Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

This project investigates the complicity of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the use of sexual violence as a war tactic and means of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian War. The thesis explores this in three ways: examining religiously imbued incidents of rape by Serbian belligerents, analysing the relationship between Serbian Orthodox authorities to Serbian politics and war criminals, and deconstructing specific Serbian Orthodox theological discourses. A project of this nature relies on two foundational pillars: first, an in-depth exploration of rape (especially in conflict) and second, the interlocking and socially constructed nature of identities, particularly ethnicity, enemies and gender. The analysis relies on United Nations reports, transcripts of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, media reports and secondary sources, all of which illustrate the often subtle and discursive relationship between the Serbian Orthodox Church and the systematic rape of Bosniak women.

In 1790s England, an expanding empire, a growing diaspora of English settlers in foreign territories, and spreading political unrest in Ireland and on the European continent all helped to contribute to a destabilization of British national identity. With the definition of “Englishperson” in flux, Ireland, France, and Italy—nations which are prominently featured in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)—could be understood, similar to England’s colonies, as representing threats to the nation’s cultural integrity. Because the people of these European countries were stereotypically perceived as being economically impoverished victims of political and “popish” tyranny, it would have been easy to construct them in popular and literary discourse as being both socially similar to the “primitive” indigenous populations of colonized territories and as uneasy reminders of England’s own “premodern” past. Therefore, the overarching goal of this project is twofold. First, it attempts to account for the Gothic’s frequent—albeit subtle—use of imperialist rhetoric, which is largely encoded within the novels’ representations of sublimity, sensibility, and domesticity. Second, it claims that the novels under consideration are preoccupied with testing and reaffirming the salience of bourgeois English identity by placing English or Anglo-inflected characters in conflict with “monstrous” continental Others. In so doing, these novels use the fictions of empire to contain and claim agency over a revolutionary France, an uncertainly-positioned Ireland, and a classically-appealing but socially-problematic Italy.

This research examines urban renewal in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb of 30,000 inhabitants located in the northeast of Paris. It studies the modalities of spatial racialization, nation building, and subject formation among Afro-French young men living in the city. It also builds on a world-historical perspective to explore the diasporic webs in which the lives of Afro-French are embedded. Taking spatial racialization as a point of entry, the study attempts to understand how governmental strategies and urban policies regulate lives and residential patterns in the city. Three lines of investigation are pursued: 1) an examination of Afro-French racialization and genealogies; 2) an analysis of narratives and struggles of these communities and their impact on neoliberal spaces; 3) an exploration of the various ways spatial governmentality constrains and/or produces Afro-Frenchness. The primary purpose of this ethnographic research is to comprehend the French colonial history and its impact on the racialization of diasporic Afro-French living in metropolitan France. For this end, the study proposes the notion of "Afro-French," an analytical concept that designates a constellation of groups from Sub-Saharan, North African, and Caribbean origins. The term provides a heuristic to comprehend the urban and cultural experiences of diasporic sub-groups who have different but overlapping genealogies. Second, the project helps understand why Afro-French living in Clichy-sous-Bois embody and at the same time transgress official narratives of the nation. It argues that France's nationalism, like other forms of European nationalisms, is facing a contradictory moment in the neoliberal conjuncture. On the one hand, discourses about liberalization of the economy involve the deployment of narratives that celebrate mobility and flexibility. This new dependence on a global neoliberal economy destabilizes national economies and erodes the state's structures. On the other hand, state actors diffuse identitarian and xenophobic discourses that blame ethnic and religious minorities for the socio-economic crisis. Third, the study argues that spatial governmentality and urban strategies enable certain aspects of Afro-Frenchness but constrain others: there is no homogenous or unified logic to regulate lives and spaces in Clichy.

At the current moment, with voter turnout low and mass popular uprisings refashioning the political map, questions of political participation and dissent are extremely pressing. In established democracies and newly democratized states alike, an active and potentially dissenting citizenry is often seen as the necessary balance to overreaching state power and unregulated market forces, but scholars struggle to keep abreast of a proliferation of new foci and forms of engagement. This dissertation focuses on the form of collective political engagement enacted at centri sociali occupati autogestiti (occupied, self-managed social centers) or CSOA in Bologna, Italy. As they enact political alternatives through everyday practices of self-management and cultural production, social center participants complicate conventional analytical distinctions between revolution and reform or between individual transformation and larger social change. Through participant observation at three specific centers, interviews with participants and visitors and discourse analysis of recent legislation and policy, the investigator explores the character of social center participants’ cultural and political practice, internal organization and decision-making processes, and the heated conflict surrounding social centers in order to discern the opportunities afforded and tensions generated by this form of political engagement. The author argues that CSOA participants experience a form of belonging constructed on the basis of participation rather than ascribed statuses or adherence to shared ideological positions. Furthermore, participants seek to establish an autonomous space wherein key obstacles to participation have been deliberately dismantled or drained of authority in order to render this form of belonging more inclusive. In the shadow of post-9/11 securitization processes at the supra-national, national and local levels aimed at governing migrant mobility and public expressions of dissent, CSOA participants seek to displace the ethnic, religious, linguistic, generational and class-specific norms that define the cultural dimensions of contemporary Italian citizenship. Drawing on the concept of cultural citizenship, the author therefore argues that the political imaginary proposed by CSOA participants represents a deliberate contestation of both the authority and function of state-based citizenship models and can be understood as new model of citizenship characterized by an alternative, less exclusive relationship between belonging and participation.

No description available.

No description available.

This study seeks to examine and refine the concept of consociational democracy, a political system in which political leaders of socially and politically distinct groups interact with one another in an atmosphere of moderation and mutual accommodation. A discussion of the explanations, suggested by various political theorists, of the political behavior and relationships in a consociational democracy produced a list of the basic characteristics of the system. Characteristics which were either ambiguous or ascribable to other political systems were eliminated. The Benelux countries— Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg— are three countries which have moderate political systems similar to the general definition of a consociational democracy. Using the Benelux countries as test cases made it possible to refine further those characteristics isolated in the theoretical discussion, and to synthesize a model of the political activity of a consociational democracy. This model, in turn, provided the basis for a theory as to why elites of distinct social groups are able to interact in a moderate, mutually accommodative fashion. The results of this study suggest, in broad terms, that consociational democracy exists because most individuals within the system see this type of interaction to be the normal and proper approach to politics. In actual political practice, relations between different groups or leaders are based upon mutual recognition of legitimacy. Distinct social groups and their political leaders recognize the right of other social groups to participate in the political system, and the individual groups recognise the right of their political leaders to act as spokesmen for the group and to interact freely with the leaders of other groups. Finally, there is-the common recognition that the political system, represented by the sovereign authority of the State, is the legitimate forum for political activity. As an afterword, there is a brief discussion as to the possible impact of the domestic practice of consociational politics on a country's approach to foreign affairs.

No description available.