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This thesis seeks to contribute to the understanding of conflict intervention in protracted violent conflicts by studying the activities of civil society actors in regard to the conflicts in what was Yugoslavia until 1991. A very broad understanding of ‘intervention’ is used for this purpose that includes all kinds of activities that relate to the conflicts. Based on a survey of activities in the period between 1990 and 2002, a framework for categorising and describing these interventions is applied according to basic functions in four ‘grand strategies’ of ‘peace-making’, ‘peace-keeping’, ‘peacebuilding’, and ‘information, support, protest and advocacy’, with a total list of about 230 instruments of conflict intervention identified. The study concludes that civil society actors played three different basic roles: They complemented the work of state actors, they were the avant-garde for approaches, strategies and methods that later became ‘mainstream’ in conflict intervention, and in some cases, they were able to control or correct actions by governments through advocacy or direct action. The development of instruments of civil conflict transformation received a massive boost through this engagement in the 1990s. The study supports the position taken recently by some researchers making comparative studies of cases of conflict intervention regarding the limited role played by dialogue and reconciliation work in regard to dealing with the overall conflicts: In spite of ‘reconciliation’ and inter-ethnic cooperation being at the core of the vast majority of all projects and programmes undertaken in the area, indicators of real impact regarding an overall positive change in society and prevention of future violence seem to be rather weak. The study further observes that there was a social movement developed relating to former Yugoslavia in many Western countries that in a hitherto unknown way combined traditional methods of protest and advocacy with concrete work in the field.

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‘Of Bellies and Books' refers to pregnancy and formal education, constructed as mutually exclusive processes. This thesis explores that opposition by tracing the confluence of discourses through which it is produced. In so doing, it dissolves dichotomies and proposes a shift to the subject as both constituted by and constituting of discourses. Both academic research and global and national social policy construct teenage pregnancy as problematic. This is heightened in development contexts, where in-school pregnancy triggers Malthusian fears of overpopulation and consequential poverty increase. Conversely, formal education and training are represented as a means to personal development and success, through acquiring knowledge and skills leading to formal employment and individual empowerment. In this sense, schooling is constructed as a symbol of - or entrance to - modernity, while pregnancy and parenthood are defined in terms of the opportunities they prevent. From this perspective, in-school pregnancy works against individual and social progress and is synonymous with backwardness and tradition within a modernising and globalised world. Exploring in-school pregnancy in this thesis becomes a means through which to revoke the binary symbolised by tradition and modernity which produces a deficit view of the pregnant schoolgirl. Within this context, the study has been driven by the following research questions: · How do education policy and practice frame in-school pregnancy in Mozambique? · How do families interpret and regulate in-school pregnancy? · How do young people – young women – navigate the available discourses in the performance of their identities? Stimulated by a desire to explore the national policy tackling in-school pregnancy indicating that pregnant schoolgirls should be transferred to night courses, the empirical data collection took place within 10 months in and around the capital Maputo. It entailed documentary analysis, interviews with 10 Ministry of Education officials, 20 school teachers and 33 young people (25 girls and 8 men/boys) in and out of education. Through the generation and analysis of data, I develop a nuanced interpretation of the discourses that construct and regulate in-school pregnancy within schools and families. Within the institutional space of schools, a textual analysis of the policy shows how language borrowed from the biomedical and legal fields is directed towards the production of in-school pregnancy as unwanted, unplanned and ultimately ‘wrong'. This normalises the difference between pregnant and non-pregnant schoolgirls, producing transfer to night courses as a rational strategy to tackle in-school pregnancy. Although understood as a means to bridge the gender gap in education by tackling one of the main causes of female dropout, the current policy acts de facto as a highway to dropout, thereby reproducing gender exclusion. Within families, pregnancy initiates the complex procedure of family formation by drawing on the mutually exclusive categories of childhood and adulthood and symbolising the transition between the two. I contend that these two spaces, schools and families, often associated by research participants with modernity and tradition respectively, are not stable and homogenous constructs, but offer shifting and contingent sets of norms which are both conflicting and intersecting. By engaging with young people's narratives, I argue that pregnant schoolgirls, while being constructed by discursive norms, also resist and react to them. At school, young pregnant females enact a number of strategies to resist transfer to night courses. At home, they resist family formation and find ways to combine their multiple identities. By drawing on this, I ultimately contend that young pregnant schoolgirls navigate different regulatory frameworks in the production of their identities. This means that the itineraries they construct in crossing boundaries within normative frameworks constitute their identities and reposition them as travellers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 344-366).

Religious freedoms in the countries which were once part of the Soviet Union have gradually been on the decline since the mid 1990s. Reflective of de-democratisation trends in many states, religious market liberalisation has lost momentum. Governments have increasingly used methods to restrict non-traditional religious organizations similar to those used in protecting national industries. These range from subsidies for traditional churches to regulatory barriers and even outright bans on non-traditional groups. This drift towards a restrictive religious playing field has coincided with traditional dominant churches being more vocal in the debate over religious institutional design. In this thesis I examine the motives of traditionally dominant churches in either advocating legal restrictions on non-traditional religious entities or promoting a religious free market. Variation in attitudes and policies across traditional churches suggests explanatory variables are at play. A multi-methodological approach is used to understand policy formulation within the hierarchical establishments of traditional churches on religious liberties and religious pluralism. In addition to utilising path-dependent modelling to account for churches' Soviet existence, assumptions drawn from recent scholarship in applying rational choice methodology to the study of religion is used to conceptualise present-day market features. Findings from three churches suggest that a church'€™s agenda on religious liberalisation and plurality stems from hierarchical perceptions of the direction of change of their church'€™s relative influence in society. That perception is heavily rooted in the intersection of Soviet experience and transitional market place dynamics. This thesis adds a case-study contribution to the growing academic discourse on institutional change in transitional societies. In particular, it identifies the mechanisms by which institutional transformation and the creation of a vibrant civil society can stagnate in transitional societies.

The period 1917-1921 provides an insight not only into the policies of the new Soviet state but the mindset of its leaders. These four years were a time of intense political struggle and socio-economic disruption, which exposed the tension between ideology and practice in Bolshevik discourse and policy making. Workers, specifically metalworkers, were a focal point of Bolshevik ideology and policies in this period. This thesis will explore how the Soviet state conceptualised metalworkers, through ideology, and how this informed their engagement with workers, through policy. This will be done through an examination of state statistical data and how prominent state polices, cultural policy and treatment of dissent, and discourse changed over this period. It will also focus on a case study of Sormovo Metalworks, a suburb of Nizhnii Novgrorod, and use local sources to investigate how the tension between ideology and practice played out on a local level. It will explore how local Bolsheviks conceptualised and engaged with Sormovo workers and how this was shaped by three things: Bolshevik ideology, the context of the Civil War and the specific local conditions of Sormovo and its workforce. The Civil War period witnessed a change in the discourse and policies of the Soviet state, which became more coercive, interventionist and repressive as the war progressed. Sormovo Metalworks was a large metalworking complex in a largely rural province; it had a skilled workforce with a tradition of labour activism through striking and was dominated by the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The move towards an increasingly centralised state was utilised by local Bolsheviks in Sormovo in an attempt to end the labour activism of its workforce and crush political opposition. However, despite the increasingly assertive discourse about the identity of metalworkers and the state’s drive for economic, political and cultural centralisation, Sormovo workers had the ability to challenge, subvert and negotiate state labels and even policies. This case study reveals that although Sormovo workers suffered repeated challenges to their identity by the state, local government and the economic crises of the Civil War, they continued to utilise self-identification based on their skill and shared socio-economic experience. This in turn shaped their vertical and horizontal social, economic and political relationships with those around them. Although the central state became politically and economically centralised and authoritarian, the identity of the grassroots in Sormovo remained diverse and fluid.

Syftet med denna studie har varit att undersöka några förskoleklassbarns förståelse av de geometriska formerna kvadrat, cirkel, triangel samt rektangel. Dessutom har syftet varit att analysera barnens kunskapsutveckling före och efter geometrilektionerna. Studien genomfördes genom intervjuer och observationer med både barnen och läraren för att ta reda på deras tankar om formerna. Studien utgår ifrån Piagets teorier om barns kognitiva utveckling samt van Hieles teorier kring barns tänkande i geometri. I studien används även Douglas H. Clements, et al. (1999) forskningsrapport om geometriska former. I denna studie visar resultaten att cirkeln var den lättaste formen för barnen att namnge. Triangel visar sig vara den svåraste för barnen att namnge. Studien påvisar även en relativ kunskapsutveckling hos barnen beträffande geometriska former efter geometrilektionerna.

No description available.

Thesis (M. P. A.)--Texas State University-San Marcos, 2009. / "Fall 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-82).