This study examines the Biafran secession of 1967-1970 and how the secessionist government constructed a Biafran identity in its campaign to gain international support for Biafra’s permanent separation from Nigeria. The introductory chapter outlines the role of identity in Nigeria’s twentieth-century political history and discusses the scholarly literature addressing questions of national and ethnic identity and on the Biafran secession. The thesis then provides a historical framework for discussing the evolution of Nigerian political identities and the failures of Nigerian leaders to build a Nigerian nationalism among the region’s numerous identifiable groups in the colonial and early independence eras. Subsequent chapters analyse the Biafran government’s attempts to elide the inherent instability of identity and overcome the dynamic process of identity formation in Nigeria by constructing and promoting a fixed Biafran identity based on cultural characteristics and historical experiences that allegedly distinguished and united the diverse peoples of the secessionist region.

La tesi s’inicia amb la descripció del fenomen de la justícia transicional, diferenciant-ne la justícia retributiva, la institucional i la justícia transicional reparadora, encarregada d’implementar els mecanismes de reparació de les víctimes de l’anterior règim autoritari. Dins de la justícia transicional reparadora, s’analitzen les diferents mesures de reparació de les víctimes de la Guerra Civil espanyola, que han adoptat els governs democràtics després de la transició espanyola cap a la democràcia. D’entre aquestes mesures, destaca la regulació de pensions vitalícies a favor de mutilats i familiars de morts a la Guerra Civil, el reconeixement de drets a favor dels militars republicans, les ajudes pel temps de privació de llibertat, i la restitució de béns a favor de sindicals i partits polítics il•legalitzats durant el franquisme. També s’estudia l’anomenada Llei de la Memòria Històrica i es proposa una acció judicial en reclamació dels danys patits per la privació de llibertat. / The thesis begins with a description of the phenomenon of transitional justice, exploring the difference between retributive justice, institutional justice (lustrations) and reparative justice, which deals with the implementation of reparations of the victims of the previous authoritarian regime. Within the transitional reparative justice, we analyze different measures of reparation to the victims of the Spanish Civil War taken by the democratic governments after the Spanish transition to democracy. Among these measures, we can observe the regulation of annuities in favor of familiar mutilated and dead in the Civil War, the recognition of rights in favor of republican military, aid for the period of detention, and restitution to favor unions and political parties outlawed under Franco regime. We also study the so-called Law of Historical Memory and we propose legal action to claim for damages suffered by imprisonment.

This dissertation engages the historiography of American citizenship and identity, republican traditions in American life and thought, and explores the evolution of military leadership in American society during the American Civil War. The nature, experiences and evolution of citizen-soldiers and citizen-officers, both Union and Confederate, reveal that the sentimental, often romantic expectations and ideologies forged in the American Revolution and modified during the antebellum era were recast, adapted, and modified under the extreme pressures of four years of conflict. Civil War citizen-officers experienced extreme pressures to emulate the professional officers of the regular army and to accommodate the ideological expectations of the independent, civic-minded volunteers they led. These junior leaders arrived at creative, often ingenious solutions to overcome the unique leadership challenges posed by the tension between antebellum democratic values and the demands of military necessity. Though the nature and identity of the officers in both armies evolved over time, the ideological foundations that informed Civil War Americans’ conceptions of military service persisted throughout the conflict. The key to the persistence of the citizen-soldier ethos and citizen-officer image during and after the Civil War era lies in the considerable power of antebellum Americans’ shared but malleable republican tradition. By focusing on the experience of volunteer company-grade officers in the Civil War era, we discover how the ordeal of the Civil War forced Americans to reevaluate and reconcile the role of the individual in this arrangement, both elevating and de-emphasizing the centrality of the citizen-soldier to the evolving narrative of American identity, citizenship, and leadership.

The existing democratization and peacebuilding literature often neglects the important role the domestic realm plays in post-conflict peacebuilding. To explain why some post-conflict peacebuilding operations have a greater likelihood of success than others, some scholars have examined the impact of factors such as international coordination, external donor interest, democratic sequencing, and hostility levels. This analysis focuses on domestic capacities for building peace in the aftermath of civil conflict in order to systematically explore the relationship between the domestic sphere and peacebuilding success. Using Sambanis and Doyle’s (2006) peacebuilding triangle model, new local capacities indexes will be created and tested.

With the extant work on civil war duration as a starting point, this project uses the Ugandan case to identify and address theoretical aporias in our existing understanding of the determinants of duration. The vast majority of existing work begins with the assumption that the rebel force is the determining factor in the duration of conflict. Challenging this assumption, I argue that civil war duration should be understood as a function of the calculations made by both the rebel units and the established state, a dynamic that has implications for the way in which we think of the preferences of the state. Finally, that incentive structures exist, given the nature of post-colonial states that lower the utility of peace for elected leadership and reduce their willingness to provide peace as a collective good to the broader population as civil war can be used as one of Jeffrey Herbst’s buffer mechanisms.

The regnant interpretation of the American Civil War includes the fact that it evolved into a “total war,” which adumbrated the total wars of the twentieth century. Mark E. Neely, in 1991, published an influential paper calling this interpretation into question for the first time. In the article Neely revealed that the first mention of “total war” in connection with the Civil War was an article written in 1948 by John Bennett Walters about Gen. William T. Sherman and a raid he ordered on Randolph, Tennessee in reprisal for an attempted hijacking of the packet boat Eugene on the Mississippi River. Walters castigates Sherman’s raid as brutal, cruel, and wanton and tries to depict Sherman as a violent and hateful man who set out to punish Southerners for turning their backs on the Union. He—along with modern residents of Tipton County, Tennessee—claim that Sherman burned the whole town to the ground. But a close investigation of the target of Sherman’s attack shows that Randolph, Tennessee had been a ghost town since the mid 1840s with the result that very little actual damage was done. There may have been as many as six dwellings in the area along with dozens of abandoned and derelict buildings. Sherman’s orders to the troops were to let the citizens know that Union officials abhorred this kind of violence but were forced by guerilla activities to burn their homes to discourage continued attacks on river boats. The residents were given sufficient time to remove their belongings before the buildings were set afire. The results of this investigation suggest that the raid on Randolph might be emblematic of much of the purported devastation of the South by Sherman and his armies. Perhaps the “total war” on the South was illusory and has been greatly exaggerated along with the destructiveness of the Civil War. The term “total war” seems never to have been used in the nineteenth century. Total war is a twentieth-century term and is completely bound up with twentieth-century technology, especially with aircraft as weapons of mass destruction. The kind of destruction encompassed by “total war” was unimaginable in Civil War times, especially the deliberate killing of noncombatant civilians. It is argued, then, that the use of the term “total war” to describe the American Civil War is anachronistic and thus entails the projection of twentieth century realities into the past.

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a logically coherent and empirically grounded account of the relationships between collective communication, collective loyalties, and collective violence. Drawing on research from an array of disciplines, ranging from psychology to economics and sociology, I develop a new theoretical framework that I term "communicative structuralism." The central claim of this framework is that the communicative processes upon which the formation of collective identities and loyalties are based are structurally constrained in systematic ways. More specifically, it claims that public communicative structures, those which transmit synchronized messages and thus generate joint awareness of those messages amongst a collective audience, are central to the development of national, sub-national, and transnational symbolic allegiances because they create communities of shared experience and thereby generate symbolic touchstones which allow individuals to feel connected to a seemingly unified moral community. To test this theory, I collect data on the structural properties of the most prominent public communicative structures in the contemporary state system - those constituted by the mass media networks of newspapers, radios, and televisions - in 177 countries for the period 1945 - 1999. I then use this data to test the implications of the theory at two separate levels of analysis: (1) at the individual level the theory is tested using cross-national survey data on media exposure and state allegiance from over 30,000 respondents in 38 countries, and (2) at the state level the theory is tested using cross-national time-series data on civil conflict, identity fragmentation, and regime stability. I each case, the central finding is that mass media structures are fundamentally involved in generating the conditions for the formation of collective audiences (that is, audiences which are composed of members who are jointly aware of themselves as a collective). The dissertation demonstrates that such collective audiences, when constituted on a national scale by dense public communicative structures (i.e. mass media), make individuals more inclined to feel affective attachments to their country, and reduce the propensity to sociopolitical fragmentation thereby lessening the risk of large-scale civil conflict. In making this demonstration, the dissertation attempts to triangulate through the use of a wide variety of quantitative techniques, including multilevel hierarchical linear models, structural equation models, non-parametric tests of predictive accuracy, Bayesian model averaging, social network analysis, and agent-based computational simulations. I also ground the analysis in careful qualitative process-tracing of the disintegration of the Yugoslavian federation. / Dissertation

<p>Conflict between states in an anarchic international system is generally the result of an inability among state leaders to successfully negotiate perceived power imbalances within the system. Interstate conflicts are relatively rare events and are generally short in duration; international pressures to quickly and permanently resolve conflicts before their effects are felt outside the region of conflict are often intense. In an increasingly global community, an international order in turmoil ripples through the global financial system, often leading to a weakening of state power within it. </p> <p>Violent conflicts within state borders have been historically more common, with causative issues ranging from polity dissatisfaction or inequities in the economic structure of the state to disputes over territorial integrity and autonomy. Pressure to rapidly resolve conflict within states is differentially applied cross-regionally; however, where strategic interests of major-power states are involved, such conflicts are usually quickly addressed. Where no such interests exist, these conflicts can and do persist for decades, at often huge costs to state resources. </p> <p>In the mid-1990s the number of ongoing subnational conflicts appeared to be trending upward and increasingly between dissimilar people groups; Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis posited that future conflict at the subnational and international levels would be increasingly between groups of differing civilizational origin. This study disputes this claim, intending instead to show that conflict between groups of dissimilar religious beliefs is more likely to escalate to violence than that occurring between civilizational groupings, especially after the end of the Cold War.</p> <p>This study covers nearly 200 countries during the period 1946-2007, including those granted independence within the period and new republics formed in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. If Huntington's thesis is correct, states located along defined civilizational "fault-lines" should experience a higher incidence of violent conflict at the state level. States that contain sufficiently large populations from differing civilizations (defined as cleft states) should also be more conflict prone. The differential advantages gained during modernization processes in the post-Cold War era should result in an upward trend in such conflict after 1989. </p> <p>This study uses conflict data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, recording 1,670 conflict-years in over 100 countries within the observation period. Descriptive statistics suggest subnational conflicts have not become increasingly civilizational as Huntington described. Instead, conflict between dissimilar religious groups has become more common since the end of the Cold War. Multivariate analysis is used to estimate the relative importance of religious differences on the initiation of violent subnational conflict. In addition to the existence of religious cleavages, the salience of a number of realist variables is also considered. </p> <p>Results show Huntington's theory to be insufficient to describe this evolution of subnational conflict. Civilizations are too broad to engender the necessary inclusivity in times of crisis, and the number of classifications theorized too narrow. However, results suggest religious cleavages to be equally weak predictors of future conflict likelihood at the subnational level. As in prior studies of civil wars, religion seems epiphenomenal in causative predictions of low-level subnational conflict initiation in the modern era.</p> / Dissertation

<p>This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political term within Whitman's later editions, it was nearly devoid from the original one, in which republican political concepts were still regnant. The argument put forth is that in the space of twelve years, Whitman's relationship to democracy went through a strikingly classic dialectic trajectory: emergence, consolidation and fissure. The immediate engine driving this progression was the Civil War, but behind this immediate cause was the slower, broader motor of modernization, particularly modernization's expansion of markets, for in the market's circulation and interconnection of people and commodities Whitman saw a model for an expansive and integrative democratic collectivity. The first chapter explores the importance to Whitman of the physical print room as a uniquely hybrid site in the course of modernization, for while it was one of the first to exploit the expanding industrial market, it also maintained pre-industrial forms of artisanal labor late into that progression. The print room thus became a site where the industrial market's reach and pre-industrial labor's affective relationship to the product and its consumers could be combined, and the print room therefore plays a central role, in ways both subtle and profound, in Whitman's poetry, in his understanding of the emerging democratic nation, and in his own literary productive practice. The second chapter turns from an investigation of democratic social space to an investigation of democratic time, noting how a nearly forgotten event, a loan between Whitman and James Parton, ended the "afflatus" under which the early editions were produced and prompted Whitman to revamp Leaves' relationship to history. Whitman's experience of personal debt failure led him to reconsider the ways in which his political project was susceptible to similar collapse, for the circuits of affective connection upon which his democratic project was based depended not only on their reach through space but on their forward projection through time, particularly the continual recycling of death into life, what Whitman called the "perpetual payment of the perpetual loan." Whitman sought to reduce this contingency by abstracting the political project of the work from his immediate social world (America) to a political philosophy (democracy) which stood above and outside of time. The 1860 edition thus marked the emergence of democracy as the book's central political philosophy. Yet this strategy proved insufficient when Whitman confronted the one barrier to affective exchange that his verse could not bridge: the dead bodies of the Union soldiers. This unbridgeable difference reverberated outward through the circuits of Whitman's poetry, dismantling the political and affective structures he had been building up to 1860. A text which previously declared the absence of both the past and death - "the greatest poet ... places himself where the future becomes present," "the smallest sprout shows there is really no death" - now becomes doubly haunted by ghosts, once by the dead bodies of Union soldiers which, as much as Whitman declares he "will henceforth forget," he cannot, and again by the strange emergence of new "Phantoms, gigantic, superb." These phantoms represent for Whitman the inversion of democracy's promise, democracy become nightmarish and zombie-like, and his fundamental triangle is haunted by its inverse: a melancholic Whitman; the overmastering re-emergence of the "bards of the past" and explicitly antiquated poetic forms; and a threatening, sovereign federal power autonomous from the people. The revisions Whitman introduced to the post-war edition of 1867 tell the story of a crisis in democratic confidence on behalf of democracy's former champion. Taken all together, the first four editions of Leaves form a chronicle of the archetypal democratic poet's struggle with democracy during U.S. democracy's most critical decade.</p> / Dissertation

The recent civil war in Sierra Leone (1991-2002) saw massive migrations amongst the civilian population and widespread damage to villages and towns. This study combines elements of military and cultural geography to ask the questions of how the events of the war changed the cultural landscape and how the cultural landscape influenced the course of the war. Fieldwork for this study was conducted during the summer of 2005 in the Eastern Province and included numerous semi-structured interviews regarding the landscape histories of villages, towns, and various temporary camps. These findings revealed that a clear relationship existed between the civil war and the cultural landscape. On the one hand, the war caused dramatic changes in the morphology of the cultural landscape, creating three distinct landscapes (pre-war, wartime, and post-war), while on the other hand the cultural landscape went far to structure the character of the war. In order to understand how the cultural landscape structured the war one must first consider how the landscape was perceived by each major faction (Revolutionary United Front, Sierra Leone Army, and Civil Defense Forces) as presenting a unique set of risks and opportunities. This perception was based in their strategic intentions and capabilities. Intentions can be understood as military objectives (derived from political goals), while capabilities can be understood as factors which constrain and enable action. Since each faction had different military objectives and capabilities they each perceived the landscape in a unique manner and this perception influenced their military operations. It is recommended that cultural geographers begin to study the impacts of war on the landscape and that military geographers expand their focus on the physical landscape by taking into account the role of the cultural landscape and environmental perception.