This paper focuses on Native American military service in Euro-American Wars. It analyzes their reasons for fighting and compares those reasons to the reasons of other racial and ethnic groups. This paper explores how certain racial and ethnic groups are marginalized and “otherized” and how they occasionally attempt to assimilate into mainstream society through military service. Irish Americans and African Americans viewed the Civil War in this way, while Native Americans hoped they would be able to improve their individual situations. Native Americans fought for purposes of assimilation and citizenship in World War I, and while they were technically granted citizenship their conditions did not improve. Neither military service or various government policies have allowed Native Americans to fully integrate into mainstream society. Today they still suffer because they are seen as “others” and stereotypes.

During the Guatemalan civil war (1962-1996), different forms of anonymity enabled members of the organizations of the social movement, revolutionary militants, and guerrilla combatants to address the popular classes and rural majorities, against the backdrop of generalized militarization and state repression. Pseudonyms and anonymous collective action, likewise, acquired political centrality for revolutionary politics against a state that sustained and was symbolically co-constituted by forms of proper naming that signify class and racial position, patriarchy, and ethnic difference. Between 1979 and 1981, at the highest peak of mass mobilizations and insurgent military actions, the symbolic constitution of the Guatemalan state was radically challenged and contested. From the perspective of the state’s elites and military high command, that situation was perceived as one of crisis; and between 1981 and 1983, it led to a relatively brief period of massacres against indigenous communities of the central and western highlands, where the guerrillas had been operating since 1973. Despite its long duration, by 1983 the fate of the civil war was sealed with massive violence. Although others have recognized, albeit marginally, the relevance of the politics of naming during Guatemala’s civil war, few have paid attention to the relationship between the state’s symbolic structure of signification and desire, its historical formation, and the dynamics of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity during the war. Even less attention has received the affective and psychic dynamics between proper naming, state violence, and the symbolic formation of the Guatemalan state. This dissertation addresses that relationship and dynamic. Following a historical-anthropological perspective, I argue that, from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s decade, prior to the beginning of the civil war, the Guatemalan state took the form of a finca-state. The Guatemalan finca-state functioned by inscribing, in the form of proper names, lineages and inheritance of colonial and post-colonial origin that came to signify wealth, whiteness, renown, and surplus of pleasure or jouissance, in the form of White-European patronymics, by virtue of which, indigenous proper names were forced to occupy the position of loss. This form of inscription, I argue, produced the foreclosure of the indigenous other. For the indigenous pueblos, nonetheless, state enforced inscription established forms of interpellation that desubjectivized the conditions of their own institutions of proper naming by turning them into mere objects of identification. The politics of pseudonymity and anonymity that proliferated between 1979 and 1981, especially among indigenous people of the Guatemalan highlands, was a refusal of a form of state that excluded the possibility of their recognition beyond identification. In a deep sense, anonymity and pseudonymity enabled revolutionary militants to become truly others, a condition that disorganized previous forms of state identification. In their inability to respond to a sense of crisis under conditions of anonymous collective action and revolutionary pseudonymity, the Guatemalan army responded with massive violence as an attempt at eliminating their sense of threat. I pay particular attention to the Ixil region, where the UN sponsored Guatemalan truth commission concluded that the Guatemalan army perpetrated acts of genocide against indigenous communities of Ixil descent. This dissertation is based on extensive archival research conducted between the months of October 2014 and May 2015, extensive collective and individual interviews carried out between 2004 and 2007, and ethnographic observation in the Ixil region between May and October of 2015. Its methodology follows the routes of collaborative research, archival reading, and ethnographic participant observation.

This dissertation examines African American students’ perspectives of African American agency during the Civil War. It also seeks to understand where their knowledge of African Americans during the Civil War comes from. The topic fits within the Critical Race Theory framework and utilized a mixed methods approach to understand the study findings. The methodology included an online survey completed by forty-two participants at a Historically Black university and 3 semi-structured interviews using the interview protocol. Descriptive statistical demographic data, open-ended responses and interview transcripts were analyzed using the agency rubric developed by the researcher. The themes that emerged from the study included the limited agency of African Americans during the Civil War, silenced voices of African American women, students’ limited knowledge of ancestors’ emancipation and emancipation narratives, and little specific knowledge of African Americans involvement in the Civil War

Public sector corruption is a major problem in Monrovia. Successive national governments have instituted anticorruption measures in the 1970s and 2000s, and anticorruption agencies were established to eradicate corruption. However, there appears to be a significant lack of resources and political willpower to prosecute corrupt government officials. A failure to curb political corruption indicates that current policies are not working. Government works when there is a perception that it delivers results and that the needs and safety of the citizenry are protected. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenology study was to gain a deeper understanding of public sector corruption at high levels of government in Monrovia. The conceptual framework for this study was based on the sociological theory of collaboration, within which governance is seen as a component of interpersonal relationships and a way to build trust and social interactions. Data were collected from open-ended semistructured interviews with former and present government officials (N = 8). The results were coded using descriptive coding to take an inventory of the contents, and to classify the coding into themes and subthemes. Results indicated that distrust among stakeholders and various governing institutions has hindered cooperation. Civic engagement and participation, patriotism, decentralization of the central government, job creation, safety and security, law and order, education and healthcare, and diluting the powers of the presidency, etc., were some of the issues raised by the participants. This dissertation may support positive social change in a meaningful way by providing policymakers with the information to make the country safe and governable, increase the standard of living and bring needed relief to the citizenry.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the medieval Florentine poet Dante Alighieri was an almost completely unknown figure in the United States. Yet, by mid-century, he was considered by many Americans to be one of the world's greatest poets and his major epic, the Divine Comedy, was translated during the Civil War by the most popular American poet at the time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This dissertation examines Dante's nineteenth-century emergence in the United States and the historical and cultural reasons why Dante, for many nineteenth-century Americans, became a highly-regarded literary figure and an unexpectedly popular poet during the Civil War. Using new historicist and book studies methodologies, it argues that Dante was widely viewed as an important theological-political poet, a cultural representative of Italy and nineteenth-century Italian nationalism and liberalism, one who spoke powerfully to antebellum and wartime issues of national disunity, states' rights, the nature of empire, and the justice and injustice of civil war. American periodicals and English-language translations of the Comedy touted Dante as a great national poet--a model who might inspire any would-be national poet of the United States--while interpreting his biography and the Comedy in terms of American and transatlantic political events, ideologies, and discourses. Aware of such promotion, many American writers, including Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, read and interpreted the Comedy in terms of national politics and, by the early 1860s, the Civil War. Given its relevance and popularity during the 1860s--numerous books by or about Dante were published in the United States during this decade--the Divine Comedy thus became an important epic poem of the Civil War, a poem that Longfellow and Walt Whitman turned to while constructing their wartime and Reconstruction-era poetry.

In placing Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey in conversation with each other, my dissertation analyzes - alongside their poetry and prose - monuments, paintings, television, film, photographs, and performance as connected to understanding the impact of historical legacies on lived experiences within the empire of U.S. America. Toni Morrison's concept of recovering the "unwritten interior life" of the slave experience - a life hidden within slave narratives - assists in understanding the historical poetics of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey as artists engaged in similar projects of reclamation. For Harjo this entails shedding a light on the weight of Native American histories for the descendants of survivors while contesting the myths that abound within popular culture regarding Native peoples. Trethewey's work intervenes within the public memory of the nation by centering on the inner-lives of African Americans as well as other people of color, stressing their various gendered and racialized experiences. The gaps within the records that each poet illuminates do not constitute a failure of history, per se, but rather emphasize limitations concerning traditional methodologies of history-writing. In order to further expand on this argument, throughout my work I rely upon certain ideas from 20th century ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas regarding our obligations to the past of the Other as well as the potential violence inherent within Western philosophical rhetoric regarding the Other. "Tending to the Past" argues that due to the gaps within the archival records we need multiple ways of approaching our history. The absence within the archives of the "emotional truths" or "interior lives" of historical subjects proves to emphasize the necessity for the poetic interventions of Joy Harjo and Natasha Trethewey.

Doctor of Philosophy (Economics) / This dissertation asks how foreign assistance to one or both sides in a civil war affects the dynamics of the conflict. This overarching question is subsequently divided into two further questions: 1) how does foreign intervention affect the capabilities of the recipient, and 2) how does this affect the nature of the warfare. The puzzle for the first is that the impact of foreign intervention on combat effectiveness frequently varies significantly between recipients. This variation is explained by recipients’ different abilities to convert the inputs of foreign intervention into the outputs of fighting capability. The nature of the warfare in civil war will change in line with the balance of military capabilities between the belligerents. The balance of capabilities will be responsible for the form of warfare at a particular place and time whether it be conventional, irregular or guerrilla/counter-guerrilla. The argument is then illustrated with two extensive case studies, of civil wars in Angola and Afghanistan, where temporal and spatial variation in the type of warfare is shown to correlate with the type, degree, and direction of foreign intervention.

黎巴嫩孱弱的社會體質在無力消　於發展過程中所迸發的一連串危機下， 終在一九七五年釀成全面的內戰，其混沌險惡之勢全面肢解國家機器，生 民賤如螻蟻；也為飽受歷史巨擔磨難的中東地區，再上一層重枷，成為關 切中東事務者的研究課題。本研究論文即透過黎巴嫩的社會層面，地區關 係及國際關係的三大主軸去構築內戰的圖像。 @有鑑於政治情勢的變化乃 為導引社會興衰的主流，而歷史又為政治之母；所以本文擷取黎巴嫩史上 對其今日社會性格塑造有決定性影響的諸變點及所推演的事件作一說明來 作為本研究的基點。歷史遺續沉澱堆積在各個社會權力中心，其運作生態 已無法自外於非理性教派情結及偏狹地域家族、意識的感染，七０年代巴 勒斯坦問題在上述情境下被激化，其殺傷力足以割斷維繫社會體系的紐帶 。 黎國內戰不單純是本土化的戰爭，更是區域性、國際化的內戰。敘 利亞、以色列、伊朗以及伊拉克等地區強權的涉入，將內戰推向地區權力 鬥爭的深淵；美國為推動中東政策，儘管在行政部門仍有爭議下，也出兵 黎國。探討各外來行為者的涉入動因、參與過程、施展外交工具的手段及 與黎國民兵派系的互動都是本論文寫作的核心。唯有如此，才能真實體察 戰事的脈動，釐清錯綜複雜的表象，並有助對於如何重建黎巴嫩社會及推 展中東和平的議題上，提供一條全方位思考途徑。 @ 在結論中，將根 據整個研究心得，對黎巴嫩社會提出一兼具階段性 及跟本長久之計的方 案，以廓清內戰的亂源，重塑和平。

The period of English history between the second Civil War and the Restoration opened up seemingly unlimited possibilities for shaping the country�s future. The period likewise witnessed an unprecedented surge of political imagination, a development which is particularly visible in Interregnum utopianism. More than ever before, utopianism orientates itself to a hopeful and expectant reality. It is no longer fictional or contemplative. Its ambitions and fulfilment are political; there is a drive towards active political participation. Utopianism reshapes its former boundaries and reinvents itself as reality utopianism. Considering this new reality-orientated identity, the utopias of the 1650s are especially useful in providing an insight into the political imagination of this period. This thesis studies three reality utopias of the 1650s: Winstanley�s The Law of Freedom, Harrington�s Oceana and Hobbes�s Leviathan. Each work represents a uniquely different utopian vision: Winstanley imagines an agrarian communism, Harrington revives classical republicanism, and Hobbes stresses absolute sovereignty. These three different utopian visions not only illustrate the range of the political imagination; they provide an opportunity to examine different ways to deal with the existing political and social concerns of the Interregnum and different perspectives for ideal solutions. Interregnum utopianism is shaped by the expectations and violence of the English Revolution and accordingly it is characterised by the heightened hopes and fears of its time. Despite substantial differences in the three utopias, the elemental hopes and fears expressed in these works remain similar. The hope for change and a better future is negotiated textually with a fear of anarchy and violence. In the end a compromise between opportunity and security has to be found. It is this compromise that shapes the face of Interregnum utopianism and reflects a major aspect of the post-revolutionary political imagination in England.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Social Anthropology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-250). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss&rft%5Fval%5Ffmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss:MQ99313