Techn. Universiẗat, Diss--Dresden, 2004.

Zugl.: Bremen, Univ., Diss., 2009

Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2004--Dresden.

This study provides a critical analysis of the influence of social class on life chances in post-reform Vietnam. As the country underwent a profound structural transition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy in the mid-1980s, social class gradually replaced political class as a major source of inequality. Knowledge about this phenomenon is rudimentary – not least because of the continuing power of state ideology in contemporary Vietnam. Throughout the investigation, Bourdieu’s framework of class reproduction guides both a quantitative analysis of the Survey Assessment of Vietnamese Youth 2010 and a qualitative research of 39 respondents in the Red River Delta region, including young people of the first post-reform generation – now in their 20s and 30s – and their parents. The study discusses the ways in which class determines the ability of parents to transmit different resources to their children, focusing on those that are usable and valued in the fields of education and labour. It finds that, across several areas of social life in contemporary Vietnam, implicit class-based discrimination is disguised and legitimised by explicit and seemingly universal ‘meritocratic’ principles. The study makes a number of original contributions to sociology, three of which are particularly important. (1) Empirically, it breaks new ground for a sociological understanding of both the constitution and the development of class inequalities in contemporary Vietnam. (2) Methodologically, it offers numerous useful examples of mixed-methods integration. (3) Theoretically, it proposes to think with, against and beyond some of the most relevant Bourdieusian research on this topic. The empirical application of Bourdieu’s framework in toto, as opposed to a more customary partial appropriation, facilitates comprehensive insights into: class-specified practices as governed and conditioned by internalised powers and structural resources; the multidimensionality of class-based advantages and disadvantages; and the causative transmission and activation of capital across and within generations.

This thesis offers a consideration of how the ideological foundations of Zionism determine the movement’s exclusive relationship with an outside world that is posited at large and the native Palestinian population specifically. Contesting Israel’s exceptionalist security narrative, it identifies, through an extensive examination of the writings of Theodor Herzl, the overlapping settler colonialist and ethno-nationalist roots of Zionism. In doing so, it contextualises Herzl’s movement as a hegemonic political force that embraced the dominant European discourses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including anti-Semitism. The thesis is also concerned with the ways in which these ideological foundations came to bear on the Palestinian and broader Ottoman contexts. A closer consideration of Ottoman Palestine reveals a hidden history of imperial inclusivity that stands in stark contrast to the Zionist settler colonial model. The thesis explores the effects of the Zionist project on Palestine’s native population, highlighting early reactions to the marginalisation and exclusion suffered, as well as emerging strategies of resistance that locate an alternative, non-nationalist vision for the future of the region in the collective reappropriation of a pre-colonial past. The question is broached about the role that Palestinian literature can play within the context of such reclaiming efforts. More precisely, it debates whether Palestinian life writing emanating from the occupied territories contributes, in its recording of personal history, to the project of re-writing national history in opposition to the attempted Israeli erasure. Finally, by drawing a direct line from original Zionist thought to the politics and policies of the state of Israel today, the thesis suggests an on-going settler colonial structure that has become increasingly visible through the state’s use of spatially restrictive measures in order to finally conclude its settlement project. Israel’s obsessive ‘walling’ is discussed in that context as the physical escalation of Zionism’s founding ideological tenets.

The present study focuses on emotion discourses in early modern travel books. It attempts a close textual, intertextual, and contextual analysis of several embedded narratives on emotions in three late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel books: Kitāb Nāṣir al-Dīn 'ala 'l-Qawm al-Kāfirīn: Mukhtaṣar Riḥlat al-Shihāb 'ila Liqā´ al-Aḥbāb by Andalusian traveller Ahmed bin Qāsim al-Ḥajarī (1570- c.1641), The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam by an English craftsman, Thomas Dallam (1575-1630), and Seyahâtnâme (The Book of Travels) by Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1685). In these travel books, al-Ḥajarī, Dallam, and Evliya narrate their journeys as emotionally protean experiences. They associate emotions with the contexts of their journeys, their volition to travel, and their authorial motives to write about their journeys. They display their emotions in their dreams, humour, and other subjective experiences. Their narratives yield uncommon notions of emotions, namely the emotions of encounter. A love story between a Muslim traveller and a Catholic girl, an English craftsman's anxiety at the court of an Ottoman Sultan, a disgusting meal in a foreign land, are just a few examples of emotionally freighted situations which are unlikely to be found in any genre but a travel book. The close textual analysis aims to identify the role of the writers' cultures in shaping and regulating their discourses on emotions. The intertextual and contextual analysis of these narratives reveals that the meaning and function of these displayed emotions revolve around the traveller's community affiliation, religion, ideology, and other culture-specific discourses and practices such as Sufism, folk medicine, myths, folk traditions, natural and geographical phenomena, cultural scripts, social norms, and power relations. In a nutshell, reading the travellers' discourses on emotions means reading many cultural and historical aspects of the early modern world. To approach discourses on emotions in texts of the past, the present study draws on the theory of culture-construction of emotions. It uses three analytical notions from the fields of language, anthropology and history of emotions: 'emotional communities', 'emotional styles' and 'emotional self-fashioning'. The present study uses a theoretical framework defined by a recent wave of studies on self-narratives as sources for the history and cultural diversity of emotions in the medieval and early modern periods. Within this approach, travel writing is seen as a self-narrative, a communicative act, and a social practice. This approach to emotion discourses in Riḥla, travel journals and Seyahat genres allows us to project the transcultural and entangled history of the early modern Mediterranean, which as much it was a contested frontier between Islam and Christianity, was also a space of religious conversion and hybrid identities, the articulation of diplomacy and cultural exchange, mysticism and religious pluralism. This approach also pinpoints the diverse forms of cosmopolitanism, or rather cosmopolitanisms, in the plural.

Programming China: The Communist Party’s Autonomic Approach to Managing State Security, introduces the new analytical framework called China's “Autonomic Nervous System” (ANS). The ANS framework applies complex systems management theory to explain the process the Chinese Communist Party calls “social management”. Through the social management process, the Party-state leadership interacts with both the Party masses and non-Party masses. The process involves shaping, managing and responding and is aimed at ensuring the People’s Republic of China’s systemic stability and legitimacy—i.e. (Party-) state security. Using the ANS framework, this thesis brings cohesion to a complex set of concepts such as “holistic” state security, grid management, social credit and national defence mobilisation. Research carried out for the thesis included integrated archival research and the author’s database of nearly 10,000 social unrest events. Through ANS, the author demonstrates that in the case of the People’s Republic of China we may be witnessing a sideways development, where authoritarianism is stabilised, largely through a way of thinking that both embodies and applies complex systems management and attempts to “automate” that process through technology designed based on the same concepts. The party's rule of China, thus, evolves away from traditional political scales like reform versus retrenchment or hard versus soft authoritarianism. The ANS framework should be seen not as an incremental improvement to current research of China’s political system but as a fundamentally different approach to researching and analysing the nature of Chinese politics.

The purpose of the thesis is to reinterpret Lord Wellesley's forward policy in India, with particular reference to his dealings with the Marathas, and to consider its motivation and the reasons for its failure. Lord Wellesley was the product of his age and environment. He was a colonial with ambitions to play a major role in metropolitan affairs. At the time of his appointment as Governor General of India the most important aspect of metropolitan concerns was the war with France, so that a major element in his policy was the protection of India from French interference. His policy was formed before he reached India, and had as its motivation, not only fear of the French, but fear of aggression by the Indian rulers, with or without French support. This fear derived from a conviction that Indian rulers were totally untrustworthy; only treaties permitting British control of their affairs (subsidiary treaties) could be effective to preserve peace in India. A balance of power between the Indian states, which was thought to have existed five years earlier, had been destroyed. Lord Wellesley succeeded at Mysore and Hyderabad, but failed with the Marathas. His primary target had been the Pune state, which was emphasised in the autumn of 1800 by conditional orders given to Arthur Wellesley to occupy Pune in certain circumstances. These did not occur and he retired. Meanwhile a new treaty had been concluded with the Nizam which was intensely provocative to the Marathas. It involved the British in protecting the Nizam's territory from all comers, including the Marathas who had legitimate claims on the Nizam. Their pursuit of them was liable to lead to war at some point and the British obligation made Lord Wellesley's forward policy towards them irreversible. The Peshwa of Pune was driven from Pune by Holkar and concluded the Treaty of Bassein with the British. This further provocation of the Marathas led to war with Sindhia and the Raja of Berar. The war was short lived and peace treaties were concluded with the Maratha chiefs separately by Arthur Wellesley who had been granted plenipotentiary powers in Western India. His policy was one of conciliation, not as Lord Wellesley's conquest. As a result the British failed to dominate Sindhia. Holkar now arrived on the scene and after abortive diplomatic exchanges war was declared on him. Lake the Commander-in-Chief failed to conquer Holkar, and Arthur Wellesley took no direct part in the war. Sindhia was sympathetic to Holkar and elements of his army, and, later, Sindhia himself, joined him. Lake's failure and Arthur Wellesley's divergent policy led to Lord Wellesley's failure to dominate the Marathas and, therefore, his failure to bring peace to India by conquest.

Since the regime was brought down by coalition forces in 2003, Iraq has been undergoing the process of democratisation through some significant political changes, namely, relatively free and competitive elections, and the freedom to form political and civil organisations. However, it faced crucial challenges that undermined this process such as ethno-sectarian violence/conflict. This thesis examines the impact of ethnic and sectarian conflict on the failure of the power sharing democracy. The thesis covers the period from 2003 until April 2014. The main themes that the thesis analyses are societal security/ethnic and sectarian violence, ethnic and sectarian inclusion, proportionality, and power devolution/federalism. For the purposes of the thesis, the societal security dilemma (SSD) theory, which focuses mainly on the roles of elites and external actors in societies that experience a power vacuum or institutional collapse in divided societies, is adopted. This theory is used for two purposes: firstly, to examine why and how the ethno-sectarian behaviour of elites affects societal security and the failure to establish a stable democracy; and secondly, to examine the viability of consociational design for the Iraqi case with the existence of distrust, fear and uncertainty among identity groups. The thesis argues that, due to fear, distrust and grievance among groups, the implementation of ethnic regions that draw lines between groups and localise the armed and security forces under a locally elected government is one of the mechanisms for reducing identity based violence and ensuring an effective power sharing democracy.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Neste trabalho, foram calculados os fatores de forma e as constantes de acoplamento dos vértices mesônicos J/ψ DsDs, J/ψ Ds*Ds e J/ψ Ds*Ds*usando a técnica das regras de soma da QCD (RSQCD) até a ordem 5 da OPE. Estes três vértices estão envolvidos em algumas das numerosas hipóteses que tentam explicar a estrutura interna de alguns mésons charmosos exóticos que começaram a ser observados a partir de 2003. Tais mésons não se encaixam no espectro do charmonium e/ou apresentam números quânticos exóticos dentro do modelo CQM (constituent quark model). Um exemplo é o méson Y(4140), cujo decaimento observado é no par J/ψφ enquanto o esperado seria que tivesse decaimento predominante em mésons com open charm, devido à sua massa. Uma das propostas para se entender este méson consiste em estudá-lo como um estado molecular Ds*ar{D}s*, de modo que seu decaimento seria Y(4140) → Ds* ar{D}s* → J/ψφ. Neste processo, aparecerão os vértices de interação estudados neste trabalho, de maneira que o conhecimento mais preciso de seus fatores de forma e de suas constantes de acoplamento pode beneficiar a compreensão sobre a constituição fundamental do Y(4140) assim como a de outros novos estados como o X(4350), Y(4274) e Y(4660) por exemplo. Foram considerados neste trabalho, todos os casos off-shell possíveis para cada um dos três vértices, obtendo assim dois fatores de forma distintos para o vértice J/ψ DsDs, três para o vértice J/ψ Ds*Ds e dois para o vértice J/ψ Ds* Ds*. Nestes três vértices, os fatores de forma para o caso J/ψ off-shell foram bem ajustados por curvas monopolares enquanto os casos Ds e Ds* foram ajustados por curvas exponenciais, o que está de acordo com o comportamento encontrado em trabalhos anteriores do grupo. Os cálculos das constantes de acoplamento tiveram como resultados: g_{J/ψ Ds Ds} = 5.98^{+0.67}_{ -0.58}, g_{J/ψ D*s Ds} = 4.30_{+0.41}^{-0.35}GeV^{-1} e g_{J/ψ Ds* Ds*} = 7.47^{+1.04}_{-0.71}, resultados estes que estão compatíveis com os trabalhos anteriores que utilizaram as RSQCD para o cálculo das constantes de acoplamento dos vértices J/ψ D(*)D(*). / In this work, the form factors and coupling constants of the meson vertices J/ψ DsDs, J/ψ Ds*Ds and J/ψ Ds*Ds* have been calculated with the QCD sum rule (QCDSR) technique up to dimension 5 of the operator product expansion (OPE). These three vertices are involved in some of the numerous hypotheses that attempt to explain the internal structure of some exotic charmed mesons which began to be observed since 2003. Such mesons do not fit in the charmonium spectrum and/or have exotic quantum numbers within the CQM (constituent quark model). An example is the Y(4140) meson, which decays in the pair J/ψφ while the expected would be a dominant decay in open charm mesons. One of the proposals to understand this meson is to study it as a molecular state Ds*{D}s*, so it would decay as Y(4140)→ Ds* {D}s* → J/ψφ.In this process, the vertices studied in this work will appear, so the more accurate knowledge of their form factors and their coupling constants can benefit our understanding of the fundamental constitution of the Y(4140) as well as other new states as the X(4350), Y(4274) and Y (4660) eg. In this study all possible off-shell cases for each of these three vertices were considered, thus obtaining two different form factors for the vertex J/ψ DsDs, three for the vertex J/ψ Ds*Ds and two for the vertex J/ψ Ds* Ds*. In these three vertices, the form factors for the J/ψ off-shell case were well fitted by monopolar curves, while the Ds and Ds* off-shell cases were well fitted by exponential curves which is in agreement with the behavior found in previous work of the group. The calculations of the coupling constants leaded to the following results: g_{J/ψ Ds Ds} = 5.98^{+0.67}_{-0.58}, g_{J/ψ Ds* Ds} = 4.30^{+0.41}_{-0.35}GeV^{-1} and g_{J/ψ Ds* Ds*} = 7.47^{+1.04}_{-0.71}, these results are compatible with previous QCDSR works for the non strange vertices J/ψD(*)D(*).