The purpose of this thesis is to locate the experience of individuals in the shared experience of a cultural community, to reveal a collective experience. Further, this thesis aspires to demonstrate that the experience of trauma is transmitted, often silently, intergenerationally. This is an attempt to define a community of distant survivors, and to locate the echoes of the voice of trauma hidden in the narratives of its members. The study explores the events of the December 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami. At the moment of the tsunami disaster all the participants in this study, Indonesian International Students, were studying in Montreal Canada. The impetus behind this qualitative inquiry into the essential experience of trauma is the desire to bring the experience of distant survivors to the foreground; to recognize vicarious victims by listening for echoes in their narratives. The aim of this thesis is to (1) locate personal narratives in the context of collective grief, (2) detect the re-creation of that grief in subsequent generations. This project has been undertaken with the hope of determining ever more effective social work practices for today's survivors, and of sparking interest in trauma research for tomorrow's victims.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Waikato, 2007. / Title from PDF cover (viewed May 2, 2008) Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-182)

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This dissertation consists of three chapters exploring challenges that many developing countries face in augmenting state capacity and accumulating human capital. In particular, I focus on difficulties in developing state capacity and human capital induced by political violence, natural disasters, and over-reliance on income from foreign countries. The first chapter explores the effects of losing local politicians on the fiscal and personnel capacity of local governments using the outcome of the assassination attempts on mayors in Mexico. The second chapter investigates the effects of exposure to natural disasters on birth outcomes in Indonesia, using the Indian Ocean Tsunami as a natural experiment. In the final chapter, I use a cross-country analysis to study the link between reliance on remittances and the capacity of a country to collect taxes efficiently. The first chapter investigates the effects of losing mayors to successful assassinations on the capacity of local governments. By leveraging the randomness in the outcomes of assassination attempts against mayors in Mexico in 2002-21, I find that the loss of mayors negatively affects the fiscal and personnel capacities of the local governments. Municipal tax collection decreases by 29\%. The share of expenditure on primary services falls by 3 percentage points and is crowded out toward investment in construction. Municipal workers at productive stages in their careers leave the position. The back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that wages should increase by 13\% to retain them after assassinations. Organized criminal groups take advantage of the loss of mayors by increasing their presence in municipalities with successful assassinations. The results are not explained by non-political violence, levels of economic activities, or population changes. The results speak to the significance of leaders in maintaining fiscal capacity and retaining capable personnel in the workforce even in a violent environment. In the second chapter, co-authored with Elizabeth Kayoon Hur (Michigan State University), I evaluate the effect of in-utero exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami on short-term childbirth outcomes in Indonesia. Exploiting variation in the timing of exposure, I find that the probability of successful pregnancies drops by 5.9 percentage points (pp), while miscarriages increase by 5.5 pp for those exposed in the earliest stage of pregnancy. I find suggestive evidence that post-disaster health investments by households may have shielded later cohorts from harmful effects. The results suggest the importance of considering fetal loss in developing countries and highlight that facilitating household investment in health through various policies may mitigate negative birth effects in the aftermath of natural disasters. The third chapter investigates the relationship between a country's reliance on remittances from abroad and its ability to collect taxes from various domestic sources. Despite the increasing flow of remittances in volume and proportion, particularly among developing countries, their role in determining the state's capacity to collect taxes has received little attention. This chapter explores the link between remittances and various tax revenue categories using country-level data. Two-way panel regressions suggest that a 1 percentage point (pp) increase in the inflow of remittances explains a 0.12 pp rise in consumption tax revenues. The same estimate derived from IV methods proxying for migrant network strength and openness of borders increases to 0.9 pp. Decomposing this result reveals that the increase in household consumption expenditure explains all of the statistical association, not the efficient tax-collecting mechanisms such as VAT. Subsample regressions by income category suggest that the association between remittances and consumption tax revenue is stronger in countries with lower income.

A massive tsunami hit Aceh in December 26, 2004. It was one of the biggest natural disasters of the century. The tsunami’s unprecedented destruction of the area attracted the biggest influx ever of international aid and highlighted the nearly non-existent social service system at local levels. The abundance of international aid served as an impetus for the Indonesian government to review their social service system. This is the first time that resources from international aid in Indonesia were allocated for professionalization of social workers. This dissertation utilizes a qualitative narrative analysis to explore the questions: How do Indonesian social workers understand and express their experience of the social work professionalization process post-2004 tsunami? How do they interpret the process of professionalization? How do the systems available influence their professional interpretation of the experience and affect their strategies to gain public recognition and resources to claim professional jurisdiction in a society? Interviews were conducted of fifteen Indonesian social workers who were involved in the 2004 tsunami recovery efforts and are still active in the social work professionalization efforts today. The findings show that the international aid and 2004 tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia was the impetus for professionalization of social work in Indonesia. This study explores how Indonesian social workers understand and interpret their experience during the tsunami 2004 recovery efforts using Abbott’s system of professions concepts to frame the professionalization process as impacted by international aid during the 2004 tsunami. The findings revolve around formal public recognition, community sanction and a systematic knowledge base in Indonesia’s social work professionalization process.

The December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami wrecked thousands of lives, homes, and livelihoods - losses that could have been avoided with timely and better information. A resource such as information is needed at a fundamental level much like water, food, medicine, or shelter. This dissertation examines the development of the Thai information society, in terms of the share of information workforce and the level of diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT), as well as, the role of the Thai information society in response to the tsunami disaster. The study combined the historical and political economy analyses in explaining factors influencing the growth of information workforce and the development of ICT in Thailand. Interviews conducted in 2007-08 revealed the Thai information society responded to the 2004 Tsunami - the first global internet-mediated natural disaster - in two areas: on-site assistance in collecting and recording identification information of tsunami disaster victims and on-line dissemination of disaster relief information. The effectiveness of ICT institutions in providing the tsunami disaster relief efforts and increasing the development of the information society were assessed using statistical procedures analyzing the perceptions of the Internet-based survey respondents. The disaster effects on survey respondents were also assessed. The study's findings include: (1) the Thai information sector development pattern confirmed a key difference between development patterns of information sectors in developed and developing countries, (2) the increasing number of Thai information workers was due more to the expansion of government than the expansion in the manufacturing and service sectors during the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis, (3) Thailand's expansion of ICT infrastructure was influenced not only on the basis of economic profitability but also by political desirability, and (4) volunteers were crucial in humanitarian aid and disaster relief.

Superficial information of the civil wars in Aceh, Indonesia and Sri Lanka creates the idea that both conflicts were in similar situations when they were hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. It thus seems surprising that in the wake of the tsunami, the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia signed a peace agreement, while the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Government of Sri Lanka returned to war. This thesis aims to explore what factors related to the tsunami contributed to this difference and whether rational choice theory can serve as an explanation for this difference. In order to find out, I conducted a qualitative comparative case study though the analysis of secondary documents. The results suggest that the factors that contributed to the difference can be divided into four broad themes: (1) the timing of the tsunami and thus the pre-disaster context; (2) the geographical situation and with that, the military impact; (3) the types of guerilla groups, including their abilities to rule, their access to financial capital and their strategic; (4) the role of the international community, which can be further divided into firstly, the geopolitical relevance of these countries, and secondly, internationalization, community engagement and separating the tsunami and conflict. I believe that rational choice theory explains the difference in outcome between the two conflicts very well. This theory assumes that people, given the circumstances, and in view of all the possible options, will act in line with the option that is expected to satisfy them most and minimize their losses. Applying this theory to the case studies of Aceh and Sri Lanka following the tsunami, it was appealing for the Free Aceh Movement to settle, but this was not the case for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. As a result, the former chose to sign a peace agreement with the Government of Indonesia, whereas the latter chose to continue its fight against the Government of Sri Lanka.