Throughout the 1950s and 60s, domestic activist groups were subject to heightened levels of surveillance, infiltration, and harassment through the government's counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO). Though the program was officially disbanded nearly four decades ago, current domestic activist groups, especially environmental and animal rights activists, continue to allege that the program remains in effect to this day. Though certain similarities to the COINTELPRO-era remain, the current socio-political climates focus on terrorism prevention and the protection of industry profits and the resulting legal, statutory and regulatory frameworks present new challenges to such activists that must be met with new solutions. This thesis will examine the origin of the activists' claim, why such an analogy is faulty, and why such a distinction is important for those involved in environmental and animal rights activism.

Immigration in the European Union is an issue increasingly discussed by EU member states and researcher across the world. Although immigrants come to Europe from many countries across the world, flows from North Africa constitute a substantial percentage of total immigration, in particular to France and Spain. While many studies focus on the impact of this immigration on EU member states, this paper discusses the issues faced by immigrants and how they are impacted by host state policymaking. Drawing from case studies on France and Spain, the paper provides an assessment of how human security and immigration are interrelated. It then analyzes immigration policies in France and Spain, laying the groundwork for an overview of the situation in Europe. Policies in both France and Spain have an impact on human security of immigrants, especially those related to immigration control and integration. At the EU level, limited integration on immigration policies has limited the ability of the organization to do more than suggest that member states coordinate their efforts. EU policies have also not had much effect on human security of immigrants until recently. Changes following the 2008-2009 economic crisis have the potential to pave the way for increased integration, though the future of a human security doctrine in the EU remains uncertain.

This study examines the transformation of the Bulgarian political elite that took place with the transition from communist to post-communist society. Drawing on classical elite theory and contemporary research on East European elites, I argue that two sets of factors determine the nature of elite transformation the presence of a counter-elite and the degree to which this elite is organized, and the effectiveness of the auto-transformative mechanisms of the ruling elite (i.e. intra-elite conflict and modes of recruitment). Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data gathering techniques, I analyze the nature and intensity of intra-elite conflict within the ruling communist elite; the emergence of an organized counter-elite; the extent to which the counter-elite was able to challenge the power of the ruling communist elite; and the difference in the composition and modes of recruitment of the communist and post-communist elites. In examining the process of elite transformation in Bulgaria, I address the wider and more important question of the role the elite played in the transition process and the impact it had on the transition outcome. East European transitions produced a variety of outcomes, with Bulgaria consistently lagging behind other countries from the region. Without viewing elite transformation as the sole explanatory variable, I argue that it significantly affected the outcome of the transition process. Elite action, more than anything, defines domestic and foreign policy choices, and hence, the direction and success of the transition process. Elite change in Bulgaria was defined by a strong and slowly reforming former communist party, unable to articulate a viable reform program; a weak and poorly organized opposition torn by internal conflict and lacking a unified vision of the transition and sound reform policy; and an opportunistic ethnic-based party changing allegiance every so often. This particular combination resulted in a sequence of unstable governments and reform policies that were stalled or reversed with each change in government. The nature of elite transformation in Bulgaria and the countrys difficult transition pose the question of the link between elite change and transition outcome a connection that renders the elite variable the more so important.

NGOs have come to occupy center stage in emergency relief and development work in the past twenty years. This study looks at the efforts made by international actorsboth official donors and international NGOs in developing the capacities of local organizations in Burundi during the decade of civil strife since 1993. While the needs of democratization set the agenda for most peace building programs, the priorities of donors in conflict afflicted countries may not always lead to financial commitments, nor match the needs of emerging civil society organizations. Using field interviews and document analysis, this study analyzes the development and the challenges of civil organizations in Burundi, which are marked by the political developments distinctive to the country. Donor programs, including work in critical peacebuilding sectors of media, human rights, gender and basic education are examined in detail, and aid donors are shown to have had particular difficulty encouraging the organizational autonomy that is required for Burundian civil society organizations to become effective civic and political actors.

ABSTRACT The politicization of the civil service in Mali in the context of democratization had a catastrophic effect on the democratization and development process in Mali. In the first decade of democratization, the dominant party permeated and used the civil service to control and take advantage of state resources. In addition, the civil service has been also transformed into a funding agency for the dominant party as well as coercion and exclusion machinery. In the second decade the rules of the games were changed while the goal and outcome remained the same. Dominant party rule has been replaced with a diffused party system under the name of consensus politics. This dissertation examines the phenomenon of the politicization of the Malian civil service in the context of democratization as a hindrance for its development into the institution needed to support and deliver democracy to citizens. Such an examination is important to uncover a new type of politicization whose objective is not to control the civil service for policy purposes, but rather the élites organized abuse of the state. By using the ethnographic method of studying the concept of politicization of the civil service in the context of democratization, this dissertation argues that the phenomenon of politicization of the civil service in the context of democratization has been a hindrance for the civil service development into the institution needed to support and deliver democracy to citizens. This phenomenon of politicization has also destroyed all state institutions and has endangered the democratization and development processes. The findings of the dissertation show how state leadership has engaged in grand corruption and clientelist practices to reinforce its power. The rupture of the state and its civil service from society, the Malian élites abuse of the state and its citizens, the joint conspiracy of the administrative and political leaders against the people, and the insidious and organized grand corruption under implementation have caused a crisis in both state authority and state legitimacy as well as the failure of democratization and the development process.

Operating under rapidly changing conditions, organizations face various challenges that can damage core competencies and collaborative partnerships that have been developed for normal operations. To address these challenges, organizations need to learn from previous events, develop relevant strategies, and seek to evolve in resilient ways. The critical task in designing adaptive systems is to determine the bases for the effective organizational adaptation. This study seeks to explore evidence of organizational learning, identify the most critical factors that facilitate organizational adaptation, develop strategies for change, and assess the effects of these strategies on the performance and evolution of the system. To achieve these purposes, this study applies a mixed approach of qualitative and quantitative methods including content analysis of newspaper articles and situation reports, social network analysis, and agent-based computational simulation. To explore processes of organizational learning, I conducted a comparative analysis of two hurricane response systems; Hurricane Katrina, 2005 and Hurricane Gustav, 2008. This analysis documented gaps in the performance of the two systems. The organizations in the Hurricane Katrina response systems suffered from a lack of personnel, plans, and equipment for the effective communication. Accordingly, they were unable to create a common knowledge base of operations and failed to allocate resources as requested. Evidence from organizational analysis documents that organizations in the Hurricane Gustav response system learned from the experiences of Hurricane Katrina and upgraded their performance in response operations in various ways. They invested significant resources and effort to improve organizational capacity in communication and strengthened their collaboration links with expected and spontaneous partners from public, private, and non-profit sectors. Based on findings from this analysis, I offer a set of policy implications for guiding effective organizational adaptation to changing conditions. First, organizations need to collaborate under strong leadership to develop trust that is critical to effective coordination and collaboration. To make effective use of established mutual trust, adaptive systems need to address the problem of turnover in major positions of organizations. Second, while organizations in the system work on the institutionalization of joint operations for the development of mutual trust among agencies, they also need to develop policies to retain experienced core personnel for effective collaboration with partners. Third, operations need to integrate advanced information technologies into their operations to support effective communication, knowledge management, and diffusion of organizational learning. Combined with the cultivation of experienced personnel, the integration of advanced information technology into disaster mitigation and response represents the construction of a socio-technical system. To build a socio-technical system for organizational adaptation, organizations need to focus on the technical design of advanced communication equipment and data management tools that facilitate the processing, transmitting, storing, and extracting of critical information both for enhanced performance and organizational learning. Further, they need to focus on the organizational training and education of strategic learning to develop more experienced and collaborative personnel. Based on accumulated experience and memory of collaboration, enhanced capacities, and reinforced partnerships, organizations in an adaptive system can achieve a creative mental leap to a new practice of action. Findings from this study document that organizations can successfully address challenges from rapidly changing conditions and eventually, evolve in a resilient form of adaptation.

Global energy use has expanded at unprecedented rates to keep up with the demands of growing economies and populations. Issues such as climate change mitigation, sustainable development, and energy security have complicated energy expansion, and countries worldwide are reevaluating their current sources of energy, where it comes from, and how much of it they utilize. Renewable energy (RE) technologies have emerged as the answer for many countries energy problems satisfying the need for cleaner technology while still expanding energy supplies as a tool for further economic development. These new technologies, however, face significant market barriers that impede the uptake of new RE technologies and necessitate government intervention. The research in the paper analyzes the impact of the quota obligation policy, more commonly called the renewable portfolio standard (RPS) in the United States (US), on the adoption of wind power. The first analysis in the paper observes past regulatory policies and applies what is learned from their implementation to the RPS. The manner in which electric utilities responded is also examined to determine how the utilities may respond to further regulatory mandates such as a federal RPS. The second analysis utilizes data from the 35 states with an RPS in estimating a structural model of wind power development which accounts for particular characteristics of the RPS target and other drivers of wind power development such as state economic and population factors. This research shows that several other factors play a key role in increasing wind capacity within US states in addition to the RPS. These factors include a states wind energy potential, state GDP, and state population change. Additionally, it was found that there is a momentum effect associated with time since RPS adoption and that increases in wind energy prices do not negatively affect development in states with an RPS.

In my dissertation I seek to answer the question of why some non-state armed groups in modern conflicts recruit children whereas others do not. I argue that four factors help explain the difference in rebels' recruitment of minors. The first two are related to the armed group-specific characteristics of fighting capacity relative to the government and the scope of belligerents' territorial access and control within and across the conflict country borders. Both of these factors positively affect the insurgencys propensity to recruit children, especially for armed groups that are unpopular among their constituency. The third and fourth contextual and individual factors of poverty and presence of ethnic persecution in a country, I argue, also have a positive influence on the outcome of child recruitment, especially for popular insurgencies. My findings are based on both quantitative and qualitative research. I conducted large-N tests on a dataset of 112 insurgencies that I newly compiled. I also analyzed data which I collected on Liberian armed groups and former underage combatants from the surveys which I administered in the field. I complemented my statistical analysis with comparative and process-tracing temporal case studies, as well as the plausibility probe on FARC armed group from Colombia and the LTTE faction of Sri Lanka.

Studies of African development convey both the triumphs and struggles in achieving the viability of local, small economic actors within a heightened era of global integration. Theoretical studies examining the role of social capital in economic development suggest that understanding the broader context of social relationships within which the market operates is vital in understanding market behavior. Hence, this perspective presents a distinct approach by which to grasp how small business men and women in globalizing African economies socially position themselves to manage and thrive under market pressures on all spatial levels. Drawing from this literature, this investigation explores how the social structure specifically, the diversity of relationships in the social networks of local South African entrepreneurs contributes to the development of their small businesses. Employing the qualitative analytical methodology of grounded theory, data is generated via in-depth interviews of twenty-four entrepreneurs from the clothing manufacturing and service industries in Greater Johannesburg, South Africa. Empirical research in this regard is growing but is still limited. Hence, grounded theory- as other qualitative methodologies captures the nuances and cultural interpretations vital to comprehending the social structure of the local economy. Distinct from other qualitative methodologies, however, grounded theory derives relationships between prevailing conceptual themes so as to form a testable framework for an emerging theory drawn directly from the data. The findings reveal, and form the first two hypotheses, that the structure and value of social network diversity vary across entrepreneurs of different economic sectors. To gain more empirical insight regarding network diversity variation, the study presents the analysis of particular variables highlighted by the data and literature in relation to entrepreneurs social networks. Clothing manufacturers emphasis of international trade as a threat forms the third hypothesis that their vulnerability to cheaper garment imports may be an explanatory factor for the structural and value differences of their networks diversity from those of service entrepreneurs. Recognizing that vulnerability to global imports does not fully account for the variation of network diversity among entrepreneurs within the same sector, however, continued analysis focused on the potential explanatory value of an entrepreneurs business phase and firm size. Findings supported the formation of the fourth and fifth hypotheses, which state that network diversity varies across entrepreneurs within different business phases in both sectors, and inconclusively across small firms of different sizes. The analysis notes that variation across firm size may be a function of business phase. At the end, the study lays out an emerging theoretical framework for the central concept of network diversity value, presenting the prevailing hypotheses and conceptual relationships to be tested in further studies.

This dissertation examines the question: To what extent does the international news media influence the outcome of interstate wars? It considers the longstanding charge that media reports of public debates about foreign policy provide 'aid and comfort to the enemy.' New theory is proposed that addresses this policy problem facing democracies, and also addresses gaps in the theoretical literature on the causes of war. The theory advanced in this dissertation is that the presence of the international news media influences the outcome of wars by providing an additional channel through which information about leaders' cost sensitivity is revealed and by reciprocally influencing the beliefs and behavior of leaders and their foreign adversaries in the conduct of wars. Novel variables representing major phases in the emergence of the international news media are defined. Original research is conducted using primary and secondary sources to characterize the media by year in individual states. The novel media variables are combined with variables from other studies to create a dataset spanning 90 interstate wars involving 51 different states from 1823 through 1990. Hypotheses based on the theory are tested using a multinomial logistic regression model. The results of this study partially support the theory in that the type of media in a war initiator state is strongly and significantly associated with a higher probability of winning. Unexpected findings regarding the influence of media speed on the probability of winning, and a failure to find a relationship between media and the probability of losing require further investigation. Overall, however, the presence of the international news media appears to influence the outcome of interstate wars. The results have important implications for future theoretical research as well as for policy choices regarding the proper role of domestic debates and media reporting thereof. Additional research is required to confirm the findings, examine the unexpected findings, and to examine the relevance of the findings in other eras and other phases of war. Deeply rooted assumptions within society that media reporting on wars conflicts with national security interests must be revisited as part of an examination of policy implications of the findings.