"The end of the Cold War marked for Europe the entrance into an era of instability and violence caused by the collapse of the old communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. How the European security organizations reacted to those changes and new threats and transformed themselves for dealing with a new security environment is the focus of this thesis. In particular, it gives an overview of the transformations that occurred within NATO and OSCE in the post-Cold War period, which have created and developed new security mechanisms and policies for dealing with crises. The thesis further examines the consolidation of a new European security actor, the European Union, and the development of the military dimension through the ESDP, which is linked directly to transformations that occurred in Europe, being merely a consequence of those changes. All three organizations proved their importance as stability factors of the European security system by launching crisis management operations, acting in ceasefire and post-conflict mediation, conducting preventive diplomacy, and spreading democracy and principles of human rights."-- p. i. / Republic of Moldova Army author.

This dissertation critically examines how U.S. print media sought to represent the realities of decolonizing and newly independent countries in West Africa by focusing on pivotal events and charismatic leaders from the “non” vote in Guinea in 1958 to the radical appeal of Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau in 1973. The framing and agenda setting of mainstream media coverage turned leaders and events into metonyms not only for peoples and nations but also for Africa and Africans as a whole. However, the complexities of West Africa, such as political rivalry in the Congo or civil war in Nigeria, troubled such representations. Thus this dissertation tracks the widening of coverage and opening up of representations in African American and New Left print media in a time of global unrest as well as Cold War.

This thesis will examine the response of educators to the use of the American public school system for ideological management during the early Cold War period. Through an assessment of instructional films, this work will show that the objectives of educational propaganda fell into three main categories: to promote Americanism as the national ideology, to deter students from communism or communist sympathy, and to link the potential for nuclear warfare to ideological lassitude. It will be argued that although the majority of educators accepted these goals, as films became increasingly extreme in their presentations, a critical minority revealed discontent with the use of the school for the purposes of indoctrination. By the mid-1960s, a number of factors would result in the dismantling of the Cold War consensus and a reinvigoration of the critical perspective in education.

This dissertation analyzes Life’s early coverage of the Cold War (1945-1954) in order to explicate this publication’s creation and reinforcement of prescriptive attitudes about this ideological engagement through photographically illustrated news. By uncovering Life’s editorial approach this project proposes a new diagnostic for evaluating documentary images by re-configuring Hayden White’s incisive theory of emplotment—the process of engendering historical narratives with meaning— through semiotic models proposed by Louis Hjelmslev and Roland Barthes, thereby offering a useful tool for future scholars to re-examine modern media’s transition towards prizing visual immediacy over critical engagement. Life’s editors’ link narrative devices and rhetoric with photographs to make these images appear as first-hand experience and function as objective conclusions. Life characterizes the Cold War as an epic moral struggle between the US and USSR, and its 1943 special issue on Russia acts as the comedic prologue to this narrative by distinguishing these ideologically disparate wartime allies. After post-war agreements fail, this congenial atmosphere swiftly transitions into another battle between democracy and tyranny, defined through literary conventions. Life employs synecdoche and allegory to encode photographs of individuals as icons of valorous populations (Americans and Eastern Europeans) and to symbolize concepts (democracy and charity). Metonymy and irony transform photographs into direct signs of Communism and visual evidence of its degeneracy. Life’s comic presentation of Marshal Josip Tito contrasts with its satiric coverage of Senator Joseph McCarthy to direct readers’ attention towards the best and worst possible courses of action regarding the Communist menace, at home and abroad.

The success of Chinese foreign policy since 1949 can be demonstrated empirically in terms of core national interests defined by the realist international relations perspective: state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and socioeconomic development. Influential realist writers, however, fail to consistently identify or explain the success of Chinese foreign policy, despite the work of area specialists who suggest that Chinese foreign policy displays consistent and effective, strategic patterns of force. Strategic thought arises from culturally differing ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions, as modified within specific historical conditions. Using the theoretical approach of comparative strategic culture, an abstract conceptual framework is developed for philosophical analysis of western and Chinese strategic culture. Classical and contemporary western realist-strategic paradigms coexist in theoretical and practical tension, resulting in a western strategic ethnocentrism which explains realist failure to recognize Chinese strategic patterns in foreign policy. Chinese philosophical assumptions, reinforced in linguistic structure, create a culturally paradigmatic approach to strategic thought, modified by the modern historical context of civil/national wars and state-building. The modern Chinese strategic paradigm of protracted war is characterized by the mutually constitutive relationship between the military and political dimensions of force, and by a cumulative, discontinuous pattern of foreign policy and state-building, in which force is created, stored, and applied over space and time. / Graduate

Thesis advisor: Michael J. Himes / Reinhold Niebuhr is among the most politically and theologically influential--and most misunderstood--American thinkers of the twentieth century. This misunderstanding is the product of a tendency among Niebuhr's admirers and critics alike to overlook the elaborate interplay of the theology and politics in Niebuhr's thought. I argue that Niebuhr understood himself as a preacher to religion's "cultured despisers," and that Niebuhr construed this role in fundamentally theological terms. As a consequence, there is a dynamic theology underlying his political engagement with the broader culture. Chief among the "cultured despisers" drawn to Niebuhr's thought were the political realists who dominated early Cold War politics. They were particularly compelled by the political insights of Niebuhr's Christian Realism, and proceeded to incorporate these insights into own realist visions. I argue that in the act of appropriating Niebuhr the political realists unwittingly absorbed much of his theology; and in neglecting to recognize the theological underpinnings to Niebuhr's political insights, they ended up misconstruing Niebuhr in important ways. I seek to demonstrate that fully appreciating Niebuhr's contributions to political discourse requires an awareness of how theology suffuses even his most overtly political writings. This project consists of two parts. Part One examines the theological formation of the concept at the heart of Niebuhr's Christian Realism: namely, the doctrine of original sin. From the outset, Niebuhr maintained that elaborating the full political implications of original sin required a theological structure. Through sustained conversations with theological contemporaries Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Emil Brunner, and his brother H. Richard Niebuhr, Reinhold elaborated the distinctive theological anthropology, understanding of grace and redemption, and account of the dynamic interplay between faith and history underlying his exploration of original sin and its political implications. Niebuhr's Christian Realism, I suggest, is inextricably theological. Part Two analyses Niebuhr's reception among three of the most prominent midcentury political realists: Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, and Arthur Schlesinger. Although they were among Niebuhr's most astute interpreters, all three figures wrongly presumed that they could extricate the political elements of Niebuhr's thinking on original sin from the theological structure in which this thinking was embedded, and import only these political elements into their own realist visions. Their uses of the concept of original sin indicate that they both adopt far more of Niebuhr's theology than they ever intended to, and misconstrue some of his most profound insights. I close by considering what a theologically grounded Christian Realism has to offer political discourse. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 has had a variety of significant repercussions on Chinese politics, foreign policy, and other aspects. This doctoral project examines the evolution of Chinese intellectual perceptions of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s, before and after the collapse. Relying on a larger body of updated Chinese sources, this thesis will offer re-evaluations of many key issues in post-Mao Chinese Sovietology. The following topics will be explored or re-examined: Chinese views of Soviet policies in the early 1980s prior to Mikhail Gorbachev’s assumption of power; Chinese perceptions of Gorbachev’s political reform from the mid-1980s onward, before the outbreak of the Tiananmen Incident in 1989; Chinese scholars’ evolving views on Gorbachev from the 1980s to 1990s; the Chinese use of Vladimir Lenin and his policies in the early 1980s and early 1990s for bolstering and legitimizing the CCP regime after the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Incident, respectively; and the re-evaluations of Leonid Brezhnev and Joseph Stalin since the mid-1990s. First, the thesis argues that the changing Chinese views on the USSR were not only shaped by the ups-and-downs of Sino-Soviet (and later Sino-Russian) relations, China’s domestic political climate, and the political developments in Moscow. Even more importantly, views changed in response to the earth-shaking event of the rise and fall of world communism in the last two decades of the 20th century. Second, by researching the country of the Soviet Union, Chinese Soviet-watchers did not focus on the USSR alone, but mostly attempted to confirm and legitimize the Chinese state policies of reform and open door in both decades. By examining the Soviet past, Chinese scholars not only demonstrated concern for the survival of the CCP regime, but also attempted to envision the future direction and position of China in the post-communist world. This included analysis of how China could rise to be a powerful nation under the authoritarian one-party rule, without succumbing to Western democracy and the sort of collapse that doomed the USSR. In short, Chinese research on Soviet socialism has primarily served to trace the current problems of Chinese socialism, in order to legitimize their solutions – rather than a truth-seeking process devoted to knowledge of the Soviet Union.

This is a study of regional security in the Middle East from a Critical Security Studies perspective. The main aim of the thesis is to provide an account of the pasts, presents and futures of regional security in the Middle East cognisant of the relationships between the three in one's thinking as well as practices. This is achieved through the threefold structure of the thesis, which looks at Cold War pasts (Part I), post-Cold War presents (Part II) and possible futures (Part III). The thesis also has a set of more specific aims. First, it aims to present a critique of prevailing security discourses in theory and practice with reference to regional security in the Middle East and point to unfulfilled potential immanent in regional politics. Second, the thesis aims to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions and theories and practices of security. And finally, it aims to show how Critical Security Studies might allow one to think differently about the futures of regional security in the Middle East. The overall thesis is that the Critical Security Studies perspective presents a fuller account of regional security in the Middle East; it offers a comprehensive framework recognising the dynamic relationships between various dimensions and levels of security, as voiced by multiple referents.

Drawing on primary sources in Chinese, Japanese, and English, my doctoral dissertation investigates the structure and development of maritime order in East Asia against the backdrop of the Cold War. It covers the period from the collapse of the Japanese empire in East Asia in 1945 through to the point when the United States broke off its official diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1979. By shifting the spotlight from land to sea, my dissertation challenges the conventional understanding of the Cold War in East Asia by illustrating the relationship between the geopolitical value of the sea and decision makers' strategic deliberations. I present the sea as a historical platform to examine US maritime policy in East Asia in three broad contexts: military, international law, and exploration for natural resources. In terms of the military dimension, my study argues that the US shifted its maritime strategic focus from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the 1950s. This development was symbolised by the establishment of the Pacific Command in 1947 as well as changes in its organisational structure for maintaining sea routes during the crises of the 1950s - including the Korean War and the 1954-1955 Taiwan Strait Crisis. To supplement my argument about the military dimension of US maritime policy, I further investigate the establishment of international maritime law and the exploration of underwater natural resources, to depict the dynamic role that seas played in grand strategic thinking when crafting US policy in East Asia. My research argues that the clashes over maritime sovereignty between East Asian allies such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea led the US to refrain from taking a dominant stance in areas such as the demarcation of maritime boundaries and offshore oil development. This formed a crucial part of US strategy in balancing conflicting interests within its hub-and-spoke alliance system in East Asia. However, US-China rapprochement during the 1970s led to a change in Washington's maritime policy. For US decision-makers, the sea temporarily ceased to be a strategic space for containing China, but rather served as a platform for signalling goodwill.

This thesis deals with Britain's attitude towards European security under the Callaghan government from 1976 to 1979. That period saw Cold War tensions grow and détente lose its momentum as Britain struggled with economic weakness while trying to maintain its international influence. Concentrating on Cold War Europe, this thesis asks two questions: what policy did the Callaghan government adopt towards European security, and what role did Britain play in the Atlantic Alliance? It draws three conclusions. First, under Callaghan, Britain sought to maintain a traditionally influential role in Europe. To achieve that goal, it attempted to sustain a major military contribution to NATO and to foster good US-UK relations. Nevertheless, this policy was complicated by acute economic crisis and defence expenditure cuts. Britain's credibility in the Alliance was seriously diminished and policymakers had to offset reductions in British hardware contributions with diplomatic contributions. Secondly, Britain's role as a mediator in the Alliance contributed to its stability during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Carter's inconsistent foreign policy and lack of consultation with allies caused confusion and tensions soon after his inauguration. This gave the British room to work for the maintenance of Alliance unity and, as a result, the US-UK special relationship was strengthened. Thirdly, regardless of Britain's response to its economic trails, and its collaboration with the US, Callaghan's preference for status quo, and his lack of strategy towards European security other than the maintenance of the stability of the Alliance under American leadership, hampered Britain's attempts to retain influence. As Britain's power waned, West Germany's rose as German leaders gained status in the defence policy making process of the Alliance by arguing for a new response to the changing East-West military balance and the decline of détente.