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This thesis argues that magic contributes significantly to the social and cultural context in many contemporary African settings in which acts of violence and war are carried out and interpreted. It can be understood as appropriate and logical practice, as opposed to a marker of irrationality and backwardness. To do this the thesis (a) explores the actual roles played by magic in contemporary African warfare, and (b) considers this in relation to the way we think about war and the practices that underpin it. Part I (chapters 2-4) argues the case for engaging with magic as a serious influence on wartime behaviour and suggests a conceptual toolkit for doing so, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's work on the formation of practice. It shows that magic and traditional beliefs are still relevant to political and social relations in Africa in peacetime and war. It also suggests a set of tools for thinking about magic and warfare without succumbing to either purely functionalist or relativistic explanations. Part II (chapters 5-8) applies these tools to the case study of the Kamajor civil defence forces in Sierra Leone, arguing that by looking at the interconnected dimensions of habitus, field, capital and interest (borrowed from Bourdieu) we can understand how the Kamajor's use of magic was both logical and appropriate. This is done by looking at the context of the war, the cosmology of people who joined and interacted with the Kamajors, and how these made magic a valuable resource for mobilisation as well as battlefield tactics. Part III concludes the thesis and argues that thinking about magic, and in extension cultural practice more broadly, in relation to Bourdieu's notion of practice formation helps us sharpen our analysis of warfare in a way that can be applied also beyond the study of magic and Africa.

In recent years, the study of virtual teams has become the focus of much attention and led the direction to focus on conflict management styles within virtual teams since information communication technologies have become popular and commonly adopted.

The scale of the 2005 riots in France was unprecedented, with violence spreading to suburban areas across the nation. The events that unfolded in the Villiers-le-Bel in 2007 represented the aftershock of 2005. With almost identical causal circumstances and influenced by the memory of 2005, these riots recorded new levels of intensity. Following these expressions of violence, social commentators aired differing interpretations: some reduced the riots to simple acts of destruction; others evoked an ethnocultural fragmentation of society; and others viewed the riots as a social crisis. However, the issues at stake in the suburbs are more complex than these readings suggest. The events of 2005 and 2007 revealed the extent of the divide that exists within the Republic. Young people living in these areas seem to be angered at the failure of the Republic to treat them as the equals of people from more affluent areas. Could it be that these young people were attempting to address the blind spot of French republicanism - the juxtaposition of an abstract proclamation of universal equality with the reality of the racial and social discrimination that dominates life in the suburbs? Did the riots represent a rejection of French society and values at large, or could the violence be seen as a call for social inclusion? Using the riots of 2005 and 2007 as a starting point, this project explores the sociocultural situation in French banlieues and, on a larger scale, the republican model in terms of its validity in contemporary French society. The project is based on empirical evidence gleaned from a case study of Villiers-le-Bel, a suburb sharing many of the characteristics associated with the banlieues. Extensive fieldwork offers an in-depth assessment of the true nature and causes of the riots of 2005 and 2007, and to what extent these events have challenged the French republican model.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary exploration of young people’s experiences of and means of coping with violence in the provinces of North and South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It engages with psychological resilience theory, the anthropology of violence, and structural analyses drawn from sociology to explore how young people cope with their experiences of violence. It establishes an analytical framework based on a ‘structures of violence’ perspective, through which young people’s processes of coping are examined at the individual level, as well as through social relations, political processes and the international political economy in which young people are embedded. By examining young people’s individual coping mechanisms, the thesis demonstrates how coping tactics may be effective in the short term, but may lead to longer term risks. Considering how social support networks have been transformed by violence, the thesis demonstrates how patronage relationships remain an essential aspect of young people’s coping processes, even as they reinforce their positions of weakness and dependence. Through an analysis of processes of meaning attribution, the thesis also considers how identity-based, victim-perpetrator discourses and blame can serve a psychologically protective role in helping young people make sense of violence, even as these meanings contribute to the conservation of violence. Finally, the thesis critiques international child protection responses, showing how morally-driven international interventions which valorise vulnerability and victimhood contribute to strengthening the structures of violence in the Kivus. The qualitative methodological approach used for this research has relied primarily on the documentation of young people’s narratives and participant observation; data was collected from more than 300 young people during fieldwork which was conducted in 2010 and 2011. The research has additionally been influenced by the author’s experience of living and working in the Kivus between 2006 and 2011.

Sulha (Settlement in Arabic) is a ubiquitous, seven-step, transformative and restorative customary justice practice, designed to facilitate reconciliation between and amongst feuding clans in Muslim and Arab societies. This dissertation examines the application of this practise in the Arab community of northern Israel, where most of the country’s Arab population lives. The existing literature tends to treat the Sulha from a folkloristic perspective, focusing on ritual and ceremony yet lacking in-depth analysis of the process itself, which sometimes takes years to complete and is conducted for the most part in strict confidentiality between the interveners and each of the disputing clans. It especially fails to demonstrate how the application of a judicious mix of mediation and arbitration tools contributes to changing disputants’ attitudes; what tools (if any) are used by interveners to effect the desired changes; and how such tools achieve the goal of gradually replacing what is described as an almost unquenchable desire to avenge a perceived collective injury to the clan’s honour with a willingness to forgive and move on with life, through a restoration of the victim’s clan sense of honour. Using ethnographic and quantitative research methods, including participant observations, questionnaires, surveys, interviews with informants, existing literature, statistical analysis, and the introduction of a new concept (Reintegrative Honouring Concept), this dissertation seeks to redress these key pitfalls in the study of the Sulha process, as well as to fill other research lacunae such as the ignored impact of women on the process, the impact of the interaction between Sulha and Israel’s formal legal system, and the theoretical and functional differences between similarly-named mediation and arbitration tools in Western ADR (e.g., venting, confidentiality) and those in Sulha.

In our lifetime there has been a marked increase in the number of ways in which people can communicate. This greater connectivity presents an added urgency for developing a solid understanding of the spread of deviant attitudes, particularly when they manifest as violent outbursts. How an otherwise moderate and rational populace can devolve to extremity through self-organisation is a question that must be answered if we hope to understand the underlying causes of atrocities that follow from extremism. That is the main question this dissertation hopes to tackle, specifically with a greater degree of realism and much less reliance on artificial manipulation than is currently present in the accepted literature of Opinion Dynamics. One such attempt at answering these questions is the Relative Agreement model, where agents are paired in order to exchange information about their own opinion. In this model, populations exhibit examples of real world convergences provided a number of initial parameters are specified. This thesis seeks to challenge and improve upon the accepted notion of the Relative Agreement model after finding fault with the published literature through the first known attempt at replication of its findings. Once a discussion of the discrepancies has been completed, a thorough analysis of the model is presented along with a number of suggested improvements to increase the capability and usefulness of the model. This examination is then followed by changing the population from a fully connected graph to a tuneable Klemm-Eguiluz social network to examine the model's properties under more realistic constraints. With this addition it was found that when agents are highly clustered, alternative population behaviours are inhibited, contrary to real world data. As a result, it is noted that the Relative Agreement model must be significantly improved upon, if it is to be applied to real world study. Once this analysis has been completed, a new model is presented, building on the Relative Agreement model and taking inspiration from Social Judgement Theory in psychology, creating the Relative Disagreement model. In this model, a disagreement dynamic is added removing the al1ificial need for pre-existing extremist agents and fixed uncertainties. It is then demonstrated that the Relative Disagreement model is able to exhibit all of the original behaviours, even with the most clustered of agent populations. Thus it can be seen that the Relative Disagreement model presented in this thesis represents a significant step forward in the understanding of extremist opinion spread and formation, the former having up until now required specific parameters to be set and the latter phenomenon being largely ignored in the field of Opinion Dynamics.

The neoliberal era in the UK has been characterised by rising economic inequalities, accompanied by increasing differentiation between people by class, gender and race. For those sections of the population with the least material resources there have been rises in relative social deprivation measured by a number of indexes. This study examines how exclusion and marginalisation has created a sense of stigma, anti-social labelling and, in many cases, criminalisation of the socially excluded. The punctuation of this era by acts of riot has been a sporadic but regular feature, indicating the presence of anomie and alienation which cannot always be contained by authority. Specific common features in the collective biographies of this figuration are identified and discussed below; namely interpersonal violence in the form of knife crime amongst young people, the impact of formal and informal exclusion from the mainstream system of schooling, and the consequences of these features being triangulated with another factor statistically likely to lead to involvement in the criminal justice system – being looked after by the state. In order to range across a wide range of different aspects of social policy and examine their human impact this material is presented here as a city case-study. By confining research to a specific locale the researcher has been able to carry out an ethnographic study with various members of the affected cohort in the course of his work as a school teacher, community worker and Youth Justice Mentor in the city of Bristol between 1995 and 2012. The statement below contextualises the works in the public domain submitted for examination.

This project constitutes the first multifaceted exploration of the modes of visual selfpresentation of the UN, which I see as operating partially independently from the organisation’s communication strategy. I am particularly interested in reflecting on the use of images as rhetorical devices and in contributing to strengthening the overlap between visual culture, rhetoric and UN studies. The thesis aims to respond to the question ‘What are the central characteristics of the modes of visual presentation of the UN?’ and, secondarily, ‘What do these modes of visual presentation reveal with regard to the spectatorship of the UN?’ To answer the first question, I analyse the UN flag and emblem, the publicness of the meetings of the General Assembly and the Security Council and, finally, the figure of the Goodwill Ambassador. However, my analysis considers not only these individual images but also the visual network that they originate. Of particular concern is the position of this network vis-à-vis the organisation’s internal conflicts and the UN’s aim of public support for its mission, which is in tension with the limited modes of engagement that are available to its viewers. I address the second question in the final chapter, which brings into play two artistic interventions: Pedro Reyes, The People's United Nations (2013-2014) and Goshka Macuga, Bloomberg Commission: The Nature of the Beast (2009-2010). I regard them as foregrounding possible modes of activated viewership that are vital within a contemporary image world in which the UN’s modes of presentation constitute one of several rhetorical networks to be negotiated.

This study explores the mediation of ethno-religious conflicts by the press and investigates their potential for escalating or minimising such conflicts. Undertaken in the context of the protracted sectarian conflicts plaguing the Nigerian nation since return to democratic governance in 1999, the study focuses particular attention on the Nigerian press and seeks to locate the press within these conflicts. It addresses the wider debates around the reporting of war and conflict, particularly the contentious issues of the relationship between media and conflict and explores the implications of this relationship on the course of violent intra-state sectarian conflicts. Research on news culture confirms that media representations generally tend to glamorise war, violence and propaganda with negative implications for the resolution of such situations. This has raised critical issues about mainstream journalistic practices in the coverage of violence and scholarly arguments as to whether journalism is a participant or a detached observer in the conflict cycle. This study engages these difficult and much contested issues within the context of emerging alternative strategies for conflict reportage, focusing particular attention on the concept of peace journalism and its applicability to routine journalistic practice. The research utilises a repertoire of quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection, including content analysis, framing and critical discourse analyses and semi-structured interviews. The data collected is interrogated using a theoretical framework that incorporates ideas from ethnicity, media and ethnic conflicts, critical political economy as well as debates about alternative approaches to conflict coverage and reportage. The objective is to understand the intricate relationship between conflict dynamics, conflict analysis and the reportage of ethno-religious conflicts. The research reveals significant flaws in the quality of coverage and with the framing and representational patterns of the conflicts. These flaws are located within the historical development of the Nigerian press, the commercialisation of its operations as well as weak institutional structures. It further engages the context of news production with specific focus on the issues of professionalism, training and media regulation and how these affect content. It argues for the adoption of journalistic practice patterns and styles that will make the press less predisposed to aiding conflict escalation. This has implications for both teaching and research in the field as well as for news practices by the press.