Thesis advisor: Charles Gallagher / The chaos of the Great Depression allowed for the rise of demagogues on both sides of the American political spectrum. On the fringes of the American right came William Dudley Pelley and Father Charles Coughlin, two rabid anti-Semites staunchly opposed to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Using familiar rhetorical tropes, they marshaled their supporters and presented a violent resistance to the transformation of the American state. Railing against perceiving conspiracies involving Judaism, Communism, and international banking, these men set a precedent for extreme right-wing politics that resonated in their own time and still has consequences today. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: History.

Colombia differs from the rest of the world due to the amount of kidnappings and coca cultivation taking place. Using data between 1999-2008, this paper studies to what extent and in what direction there exists a causal relationship of coca cultivation on kidnappings. A study that has never been done in the previous published economic literature. A negative relationship would mean that policies implemented to reduce coca cultivation would also increase the number of kidnappings. A positive relationship, on the other hand would reduce the number of kidnappings. Using OLS-, fixed effects- and instrumental variable regressions, the results imply a negative relationship. Meaning implementing policies with the aim of eradicating coca production would come with negative externalities in the form of more kidnappings.

Children always were and remain main group in a society because they are its future. Thus their proper education is a main issue and concern to all governments. However, understanding about the proper education and means to achieve it varies greatly both among different cultures and across generations. In Lithuania, after the restoration of independence, ideas about various organizations, communities and collective actions become extremely unpopular and were considered outdated. The stress on individuality was put forward resulting in children’s inability to work as a team members, lack of wish and experience in a team-work and adequate values for it. Finally, they do not care about the others - their opinion, culture, individuality, etc. There are a lot of youth organizations in Lithuania that deal with children’s extra-curricular education. Their membership rates vary from a few hundred to several thousand members. The largest organization in Lithuania is Lithuanian riflemen organization, that unifies near 6000 young people. However, the activities of these organizations cover just a small number school age children. There are over 400,000 children in Lithuania from the age of 7 to 16 years old. Therefore, organizations need to improve their activities and enhance their effectiveness in order to achieve higher participation rates. It is these issues that this paper deals with. Aim of the research: to ascertain theoretical assumptions underlying enhancement of public... [to full text]

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation examines the influence of paramilitary professional cultural attributes on the speed at which disaster response organizations (DROs) recognize, respond, organize, and take action in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Three agencies are examined: the U.S. Coast Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. military's Southern Command/Joint Task Force-Haiti. The 2010 Haiti earthquake is used as a case study to explore the influence of three independent variables: (1) paramilitarism; (2) career ladders (i.e., recruitment and professional development of staff); and (3) workforce autonomy. The purpose is to determine if paramilitary cultures help or hinder an agency's speed into action, thereby helping improve the disaster response organizations of the future. In the case of Haiti, it finds that the combination of thick paramilitary culture, insider career ladders, and high workforce autonomy best enabled responders' speed into action. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: Devin O. Pendas / This dissertation studies the cooperation and competition amongst various right-wing paramilitaries in the southeastern portions of German-speaking Europe. My work overturns stereotypical, teleological narratives that presume any far-fight German extremism inherently meant “the rise of Nazism.” Instead, I reveal a complex mosaic of far-right paramilitary men, whose allegiances to and rivalries with each other oscillated with shifting situational contexts across one of the most contested and chaotic borders in interwar Europe. Consequently, my research results open new possibilities for conceptualizing volatile twentieth-century borderlands as stemming not just from international conflicts but also from intra-national infighting. Paramilitary men on both sides of the Austro-Bavarian border considered themselves German, but they conceived of their “Germanness” in very specific terms: southeastern, Catholic, and Alpine in contrast to the northern, Protestant, and Prussian variant of Germandom. How did right-wing groups blend greater German nationalism with their southeastern German regionalism? The hybridization of these two loyalties created an intoxicating affective brew that brought together right-wing agents on both sides of this border in fraternal solidarity but also instigated fratricidal violence, all as these German groups sought to settle the question of what it meant to be German. National identities founded on southeastern regional impulses thus formed a constitutive contradiction of greater German nationalism. The intersectionality of regionalism and nationalism generated internecine right-wing violence, as these groups disagreed over how to implement disparate versions of unification. The result was twenty years of street brawls, assassinations, terror, Putsch attempts, mobilizations, and transborder smuggling of munitions, troops, and funds. This region was thus a paragon of borderlands conflict. The crux was that it was an intra-national borderland: to these activists, national union should have been so simple, making it all the more frustrating when it eluded them. The assumed common nationality meant any perceived dissident was not simply a political opponent but something far worse: a traitor. Paradoxically, the supposedly “agreed-upon” national identity exacerbated borderland chaos and violence. Historians of Eastern and Central Europe have falsely conflated borderlands with spaces between nations in which multi-national populations struggle among each other for hegemony. My work overturns such assumptions by offering the first analysis of European borderlands violence stemming from a perceived communal nationality. This project thus serves as a needed corrective to the scholarship, offering a richly informed regional analysis with significant interventions in the broader fields of borderlands and right-wing extremism. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Abstract Title: Building Trust: The contradiction between security and democracy in post apartheid South Africa Author: Magnus Persson Supervisor: Svante Lundberg This paper aims to investigate the contradiction between security and democracy in post-apartheid South African policing, and was executed on the field together with the South African Police Service (SAPS). The theoretical point of departure is that trust between people, in relation to the institutions of society, is fundamental to democratic development. This in combination with previous research on police reform, police academy socialization, community policing and militarization has lead to the conclusion that a remilitarization process is under way and that a militaristic approach to policing is likely to be counterproductive in terms of achieving democratic development. The study has been executed on a South African police academy as well as at two different police stations with the combined methods of participatory observation and interviews.

A primary objective of this thesis is to identify, understand and explain motivations that lead individuals to join the National Militia. National Militia (Národní Domobrana) is a Czech paramilitary organisation that emerged in 2015 as a reaction to migration crisis and growing fear of "Islamisation". Shortly after its establishment, in July 2016, the organisation claimed to have over 2,500 members and began to regularly organise border patrols, military-like drills, but also political manifestations, openly criticising Czech foreign and domestic policies. Utilizing ethnographic methods of inquiry, the researcher conducted 11 semi-structured interviews with members of National Militia. In the subsequent analysis, the research identifies a set of push and pull factors as being most influential in individual's decision-making process, eventually being completed by a personal factor. Secondary findings identify also elementary demographical data, shared personality traits and militiamen mindset. From academical point of view, this study provides the reader with foundational data, necessary for further research, as the phenomenon is heavily understudied in Czech context. The specific contribution of the research resides not only in identifying the motivations, but also in offering the explanation for...

The connection between religion and conflict is widely known, but the literature lacks in the understanding on how religion can be used in conflicts. This study aims to investigate how religion was used by paramilitary organizations in the North Ireland conflict. With the theory on how religion can overcome collective action problems, four central themes regarding how religion can benefit social movements was used to examine these organizations. The organization was analysed using journalistic sources mainly based on interviews with terrorists from these organizations. Using these four themes the similarities and differences between these organizations could be analysed and how religion was used could be better understood. The main result was that none of the studied organizations used religion to a big extent, but that the protestant side had a bigger use of it than the catholic one. With this in concern, the study was critically analysed, and further research was purposed.

The Kenyan state is currently under pressure from two sides: First, numerous non-state armed groups have taken over the provision of security in areas where the state is practically absent. Second, drug-trafficking organizations are gaining ground as the country is increasingly being used as a major transit hub for narcotics. This article investigates the relationship between drug trafficking and informal security provision in Kenya and draws analogies from comparable experiences in Latin America and West Africa. Field research in Kenya has demonstrated that profit-oriented, informal security actors in Mombasa work for drug lords, while their counterparts in Nairobi are more likely to be hired by politicians. Moreover, faith-based vigilante groups in both cities appear to be less susceptible to external manipulation by drug traffickers. The article concludes by considering the potential consequences of an expansion of the drug trade in Kenya. / © 2014 GIGA. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Africa Spectrum is an Open Access publication. It may be read, copied and distributed free of charge according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.