Based on the case study of the mediation of the Polish-Lithuanian dispute from 1920 to 1923, this dissertation explores the League of Nations' emergence as an agency of modern territorial and ethnic conflict resolution. It argues that in many respects, this organization departed from prewar traditional diplomacy to establish a new, broader concept of security. At first the league tried simply to contain the Polish-Lithuanian conflict by appointing a Military Commission to assist these nations in fixing a final border. But the occupation of Vilna by Polish troops in October 1920 exacerbated Polish-Lithuanian relations, turning the initial border dispute into an ideological conflict over the ethnically mixed region of Vilna, claimed by the Poles on ethnic grounds while the Lithuanians considered it the historical capital of the modern Lithuanian state. The occupation spurred the league to greater involvement via administration of a plebiscite to decide the fate of the disputed territories. When this strategy failed, Geneva resorted to negotiating the so-called Hymans Plan, which aimed to create a Lithuanian federal state and establish political and economic cooperation between Poland and Lithuania. This analysis of the league's mediation of this dispute walks the reader through the league's organization of the first international peacekeeping operation, its handling of the challenges of open diplomacy, and its efforts to fulfill its ambitious mandate not just to prevent war but also to uproot its socioeconomic and ethnic causes. The Hymans Plan reflected this ambition as well as commitment to reconciling the tenets of balance of power and territorial status quo with the principle of self-determination and minorities' protection when drawing new boundaries and creating new states.

Since the 1990s, ethnic divisions have replaced the cold war as the world's most important source of violent conflict (Lijphart 2002). According to Fearon and Laitin (2003), a conservative estimate of the total dead between 1945 and 1999 is 16.2 million, five times the interstate toll, as a direct result of about 127 civil wars that each killed at least 1,000. The problem of ethnic tensions is so widespread and serious that it has presented a major impediment to further democratization in this century and has possibly caused a third reverse wave of democratization (Lijphart 2002). Are ethnic tensions and conflicts inevitable in heterogeneous states? Which governmental institutions (parliamentary or presidential) and electoral systems (PR or SMD) create the best framework for addressing ethnic conflict? Is there any one-size-fits-all institutional solution to ethnic conflict? This dissertation aims at answering these urgent but under-explored questions, especially the last two about the effects of institutional arrangements. This dissertation will hold out institutional prescriptions that meet the needs of specific divided societies through a large-N quantitative study covering all ethnic groups in Minorities at Risk dataset from 1985 to 2003. / text

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-58)

Research Project (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Research Project (Dept. of Political Science) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

This project examines the literal and literary bodies associated with the Sinhalese-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka as they are represented in literary, journalistic, and anthropological accounts. These texts are populated by historical personages and fictional characters spun from imagination or based on actual people who serve as representatives of those who live in the day to day reality of violence. The goal of this project is to offer a re-visioning of the power relations between the aggressor and victim, the victor and vanquished, in violent conflicts. Island of Blood: Frontier Reports from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Other South Asian Flashpoints, a memoir by Anita Pratap, and The Terrorist, a feature film by Santosh Sivan, illustrate how Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, fashioned his own absent or invisible body and the bodies of the suicide bombers as the focal point of Tamil nationalism. Prabhakaran developed the cult of personality around himself by fostering an aura of mystery and employing religious symbolism. In particular, feeding emerges as the quintessentially nurturing function misappropriated by this malignant maternal figure Prabhakaran. The other category of bodies is comprised of the victims: the dead, the raped, and the other defiled bodies that are anomalous in military conflicts. These are the profaned and violated bodies. In Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, the unidentified bodies of human rights violations provide forensic evidence for legal proceedings and in turn attain sanctified status as the survivors use their remains to build legal cases against the atrocity. Their mute presence serves as a powerful amplifier for the survivors. A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies has as its focal point an ethnically incited rape and murder. During intergroup conflicts rape is often used to weaken the enemy group’s integrity. However, I argue that When Memory Dies challenges this norm and suggests that those who are considered threats to group integrity, whether they be minorities, outcasts, unwed mothers or raped women, could paradoxically be the agents of social integration, especially in the time of unrest. / text

Ethnic conflict is a persistent and vexing problem for the world today. The intercommunal violence during these conflicts not only significantly alters the social and spatial geography in these regions for decades, but also frequently involves external actors who magnify the social conflict. It is within the urban areas that the impacts of violence are often most acute and deleterious to the once functioning system. Ethnic conflict transforms many urban areas into “divided cities” in which barricades and armed posts dominate the landscape. With this paradigm of conflict in mind, the overarching purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to examine how and why certain peaceful societies devolve into intercommunal conflict, and 2) to outline how ethnic conflict ultimately, and often irreparably, transforms an urban area into a “divided city.” In this dissertation, Nicosia, the ethnically divided capital of Cyprus, serves as the primary case study used to illustrate the process of social devolution from ethnic conflict to a militarily fortified urban division. The three main research questions are asked concerning Nicosia’s division. 1) What historic factors contributed to the progression and intensification of the social and spatial cleavages that appear in the urban landscape today? 2) To what extent is the urban divide diagnostic of the overarching ethnic conflict on Cyprus? 3) How is Nicosia’s urban division similar to or different from other “ethnically” divided cities and how might this comparison help further the general understanding of the causes and consequences of these entities? These three questions help frame Nicosia within the context of the larger social conflict on Cyprus as well as assist in developing linkages with other divided cities. As articulated throughout this study, Nicosia is a “model” divided city that typifies how the historically-laden process of ethno-territorial polarization can manifest itself in the physical and social geography of a contested region. In the end, divided cities epitomize the “worst-case-scenario” outcome of ethnic conflict and once the urban divisions take root, they prove exceptionally challenging to remove from the social and physical landscape. / text

Using Northern Ireland this study seeks to establish what conditions on the ground must be cultivated in order for this ripe moment to come to pass. This thesis argued that five conditions in particular were necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, for the success of the Belfast Agreement. These five conditions (1) the inclusivity of the negotiation process, (2) efforts to foster positive cross community contact, (3) the positive involvement of external ethno-guarantors(EEGs), (4) the involvement of formal international primary mediators, and (5) the use of targeted economic aid. What emerged was that when taken together, these conditions created the pillars upon which a more stable agreement was reached. What is also important is that none of these conditions are short term investments; they all involved a long term commitment to peacebuilding that began long before the official negotiations of the BA.

Using Northern Ireland this study seeks to establish what conditions on the ground must be cultivated in order for this ripe moment to come to pass. This thesis argued that five conditions in particular were necessary, though not necessarily sufficient, for the success of the Belfast Agreement. These five conditions (1) the inclusivity of the negotiation process, (2) efforts to foster positive cross community contact, (3) the positive involvement of external ethno-guarantors(EEGs), (4) the involvement of formal international primary mediators, and (5) the use of targeted economic aid. What emerged was that when taken together, these conditions created the pillars upon which a more stable agreement was reached. What is also important is that none of these conditions are short term investments; they all involved a long term commitment to peacebuilding that began long before the official negotiations of the BA.

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-103).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.