesis findings suggest that whilst the policy of family reunification in child soldier DDR has a number of benefits, it may also lay the foundations for renewed conflict in the future by reifying certain contentious pre-war power structures.

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This dissertation argues that the operating temporal logic at the core of the state sanctioned models of forgiveness and reconciliation is a view of the past as apocalyptic in the future. The past as an apocalyptic imaginary hovers over the present like a ghost threatening repetition. In this political conception of the past, it is not simply a matter of chronology i.e. genocide and its aftermath. Rather, in the injunction to overcome the past through continuous remembrance, the past is made agentive in the present. This animation of the past in the present renders it continually dangerous lest it return as the future: the present must be continually mobilized, watchful and cautious so that the violent past does not return as the future. This temporal logic is reflected in the juridical demand for apologies and pardons, as mandated by the Rwandan state. The state attempts to control both ends of the equation: it demands collective catharsis on the grounds that without it Rwanda cannot overcome its past, but it simultaneously fixes in advance, and by law, the outcome of catharsis: forgiveness and reconciliation. Using fieldwork, individual and group interviews conducted in labour camps for perpetrators (Travaux d'Intérêt Général) as well as participant observation in 'unity' associations (cooperatives), this dissertation demonstrates how this model for apologies and reconciliation collapses under the weight of the internal contradiction of both demanding catharsis and controlling its result: the necessity for reconciliation. Individuals publicly perform a demonstration of affect that they circumvent and push against in their everyday experiences away from the audience. When the performances themselves fail—as they do on occasion—the language of ‘trauma’ (in the case of the victim) and ‘genocide denial’ (in the case of the perpetrators) is mobilized in order to secure the impossible demand to perform private feelings in public ceremonies wherein the meaning of such performances is juridically defined in advance. The result, I argue, are public scenes of unity, in which individuals perform a socially shared code of acting in public that they often push against away from an audience. In their lives, Rwandans constantly wrestle with this past and its traces in the everyday, sometimes in accordance to the public narrative of reconciling but also in opposition to it. There is in other words messiness on the ground, which suggests that the predominant models for thinking about post-conflict spaces along the binaries reconciliation or violence miss this complexity. I propose, the notion of an afterlife of violence as a conceptual tool. This allows us to move away from the possibility of resolvability and redemptive narratives and instead opens up the possibility of irresolvabilty: that of living with tension.