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This dissertation investigates how political instability is related to the probability of civil war. According to the literature in comparative politics, regime breakdown is caused by critical events such as economic decline, defeat in interstate war, death of a leader in office, or changes is the international balance of power. Drawing on Powell (2004, 2006), I conceptualize such critical events as shifts in the domestic distribution of power that can lead to a bargaining breakdown and, in consequence, military conflict. Following a shock to government capabilities, current leaders and the opposition are bargaining for a share of authority. The government has incentives to grant concessions to other groups within the state, yet such promises are not credible given that the leadership may regain its strength. Similarly, opposition groups lack the ability to make credible commitments as they expect to be more powerful in the future. Both the government and opposition groups could benefit from striking bargains, but cannot credibly commit because of incentives to renege on agreements in the future. Unable to commit, both actors may use force to achieve their preferred outcome. The dissertation then shifts the focus to solutions to such commitment problems. I expect that (1) the institutional structure of government and opposition groups and (2) the distance between groups have important consequences on the range of feasible agreements during this bargaining process. The arguments are tested in a statistical study of all countries for the 1960-2004 time period and in a small-sample analysis of democratization processes in Algeria and Chile. Findings show that critical events increase the probability of civil war as hypothesized and empirical evidence also provides strong support for the proposed solutions to the commitment problem.

The Civil War contained many examples of courage and commitment to duty that were inspired by religion. In recent years much has been written on this subject of religion and the Civil War but virtually all of it is written about Protestant chaplains and this has created a gap in the record. This thesis covers the role played by Catholic chaplains in Confederate army regiments from Louisiana. It explores their life, ministry, military role, and impact on the regiments. To cover this in depth the Catholic chaplains selected we those who left published records.

Thesis advisor: Kevin Kenny / Immigrants in a Time of Civil War: The Irish, Slavery, and the Union, 1845-1865 Ian Delahanty (Kevin Kenny, adviser) Irish Americans' involvement in the national conflict over slavery that engulfed the United States from 1845 to 1865 reflected the international perspective of an immigrant group. Many Irish first encountered the issue of American slavery in Ireland, where nationalists and abolitionists clashed over Ireland receiving aid from America during the Irish potato famine. Irish nationalists decried abolitionism as harmful to national unity and neglectful of Irish poverty, an argument that the famine immigrants brought with them to America and adapted to Irish Americans' circumstances. At the same time, many Irish Americans saw their adopted country as a sanctuary for the oppressed and as a future ally for an independent Ireland. They were loath to see the nation divided, and in the sectional crisis of the 1850s, they blamed antislavery agitators for pushing America to the brink of civil war. Irish immigrants' antebellum support for slavery resulted from these transatlantic strains of anti-abolitionism and Unionism. When the Civil War began in 1861, Irish Americans rallied to the Union cause in order to preserve and perpetuate the United States as an immigrant haven and as a model republic. Many soon feared that Republicans' antislavery war policies were not only prolonging the war but also weakening the position of immigrant labor. Yet other Irish immigrants, especially those in the army, learned from the progression of the war that emancipation would facilitate the Union's restoration. Crucially, wartime developments--including British foreign policy, emigration from Ireland, and a rejuvenated Irish nationalist movement in Ireland and America--sustained the notion that the Union's survival had a tangible and particular importance to the Irish. By the end of the conflict, many Irish immigrants who had once defended slavery were advocates of emancipation. Countless northerners underwent a similar change. But the Irish-American story shows that immigrants' backgrounds in their homeland and their unique status in America combined to give them a singular perspective on the internecine conflict over slavery. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Indiscriminate violence against civilians is a recurrent problem in armed conflicts of all sorts. However, from a social science perspective this type of violence poses a puzzle. The literature on government and non-government violence mostly assumes that indiscriminate violence has counter-productive effect and is ultimately self-defeating. Yet, this begs the question as to why an actor should use indiscriminate violence at all? This dissertation tries to solve at least part of the puzzle. First, it critically reviews the literature and points to some misunderstandings that have made progress in comprehending indiscriminate violence more difficult. Second, the dissertation provides a theory on the effects of indiscriminate violence that targets groups, i.e. group-selective violence. While most of the literature assumes that violence against groups seeks to coerce the groups that are attacked, this dissertation widens the view and includes non-targeted groups in the calculation as well. It thereby demonstrates that group-selective violence can be able to produce coercive effects among those groups that are not targeted while generating only limited counter-productive effects. Empirically, this dissertation provides two types of supporting evidence. First, it will provide several case studies as a plausibility probe. These cases are designed to highlight that group-selective violence is used in the way proposed by the theory and has the hypothesized effects. Second, the dissertation will test the hypotheses of the theory of group-selective violence with data on violence against civilians in ethnic wars. Here quantitative methods are used to investigate the patterns and the consequences of violence. Both empirical investigations provide support for the notion that group-selective violence can be beneficial for the perpetrator and that it is used to achieve those benefits. In sum, this dissertation puts forth the theoretical background and empirical support for the effectiveness of group-selective violence.

Under what conditions do rebel organizations control territory during civil war? How do civilians influence the distribution of territorial control? Why do rebels invest in governance, and why do they target civilians with violence, in some locations but not others? This dissertation advances a political accountability theory to explain how civilians influence the distribution of territorial control and governance during civil war. Existing research explaining variation in rebel territorial control and behavior have emphasized structural and organizational factors, identity politics, economic conditions, and geography. However, the classic insurgency literature and recent counterinsurgency doctrine emphasize the importance of securing civilian support and protecting the population to achieving military objectives in civil war. If true, civilians retain at least some power over rebel personnel. The accountability theory of rebel conduct provides a unified framework linking inter-related conflict processes associated with rebel groups’ territorial control, governance, and strategic use of violence during civil war. It argues that community collective action capacity, the ease with which communities facilitate collective action to pursue common interests, influences the distribution territorial control and belligerent conduct during civil war. The empirical strategy draws upon complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to test the accountability against plausible alternatives using village-level data from the communist insurgency in the Philippines. The results provide robust support for the accountability theory over plausible alternatives, and yield policy implications for peace-building and economic development in conflict-affected states.

Bringing Daylight with Them: American Writers and Civil War Washington explores the capital during wartime, a city remade by the thousands of new residents and visitors searching for government jobs, for their loved ones in the city's numerous military hospitals, or for a place to escape the bonds of Southern slavery. Among those who made their new homes in the city were writers - poets, novelists, journalists, editors - who then wrote about their experiences and their new city in ways that helped readers see for themselves what Washington was like during the Civil War. This project examines three of those writers - Elizabeth Keckley, Lois Bryan Adams, and Walt Whitman - who produced drastically different takes on the capital and their places in it. For Keckley, a former slave turned dressmaker to Washington's most fashionable women, including Mary Todd Lincoln, the capital was a labyrinth of power and influence. Learning to navigate it was vital to her status as a business woman in the growing free Black community. Adams, a Michigan poet and journalist, was a correspondent for a Detroit newspaper and a clerk in the Department of Agriculture. Her weekly "Letter from Washington" captured the movement and flow of a city made riotous, while coming to terms with the sacrifices of war and questioning a government's responsibility to its citizens during wartime. While so many writers represented Washington as a temporary space for themselves, as it was for so many who found themselves in the capital during the Civil War, Whitman lived there for nearly a decade, experiencing both the rush of war and what came after. Through a study of his poetry and prose, Washington emerges as not just the government seat but ultimately as a place of personal and professional fulfillment. Bringing Daylight with Them reads both the texts of wartime Washington and the city itself to understand how writers built the capital in the public's imagination.

The unprecedented size and scope of the American Civil War fundamentally redefined the relationship between state and citizen. Through its conscription laws, the Union government empowered itself to standardize and evaluate the bodies of its citizens; the concurrent General Law pension system extended this standardization into the realm of disability. The government served as both national physician and national accountant, distributing millions of dollars a year to men it deemed unable to earn up to their potential due to wounds and diseases contracted in the Union's defense. Moreover, since so many disabilities were the result of disease - and therefore invisible to the naked eye - the state also asserted its power to certify to the taxpayers that these veterans were indeed among the "deserving poor," not idlers or parasites. This became especially important as pension-related expenses ballooned to the second-largest line item on the budget, and the "veteran vote" became the most important single-issue bloc in American politics. Veterans were themselves voters, however, and could negotiate at least some of the terms of their disability through the political process. This established that disability is discursively constructed - it is a social position, not a permanent physical impairment. Veterans' organizations might sweep socially problematic old soldiers up into Homes, but veterans always retained their influence at the ballot box. Thus, the same political process which enabled the state to seize unprecedented powers of surveillance also kept these new powers at least somewhat in check.

Indonesia’s arduous path to democracy is threatened by several domestic conflicts.<br> Although the civil war in Aceh – a region in the north of Sumatra – has claimed thousands of victims, the incidents have not yet been adequately dealt with – neither in the public domain nor within the scientific community. In May 2003, the Indonesian president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, imposed material law on the Aceh region in order to crack down on the separatist movement Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM). This step does not seem to be in line with serious concepts of democracy and is threatening the consolidation of the transformation process.<br> The author seeks to shed light on the roots of the conflict, the motivation of leading politicians in Jakarta to deploy military means instead of continuing negotiations, and its consequences for the Indonesian process of democratisation.

The Battle of New Hope Church was fought on May 25-26, 1864 as part of the Atlanta Campaign of the American Civil War. This research utilizes historical records along with archaeological fieldwork in order to better understand the battlefield landscape. In particular, I seek to answer whether soldiers behaved in, perceived of, and constructed the battlefield landscape based on a set of cultural norms imposed on them by the strict structure of the military. This research offers insight into the construction of the battlefield landscape at New Hope Church, how it is connected to related battlefield landscapes, and how it has been memorialized as a landscape of conflict.