This thesis explores the transformations of the Muslim community (current Bosniaks) of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Austro-Hungarian occupation between 1878 and 1918. It examines the political, social and demographic changes in Muslim society - including the development of community life and religious, cultural and educational institutions - in the context of the formation of modern Central and South East European nations. Habsburg rule in the northernmost Ottoman province, in hindsight, stood at the beginning of a long, insecure and ambiguous but ultimately successful process of national self-awareness of the Slavic Muslim community of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sanjak. The various chapters of this thesis broadly follow the standard framework of analysis of national movements in Europe. This work is theoretically grounded in the modernist paradigm connecting the national idea to changes in social, economic and political circumstances, the onset of modernity, based on both constructivist and instrumentalist theories. The thesis is largely relied on secondary sources when discussing these subjects as well as newspaper articles, memoirs, biographical essays, declarations and political proclamations. Keywords Muslims; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Bosniaks; National Movement; 1878-1918

This dissertation consists of three essays, each covering very distinct topics under the broad umbrella of Development Economics, each set in a different region of the developing world (Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia). The one element that loosely ties them together is that they each seek to add, in a small way, to our understanding of factors that contribute to, and in some cases may entrap people in, poverty: factors such as (lack of) geographic mobility, hunger, and disease. In the first chapter, I use the natural experiment of military conscription in Argentina, which randomly assigned not only military service, but also the location of service, to study the effect of this temporary displacement on long-run migration rates. I then use a rich source of administrative earnings and employment data to investigate the labor-market implications of conscription and, in particular, displacement. I find that conscription on the whole caused a small increase in the likelihood of appearing in the formal labor force, and a small increase in earnings particularly for those who were assigned to serve in the Navy. Assignment to military service outside of one's province of origin increased the likelihood of living outside the province of origin by 2.5 percent, and while the net effects of this displacement on earnings and employment are imprecisely estimated, the evidence suggests that there are modest long-term benefits of conscription in Argentina that are not fully attributable to displacement. In the second chapter, I investigate the effects of Ramadan on calorie consumption and labor supply among Muslim households in rural Malawi. Across four rounds of household survey data, I find no evidence of a decrease in calorie consumption during Ramadan on average. I do, however, find evidence that working-age people reduce their weekly work by about three hours, or nearly 20 percent, on average. This finding on calories shows substantial variation across the different rounds of data. The evidence presented calls into question the hypothesis that consumption during Ramadan should fall more dramatically when the holiday overlaps with the harvest (when baseline consumption levels are relatively high compared to the rest of the year), compared to when Ramadan falls near the annual hunger season (when baseline consumption levels tend to be much lower). I discuss potential implications of this variation for our understanding of seasonal consumption patterns. The third and final chapter, which is authored jointly with Kaivan Munshi and Nancy Luke, discusses a randomized intervention conducted in rural South India aimed at improving rates of treatment completion for tuberculosis. Tuberculosis (TB), despite being a highly treatable disease, kills well over 1 million people every year, with 95 percent of cases and deaths appearing in developing countries. India bears the largest TB burden of any country, with more than 25 percent of the world's total yearly cases. A key factor for successful management of TB is ensuring that patients complete the full six-month (or more) treatment regimen: missing even a few doses of the prescribed medications increases the likelihood of relapse and development of a drug-resistant strain of TB, which is much more difficult and costly to treat effectively. We conduct an intervention allowing patients to select a community member to serve as a Directly Observed Treatment (DOT) provider to help ensure compliance with the full treatment regimen. Although patients assigned a Community DOT provider report significantly more frequent visits and higher rates of satisfaction compared to our control group, we do not find any significant improvement in treatment outcomes among those assigned this intervention. We explore several potential explanations for this finding and suggest potential avenues for future research.

This study investigated law enforcement officers' personal beliefs and attitudes toward Muslims and Islam in Greece. Primary survey data collected directly from forty-eight active police officers in Greece, from different gender, age group and management level. An online questionnaire with twenty-five questions was developed, in order to assess the knowledge of and attitudes toward Muslims and Islam among the sample of the Greek police officers. The survey examined four broad areas. First, it aims to look at the respondents' general understanding of many of Islam's basic tenets. Following that, it examines some of the respondents' attitudes toward Muslims and Islam. Third, the survey aims to explore respondents' views on how Muslims and Islam are portrayed in the media. Finally, the level of officers’ contact with Muslims is investigated and to what extent police officers were eager to learn more about Muslim culture and Islam.  The results of data analyses demonstrate that the majority of police officers do not consistently base their knowledge of Muslims and Islam on stereotypes. Furthermore, their views on Muslims and Islam were not uniformly negative.

During the latest armed conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) from 2013 to the present, narratives emerged regarding who was an autochthon and who was not, pitting “true Central Africans” against “foreigners”, Christians against Muslims. This new cycle of violence is embedded in a long history of political violence in the CAR. Still, the claim of one group being more autochthon than another has not been a prominent feature of previous conflicts, neither has fighting in the past formed so clearly along religious identities. Being a Son of the Soil, an autochthon, evokes an image that denies CAR’s history of migration of social groups and reify fixity, and such conflicts have also been present in other parts of Africa, as well as in Europe and Asia. To date, most literature seeking to understand autochthony-related armed conflict has been dominated by elite-centric analysis that highlight the mobilization of autochthony as a strategy to retain power in cases of political liberalization or democratization (Cameroon, Kenya or Côte d’Ivoire). When not elite-centric, analyses of autochthony-related conflict have emphasized land, access to land issues or crudely predatory logics of vigilante groups on the local level (Côte d’Ivoire or the DRC). In CAR, neither political liberalization, nor land issues alone were prominent, but autochthony was a strategy as witnessed in other African cases of autochthony-related armed conflicts. In that sense, this research asks how and why is autochthony being mobilized in the CAR politics before and after the 2013 coup? The dissertation argues that elites and ordinary citizens discursively mobilize autochthony as an identity capital across various scales. They do it to access non-land related resources, claim hierarchy, and discriminate against the other. The mobilization of autochthony is tied to longer legitimacy-seeking strategies of the elite, and autochthony is a symbolic myth that can be mobilized at various levels. The dissertation’s main theoretical contribution is to challenge the tendency to consider elites and supporters as belonging and subscribing to different discursive realm. This study has considered that autochthony links leaders and their followers in a type of pre-given conception that no longer needs explanation. This contributes to considering elites and their supporters as tied by the same discursive realm, but the concrete meaning of the discourse is different across multiple levels. To make the argument, the dissertation uses a qualitative multi-method approach predominantly centered on discourse analysis, fieldwork, interviews, and newspapers archival research. My research shows that understanding autochthony violence requires a simultaneous analysis of how autochthony is given meaning at different levels by various actors in everyday practices from the macro to the micro. Instrumentalizing autochthony lies at the interplay of all these levels. In this work, autochthony is vague enough to connect leaders to followers and, at the same time, precise enough for listeners to make sense of the term by connecting it to their daily experience of it. The long-term existence of the autochthony discourse allows it to change and morph at times of heightened crisis. It does not emerge overnight, but it has a longer genealogy that must be understood in context. That is, it is not simply because Bozizé targeted Muslim-foreigners in his speeches that people mobilized against them. Top-down manipulation might have resonated with followers but understanding of autochthony also operated independently of the top-down manipulation. That the conflict manifested around sectarian lines fits within an autochthony framework because autochthony is an empty identity marker whose content can be filled in many ways – most frequently with reference to ethnicity, religion, language, myths of origin, or some combination of such markers.

Данная магистерская диссертация посвящена выявлению особенностей мультикультурализма на территории Великобритании и особенности освещения его проблем в британской периодике с конца XX века по настоящее время. Структура работы состоит из двух глав: теоретической и практической. В теоретической части изучены теоретические основы феномена мультикультурализма, рассмотрены становление и развитие мультикультурализма в Великобритании, а так же проанализирована его критика. В практической части проанализированы статьи о мультикультурализме в британских периодических изданиях (качественных, популярных и журналах), сделано сравнение их содержания. Определена взаимосвязь между политической позицией, которой придерживается периодическое издание, ее видом и содержанием статей о мультикультурализме, что позволяет сделать вывод об отношении аудиторий газет, а, следовательно, и общества в целом, к данному явлению. В ходе исследования на основе изученных источников выдвинуто авторское определение мультикультурализма, которое обусловлено его особенностями и историей. / This master's thesis is devoted to identifying the features of multiculturalism in the UK and сoverage of the issue of multiculturalism in the UK in modern British periodicals from the end of the 20th century to the present. The structure of the work consists of two chapters: theoretical and practical. In the theoretical part, the theoretical foundations of the phenomenon of multiculturalism are studied, the formation and development of multiculturalism in the UK are considered, and its criticism is also analyzed. In the practical part, articles on multiculturalism in British periodicals (quality, popular and magazines) are analyzed, and a comparison of their content is made. The relationship between the political position adhered to by the periodical, its type and the content of articles on multiculturalism is determined, which allows us to draw a conclusion about the attitude of newspaper audiences, and, consequently, society as a whole, to this phenomenon. In the course of the study, based on the sources studied, the author's definition of multiculturalism was formulated, which is due to its features and history.

In this dissertation, I investigate the socioeconomic causes of consequences of ethnic conflict, and evaluate interventions that can reduce social animosity and misperceptions about outgroups. In particular, I focus on conflict between Hindus and Muslims in India. In recent years, online misinformation has emerged as a major contributor to misperceptions and animosity towards Muslims in India. In Chapter 1, I investigate if we can inoculate people against misinformation and mitigate its impact on people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior? We conduct a large field experiment in India with an intervention providing weekly digests containing a compilation of fact-checks of viral misinformation. In these digests, we also incorporate narrative explainers to give details and context of issues that are politically salient and consistent target of false stories. Specifically, we address misperceptions about Muslims increasingly fuelled by online misinformation. We find that familiarity with fact-checks increases people’s ability to correctly identify misinformation by eleven percentage points. However, belief in true news also decreases by four percentage points. We estimate a structural model to disentangle the two mechanisms of impact—truth discernment, which is the ability to correctly distinguish between false and true news; and skepticism, which changes the overall credulity for both false and true news. The impact is driven by an increase in both truth discernment and skepticism. Whereas skepticism increases immediately, it takes several weeks to become better at discerning truth. Finally, our intervention reduces misperceptions about Muslims, as well as leads to changes in policy attitudes and behavior. Treated individuals are less likely to support discriminatory policies and are more likely to pay for efforts to counter the harassment of inter-faith couples. In Chapter 2, I investigate the economic impacts of conflict and social animus by estimating the causal impact of ethnic violence on economic growth in India. For causal identification, I use shift-share instruments to isolate exogenous national shocks to violence from endogenous local shocks. On average, a riot reduces state GDP growth rate by 0.14 percentage points. To investigate mechanism, I estimate the dynamics of impact using the synthetic control method and compare it to theoretical predictions from a shock to social capital versus physical capital. This shows that the negative impact of violence is likely driven by a negative shock to social capital from higher animosity and discrimination among communities exposed to violence. This impact of violence on growth creates a vicious cycle when one also considers the effect in the opposite direction – lower growth leading to more violence. The multiplier due to this vicious cycle magnifies the impact of external growth shocks by 40 percent in equilibrium. Overall, the results highlight the importance of strong institutions to manage conflict for the long-term prosperity of societies. In Chapter 3, I investigate the historical origins of ethnic violence in India by comparing violence in regions that were directly ruled by British, versus those that were indirectly ruled through native kings who had significant autonomy. I find that regions that are directly ruled have more violence in post-independence period. I then use direct British rule as an instrument for ethnic violence to estimate the impact of violence and residential segregation.

This thesis aims to understand the experiences of the Somali Bantu and the Uyghur ethnic group. This study compares the differences and similarities in these groups' political representation and human rights access. Moreover, the method used to conduct this research is the Comparative Analysis Method. The Somali Bantu struggle with social and political marginalisation by Somalia's 4.5 formula and unfair representation due to the clan-based system. Meanwhile, the Uyghurs experience symbolic representation within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Furthermore, both minority groups are marginalised and discriminated against due to cultural, religious and social differences from the majority group; the Social Dominance Theory (SDT) is applied to understand these dynamics. Finally, the study examines alleged human rights violations by applying several international human rights documents, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.