Despite the general academic consensus that liberal democracy has triumphed over communism, Marxist-inspired movements continue to thrive across the global south. This is a curious phenomenon in the post-Cold War era. This paper explores the recent growth of both The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Naxalite-Maoist Insurgency in India, and compares the two groups. It analyzes the factors that have led to their resurgence, in particular, the political and economic dimensions. Specifically, it addresses the impact of two dominant factors in fomenting their resurgence: neo-liberalism and political exclusion. First, recent growth of both groups seems to correlate with the adoption of neo-liberal economic policies and progressively draconian structural adjustments, which aggravated existing poverty and inequality, in their respective countries. Second, recent growth of both groups seems to correlate with political exclusion of marginalized groups, an exclusion increasingly enforced by state violence. The survival and growth of Marxist-inspired armed movements across the globe also raises important questions about the future of liberal democracy. This paper asks whether the persistence of Marxist-inspired movements across the global south has given the lie to the "end of history" theory, and what their resurgence says, if anything, about the "clash of civilizations theory. It concludes that the success of these movements challenges the apparent triumph of liberal democracy in both Colombia and India, and perhaps in the post-Cold War era globally.

The Iron Curtain was seen as the divider between East and West in Cold War Europe. The term is closely connected to the Cold War and expressions such as ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ or ‘after the fall of the Iron Curtain’ are common within historical discussions in the second half of the twentieth century. Even if the term was used regularly as a metaphor there was also a material side with a series of highly militarised borders running throughout Europe. The metaphor and the material borders developed together and individually, sometimes intertwined and sometimes separate. In my research I have carried out two fieldwork studies at sites that can be considered part of the former Iron Curtain. The first study area is located between Italy and Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia) in which the division between the two towns of Nova Gorica on the Slovenian side and Gorizia on the Italian side was investigated. The second study area is located on the border between Austria and Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia) within two national parks. A smaller study was also carried out in Berlin as the Berlin Wall is considered of major importance in the context of the Iron Curtain. This research has resulted in large quantities of sources and information and a constant need to re-evaluate the methods used within an archaeology of a more recent past. This thesis falls within what is usually referred to as contemporary archaeology, a fairly young sub-discipline of archaeology. Few large research projects have so far been published, and methods have been described as still somewhat experimental. Through my fieldwork it has been possible to acknowledge and highlight the problems and opportunities within contemporary archaeology. It has become clear how the materials stretch both through time and place demonstrating the complex process of how the material that archaeologists investigate can be created. The material of the Iron Curtain, is also well worth studying in its own right.

The Cold War can be considered the final grand narrative of modernity because of its deterministic influence on the making of knowledge in twentieth-century America. Likewise, Cold War events and the power of their individual narratives and images (their petits recits) created the needed condition for the advent of the age of spectacle. The Cold War existed in this state of contradiction: the final grand narrative and the first postmodern spectacle. Examples of the literature of the Cold War period, what I have labelled the literature of spectacle, serve to both elucidate the social conditions of the age of spectacle and their relationship to our media society. Spectacular fictions also provide a means of examining the postmodern concept of historiographic fictionalization. Don DeLillo's Libra' presents a Lee Harvey Oswald who manipulates the traces of his life to blur the image that he knows must enter the historical record. The Richard Nixon of Robert Coover's The Public Burning evolves to an intense consciousness of the contradictions of historiography that is realized only after he is brutally molested by Uncle Sam for the entire nation to witness, a rape that both strips Nixon of any remaining masculinity and thrusts him forward into America's Cold War history as the dark shadow of his future presidency looms throughout the novel. In The Book of Daniel, E.L. Doctorow's Daniel Isaacson attempts to counteract historiography (and the narrative of his infamous parents, the Rosenbergesque Paul and Rochelle) by writing his own story, telling his history as he feels it relates to the American experience of the Cold War. Daniel's self-history differs from Oswald's selfnarratization because Oswald's text is intentionally fabricated, while Daniel realizes that his narrative is a fabrication of the nation's history. Likewise, the characterization of Nixon differs from that of Oswald, though both are inspired by their actual historical counterparts. While the Nixon of the 1970s greatly shapes the Nixon of the novel, the historical Lee Harvey Oswald remains an enigma of America's recent past, perpetually residing in the margins of unknowability. From this space of marginalization, DeLillo's Oswald emerges. / Department of English

This thesis examines civil defense in the United States under the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations. Throughout the late Cold War period civil defense policy planners employed a philosophy of dual-use. The Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) instructed the American public to plan for a nuclear attack as well as natural disasters. Civil defense directors implemented crisis relocation plans for Americans that lived in designated high-risk areas. In an imminent nuclear attack, Americans in high-risk areas would temporarily relocate to host communities in low-risk areas of the county. This study is a blend of both civil defense policy and the reactions to nuclear war through the prism of popular culture in the late Cold War period.

To wield direct influence on the everyday lives of citizens, new political elites have often professed a profound interest in shaping the politics of dwelling. In the 1920s, Vienna’s Social Democrats built 400 communal housing blocks equipped with public gardens, theaters, libraries, kindergartens, and sports facilities, hoping that these facilities would serve as loci for “growing into socialism”. In the 1950s, housing construction in Berlin became a site of the Cold War. East Berlin’s social realist “workers palaces” on Stalinallee were meant to serve as an ideal flourishing ground for the “new socialist men and women”. In contrast, West Berlin's modernist Hansa-Viertel was designed to showcase an ideal dwelling culture and an urban environment that would cultivate individuality. This dissertation examines three historically situated and ideologically distinct responses to the housing question: social democracy in Red Vienna, state socialism in East Berlin, and liberal capitalism in West Berlin. It illuminates how political promises of a radical new beginning were translated into spatial arrangements—the private scale of the apartment and the urban scale of the city—as well as how citizens appropriated the social, political, and economic norms inherent to the new spaces they inhabited. More specifically, the following analyses demonstrate the fact that inherited social, technological, and economic practices have often subverted political visions of a radically different future. This was the case with pedagogy in Red Vienna’s municipal housing, instrumental reason in the form of Taylorism and Fordism in East and West Berlin’s mass housing, and gender relations in Red Vienna’s and East Berlin’s politics of dwelling. At the same time, this dissertation examines counter-spaces that emerged from the dialectics between political promises and actual socio-spatial realities, counter-spaces that both reflect critically on past hegemonic “politics of dwelling” and that foreshadow alternative political imaginations that are still relevant today. Of particular interest are counter-hegemonic practices of dwelling that embody possibilities of emancipation—of experiencing oneself as subject instead of object of social transformation, justice—of emphasizing considerations of equality and recognition, and radical democracy—of questioning power relations and of forming alliances among disadvantaged groups to transform everyday life.

RÉSUMÉ : Avec le dénouement de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale, le problème des réfugiés en Europe devient un enjeu international. Plusieurs millions de personnes, que l’on nomme les Displaced Persons (DP), sont sans refuge et doivent recevoir une aide immédiate pour survivre. Même si la majorité de ces gens retourneront dans leurs pays d’origine, il reste encore des centaines de milliers de réfugiés en 1948. La seule solution concrète pour régler cette problématique est l’émigration des réfugiés dans des pays prêts à les accepter. Les Américains jouent un rôle crucial en acceptant 415 000 DP entre 1948 et 1952 grâce au Displaced Persons Act de 1948 et ses amendements en 1950 et 1951. Après d’âpres discussions entre les restrictionnistes et ceux qui défendent la libéralisation des lois d’immigration, naîtra le Displaced Persons Act (DP Act) signé avec beaucoup de réticence, le 25 juin 1948, par le président Harry S. Truman. Cette loi qui prévoit la venue de 202 000 DP en deux ans, contient des mesures jugées discriminatoires à l'endroit de certaines ethnies. Afin d'améliorer le DP Act, le Congrès effectue des recherches sur la situation des réfugiés toujours dans les camps en 1949 tout en étudiant l’impact de la venue des DP aux États-Unis entre 1948 et 1950. Cette étude est soumise sous forme de rapport, le Displaced Persons and Their Resettlement in the United States, le 20 janvier 1950. Ce mémoire propose une analyse minutieuse du rapport et de son contexte politique afin de démontrer le rôle important de cette étude dans le processus décisionnel du Congrès américain visant à accueillir un plus grand nombre de DP tout en posant les bases pour une politique d’accueil en matière de refugiés. / ABSTRACT : With the ending of the Second World War, the refugee problem became an international issue. Several million people, which are called the Displaced Persons (DPs), are without shelter and should receive immediate help to survive. Although the majority of DPs will return to their home country, there are still hundreds of thousands of refugees in 1948. The only practical solution to solve this problem is the migration of refugees out of Europe. The Americans have played a crucial role by agreeing to receive 415,000 DP between 1948 and 1952 through the Displaced Persons Act (DP Act) of 1948 and its amendments in 1950 and 1951. After heated discussions between the restrictionnists and those who advocate the liberalization of immigration laws, the Displaced Persons Act was voted with great reluctance and signed, June 25, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. This law provides for the arrival of 202,000 DPs in two years, but it contains measures deemed discriminatory to certain ethnic groups. In order to improve the DP Act, Congress conducted research on the situation of refugees still in camps in 1949 while studying the impact of the DPs arrival in the United States from 1948 to 1950. This study was submitted as a report, the Displaced Persons and Their Resettlement in the United States, January 20th, 1950. This thesis proposes a thorough analysis of this report to demonstrate how the study helped the decision-making process of the U.S. Congress that led to the acceptance of a larger number of DP’s while also laying the basis for a settlement policy with regard to refugees.

本論文的中心命題是：冷戰後的中國是尋求向外擴張、還是自我防禦的國家？為了檢視此一命題，本論文從守勢現實主義（defensive realism）的理論中推論出維持現狀、嚇阻戰略與昂貴信號，以作為檢視冷戰後中共安全行為的指標。本論文分別檢視中共領導人的政策宣示、1995-96年台海危機以及冷戰後中共與南海爭議的個案，證明：第一、中共對國際環境的認知會符合守勢現實主義關於良性的國際結構與安全充足的觀點；第二、中共的外交政策旨在維持既有的國際秩序，所以其對外的行為以維持現狀為主，避免改變現狀的情形發生；第三、中共的國防政策屬於防禦性的，因此其戰略以嚇阻為主，避免使用武力直接與敵人衝突；第四、為了表示防禦性、維持現狀或者是合作的意圖，中共採取昂貴信號的作法，以避免被其他國家所誤解。所以，本論文論證出冷戰後的中國是一個追求自我防禦的國家，其安全政策是屬於防禦性的。 / The central question of this thesis is: Is China an expansionist or a self-preserving state in the Post-Cold War era? From defensive realism theory, I infer status quo policy, deterrence strategy, and costly signal to estimate Post-Cold War PRC security behavior. Empirically, I examine Chinese leaders’ statements, the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1995-96, and South China Sea disputes in the Post-Cold War era. I reach the conclusion that: First, PRC’s perception of international environment is consistent with defensive realism’s argument that international structure is benign and security is plentiful. Second, China engages status quo foreign policy to maintain the international order. Third, China’s defense policy emphasizes on deterrence strategy to avoid direct conflict with the enemy. Fourth, China adopted costly signals to unfold its defensive, status quo, or cooperative intention to prevent other countries’ misunderstanding. I argue that, therefore, Post-Cold War China is a self-protecting state with the defensive security policy.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong Baptist University, 2005. / Thesis submitted to the Dept. of Religion and Philosophy. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-201).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Southern California, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-269).

Zugl.: Diss. / Literaturverz. S. 183 - 189.