The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been at war for decades. Since its self rule in 1960, the country has been dealing with civil war, and has the largest number of refugees from Africa to the United States. Mineral wise it is the richest country in Africa, and yet it is the poorest in the standard of living. In this dissertation, I sought to research the lived experiences of Congolese women refugees settled in Indianapolis, Indiana. The purpose of this study was to explore, through their own voices, the challenges these women face as they resettle in a new country, with new people, and a new culture. These women are expected to be self-reliant within three months (90 days) with the help of resettlement agencies. A priority is that they are expected to learn a new language to enable them to move on to a life on their own. This is a challenge for these women who never had a formal education. Some of the challenges they face are the language barrier, living in a new country, new people, new environment, and the generational gap. Their challenge is to overcome these barriers. The study aims to share the women's voices firsthand. From the findings, awareness will be brought to the inefficiencies of the ninety day period of service from the resettlement agencies. Another finding is that the women refugees were not comfortable with the idea of being resettled in the United States. An additional finding is that the research participants condemned the separation that took place in the family when some of them were resettled in the US and some were left in Africa.

The field of mediation has emerged as one of the premier tools in the peacemaking process. While mediation has grown in popularity and become widely accepted in the judicial court system and corporate America, very few studies have focused on how mediators are impacted by the conflict resolution process. Moreover, few studies have focused on the role of spiritual self-care on the mediator. This research study explored how mediators who identify as spiritual integrate their spirituality in their own self-care practice. In order for mediation to continue as one of the most important tools in the peacemaking process, mediators of today and the future must have effective and beneficial self-care practices to perform professionally at a high level. This study utilized transcendental phenomenology to capture the lived experiences of 11 conflict professionals who incorporate spirituality into their self-care practices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to explore how they practiced self-care and the essence of what spiritual self-care entailed. The major themes identified in this study were: (a) mediators spiritual practices were used as tools for preparation and protection in conflict work, (b) spiritual practices invoked deep and meaningful feelings of connectedness, and (c) that spiritually identifying mediators began to embody the same practices they used. Essentially, spiritual self-care was vital to being effective in their professional lives. Mediators were able to offer deep value to their clients through their spirituality and simultaneously found deep value in their spiritual self-care practices. The research was significant, as it allowed for a deeper understanding of conflict practitioners and could benefit the personal and professional growth of the mediation field.

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Central American leadership in the 1980s Philadelphia Sanctuary Movement was cultivated through long experiences with social injustice, along with deeply political religious sensibilities rooted in Latin American labor organizing and the base Christian community movement. While it is sometimes assumed that they carried with them only an undifferentiated past of victimization and violence, Central American sanctuary activists and collaborators brought refined community organizing skills, which they intentionally employed to expand solidarity and sanctuary coalitions across Northern America. This dissertation explores some of the ways in which displaced Central American human rights workers moved within this international, interreligious context to further their liberationist goals. In a religious environment steeped in long histories of racialized missionary intervention and human exploitation, Guatemalans and Salvadorans asserted a different vision of sanctuary not only concerned with personal safety, but also with the opportunity to educate the U.S. public while they transformed the practice of sanctuary from the inside out. Harnessing the resources of their own cultural and religious histories and experiences, Central American human rights workers gained access to certain critical segments of the human, social, and political capital of the Philadelphia region to advance the cause of their own survival and flourishing. / Religion

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States regularly use fear of terrorist threats to gain support for domestic political agendas and promote geostrategic interests. Consecutive U.S. presidents have cited the theory of the just war to defend these policies and particular violations of national sovereignty. Those doubtful of whether existing threats justify violations of privacy and territorial integrity also use fear -- of corruption, mission creep, and unintended consequences -- claiming that such interventions are a cure worse than the disease, yet one about which domestic audiences are easily misled. To combat abuse of moral arguments for the use of force, some in peace and conflict studies advocate military force be restricted to self-defense, per strict interpretation of the United Nations Charter (as in international legal positivism), or restricted completely (as in pacifism). Because the goal of reducing violent conflict is nearly universally acceptable, these varieties of noninterventionism are rarely scrutinized. In social psychological peace research (SPPR) on public opinion, however, positivism and prescriptive pacifism mask the diversity of opinion on whether and when intervention is necessary to curb aggression, prevent atrocity, and/or restore stability in failed states. This project critically examines SPPR's positivistic premises and the political implications of moral skepticism generally. In an intellectual history of the discipline, I contrast scientific emphasis on certainty in the formulation of threat and risk-avoidance with the humanities' appreciation of the ethical implications of uncertainty, also at the heart of just war theory. Taking Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory (SCT) of moral dis/engagement as a case study, I argue that SPPR skepticism of individual citizens' moral judgment implicitly endorses elite or consensus-driven models of social and political change. The determinism, consequentialism, and institutional gradualism of SPPR approaches, I argue, contradict stated progressive aims and the egalitarian individualism behind liberal conceptions of the rule of law and international human rights regime. Using just war's ethical framework and a non-consequentialist Kantian theory of moral judgment, I construct a reasoning model and coding manual for use in public opinion research on international conflict. These instruments operationalize moral dis/engagement in a manner consistent with political liberalism and humanitarian law, including the Responsibility to Protect.

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