This thesis looks into the ways in which religion influenced the civil war in Lebanon. The basis for the analysis of religious influence is taken from several theoretical publications dealing with the general ways in which religion influences politics and international relations. Based on those theories, the thesis examines the influence of religion on the civil war in three parts. First, it examines the effect of religion on the identity of the participants in the war. Second, it shows to what extend religion was used as a source of legitimacy by those participants. Third, it ascertains whether religion encouraged the internationalization of the civil war. At the end, religion is compared with the other factors which explain the outbreak, the process and the nature of the civil war in Lebanon.

This diploma thesis analyzes the ideological basis of islamism and deals with the reasons, why this political ideology is becomimg more and more popular in the Middle East and the West. The thesis also analyzes the phenomenon of globalization, in other words the interconnection between islamists in today's world. The last chapter summarizes the facts about the civil war in Syria, where both - islamists from the Middle East, as well as islamists from the West, are involved. The main objective of this thesis was to prove that the civil war in Syria will have an influence on the spread of the political ideology of islamism.

This thesis describes the events leading up to the capture of Atlanta by the Union army during the Civil War.

While the origin of the Arab Spring is well documented in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, the role of press photography in presenting these conflicts is not. Images taken during a conflict often follow a particular narrative that comes to define how we remember a conflict. Considering that Syria is composed of a heterogeneous, ethno-religious mix located at the center of intense regional and international rivalries, understanding the cause of the uprising and the trajectory of the conflict require a careful study of the socio-political history of Syria as well as her regional and international relations. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how photographs taken of the Syrian Civil War that earned critical acclaim from photographic institutions mythologize the war. Semiotics provides a template for the interpretation of images that may be related to the underlying cultural forces shaping the conflict. Myth provides the forms in the presentation of archetypes in the images that we are able to readily identify so rendering the images relevant and recognizable to the viewer. The mythologizing of images of war has been used since Frank Capa created an “aesthetic ideal” during the Spanish Civil War and been re-appropriated during subsequent conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries especially the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003. This study uses a semiotic and mythological approach to analyze the winning photographs as selected by the National Press Photographers Association, World Press Photographers Association and Pulitzer Prize awarded during the course of the Syrian conflict. The myths of the “victim” and “underdog” were the two most commonly applied myths to the civilians and the Syrian rebels, who were portrayed as the “lovable losers” in the conflict. These narratives differ from previous depictions of the two previous Gulf Wars in their empathetic depiction of the civilian population and of the rebels. If maintaining the status quo is one of the enduring functions of myth then the underdog myth perpetuates voyeuristic participation in the conflict without requiring the discomfort of the removal of the Assad regime.

The case of Syria presents an example of a regime performing authoritarian norms of peacebuilding that is indicative of new forms of geographical power implementing alternative models of post-conflict order. Bashar al-Assad utilises authoritarian conflict management to intensify its strategy of binary othering on which to exercise sectarian- infused practices of discrimination and violence to consolidate its power and subsequent legitimacy. The process of authoritarian upgrading left the Assad regime with vulnerabilities that were exploited during the uprising in 2011. Unable to control the protests, Assad intensified authoritarian and illiberal practices as a means to manage the civil war that emerged. Through discursive, spatial and economic practices, Assad was able to retain his seat of power. For example, drawing upon sectarianism as a tool of control, Assad put into place a process of binary othering that classifies citizens as loyal or disloyal. Citizens deemed disloyal are punished through a variety of measures. The authoritarian practices have led to dire conditions for the Syrian people, and are becoming entrenched into very structure of society through the process of reconstruction. However, liberal forms of peacebuilding lack the leverage to counter these practices. Keywords Syria;...

No description available.

Local Self-Defence Militias as Counterinsurgents The Possibility, Willingness and Rationality of Selective Violence against Insurgents Autor: Jakob J. Gilg Submitted: 31.07.2019 Abstract How do local self-defence militias (LSDMs) influence violence against civilians in civil conflicts? Compared to other types of pro-government militias (PGMs), LSDMs are active in their home area. This results in abundant local information that can be used to identify and target insurgents and their supporters selectively. Furthermore, LSDMs are part of the local community, resulting in strong social ties, making indiscriminate violence against the community less likely. Finally, since LSDMs are dependent on popular support and cannot move on to a new area after violent acts, they are incentivised to retain local support by abstaining from civilian targeting. Therefore, I hypothesise that LSDMs are more likely to employ selective violence, and that their deployment decreases civilian fatalities in civil conflicts. To empirically test this claim in a global sample, I use 1) a logistic regression to assess the likelihood of selective violence of PGMs (H1), and 2) a negative binomial regression to evaluate the expected number of civilians killed by the government (H2). The results for the first hypothesis suggest an increased...

My dissertation examines the families of Civil War African American soldiers in the nineteenth and twentieth-century. The project applies gender and sociological methodologies to case studies of Northern African American soldiers to explore how African American families used military service to reframe societal debates of gender. Using these methodologies, I have uncovered the contested debates of what gender meant, not only for Northern African Americans but also for whites. By supporting black military service, African American family members attempted to have their gender recognized equal to whites, instead of as inferior. Numerous advocates of enlistment championed military service as the vehicle to have white society recognize black humanity and citizenship claims. But enlistment idealism and the hardships of service ignored the material realities of working-class Northern black families. Military service caused financial instability to numerous working-class Northern black families as their male kin sacrificed their lives in the Civil war.

This thesis addresses the importance of the American Civil War to nineteenth-century European military education, and its influence on British staff officer training prior to World War I. It focuses on Garnet Wolseley, a Civil War observer who eventually became Commander in Chief of the Forces of the British Army. In that position, he continued to write about the war he had observed a quarter-century earlier, and was instrumental in according the Civil War a key role in officer training. Indeed, he placed Stonewall Jackson historian G.F.R. Henderson in a key military professorship. The thesis examines Wolseley’s career and writings, as well as the extent to which the Civil War was studied at the Senior Staff College, in Camberly, after Wolseley’s influence had waned. Analysis of the curriculum from the College archives demonstrates that study of the Civil War diminished rapidly in the ten years prior to World War I.

"Sisson's Kingdom" uses a community study paradigm to offer an interpretation of the Confederate homefront collapse of Floyd County, Virginia. The study focuses primarily on residents' conflicting loyalty choices during the war, and attempts to explain the myriad of ways that their discord operated to remove Floyd County as a positive portion of the Confederate homefront. The study separates the "active Confederate disloyalty" of Floyd County's Unionist inhabitants from the "passive Confederate disloyalty" of relatives or friends of local Confederate deserters. It then explores the conflicting loyalties of the county's pro-Confederates, Unionists, and passive disloyalists, seeking to understand better the wide variety of loyalty choices available to residents as well as the consequences of their choices. To determine some of the significant factors contributing to the Floyd County community's response to the Confederacy and Civil War, this thesis documents the various ways residents' reactions took shape. Chapter One examines the roots of these decisions, exploring briefly Floyd County's entrance into Virginia's market economy during the 1850s and its residents' conflicting choices during Virginia's secession crisis. In the aftermath of secession, many Floyd residents embraced their new Confederate government and enlisted by the hundreds in its military units. The decision by some county soldiers to desert their units and return to Floyd caused loyalty conflicts between their supporters and the county's pro-Confederates. This conflict, and the effects of deserters living in the Floyd community, are both explored in Chapter Two. Floyd's Unionist population and its loyal Confederate residents clashed violently throughout much of the war, hastening the disintegration of the Floyd homefront. Their discord is examined in Chapter Three. / Master of Arts