Decisionmakers in organizations like the Department of Defense and the State Department rely on accurate information to develop strategies to engage foreign populations. There is gap in understanding how perceptions are formed in religious adherents, specifically understanding how Muslims determine if violence is an acceptable or unacceptable behavior. Informed by Hobföll's conservation of resources theory of stress, the purpose of this case study was to identify and understand the religious and secular factors that influenced a group of Sunni Muslims in Western Michigan to accept or reject violent behaviors. Research questions focused on how this population's perception of violence was influenced by religion, various sources of information and threats of loss. Convenience sampling was used to identify the participants for this study. Data were collected from face-to-face interviews with 10 Sunni Muslims living in Western Michigan. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and the data were inductively coded and examined to identify trends in the information. While identity and religion were important to understanding how Muslims view the acceptability of violence, perceptions of the justice system's effectiveness also emerged as an important factor in understanding an individual's tolerance for violent behaviors. The results of this study may contribute to positive social change by informing leaders who engage large Muslim populations about how perceptions of identity and justice system efficacy impact the acceptability of violent behaviors.

<p>Inom ramen för ISAF genomförs nu en massiv utbildningsinsats i counterinsurgency, detta för att den nya strategin som tillämpas skall få stort genomslag. Den doktrin som används vid utbildning och vid genomförande är den amerikanska FM 3-24. Den bygger på flera andra doktriner, men är som egen helhet ny och relativt oprövad.</p><p>Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka om faktorer i doktrinens operationslinjer bidrar till framgång. Detta görs genom att besvara frågan: I vilken utsträckning var det faktorer som framgår av FM 3-24 ”logiska operationslinjer” som gav framgång vid försvenskningen av Skånelandskapen?</p><p>Designen för undersökningen är en fallstudie, där operationslinjerna i doktrinen har översatts och operationaliserats och sedan jämförts med ett urval av litteratur om försvenskningen av Skånelandskapen.</p><p>Resultatet stödjer att utifrån detta enskilda fall leder användandet av FM 3-24 operationslinjer till ökad sannolikhet för framgång. Vilket ger en ökad legitimitet i doktrinens nyttjande. Uppsatsen har även ett underliggande syfte, att påvisa att det finns svenskt nationellt exempel på COIN.</p>

: This study assesses how South Sudan’s 2011 vote for independence has influenced the Nile Basin’s debate over water rights. Although it initially seemed that South Sudan was aligning itself with the upstream riparian states such as Ethiopia and Uganda, effectively leaving Egypt and Sudan as the only opponents to a Cooperative Framework Agreement and redefining so-called ‘historic water rights’, the escalation of the South Sudanese internal conflict between President Salva Kiir and ex-Vice-President Riek Machar changed this situation entirely. The conflict has reached a new stalemate, with Egypt giving military support to Salva Kiir in his fight against Machar, thus befriending South Sudan and strengthening its position in the Nile Basin, and Ethiopia hesitating to offer support and effectively losing South Sudan as a newly found ally. Currently, a Cooperative Framework Agreement is farther away from being signed than it was before South Sudan’s conflict escalated: South Sudan is no longer in any position to sign or implement agreements and policies regarding water issues, which allowed Egypt to reassert its dominant position in the debate. This study foresees three different possible future scenarios: one of perpetuated violent conflict, one of political conflict and one of increased interstate political cooperation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2008. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-135). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Peace negotiation is a complex political process used to end a conflict and establish peace. This thesis provides a qualitative analysis of the FARC-EP documents in preparation for the peace negotiations. Using Neocleous concept of pacification and Hannah Arendt’s concept of the political, I explored the ways in which the FARC-EP resist liberal peace by re-politicizing the conflict, addressing the sources of the inequalities and injustices generated by and for capitalism, and implying alternative ways of thinking about politics, power, justice and security to transform society. The analysis revealed that the FARC-EP thinks about peace and conflict resolution as a political process requiring social transformation of deep structural conditions through negotiation and deliberation in order to create a more just society. The FARC-EP conceptualizes peace as a complex political process that must be under local ownership and domestically rooted. In doing so, the FARC-EP addresses the root causes of the conflict by calling for transformative justice, replacing national security with integral security, extending politics beyond representative democracy and demanding equality to end the power imbalances that are so prominent in Colombia. By negotiating with the Colombian state, the FARC-EP accepts that not all their proposals will be implemented, given that it is in fact a negotiation. As a result, I conclude that peace negotiations can have the opposite effect and pacify political-military organizations in order to protect capitalist order after armed conflict has failed to succeed.

Strategic conflict in this work refers to the spectrum of co-operative and oppositional activities in which organisations engage when their interests meet. The origin of the work is in the management and prediction of corporate strategic conflict, but it will be seen that there are significant similarities between corporate struggle and that of international relations. Following a review of the nature of conflict and the characteristics of strategic decision making, the work examines the effectiveness of three existing general approaches to conflict modelling and management, namely informal and qualitative methods; general systems analysis methods; and game theoretic approaches. Desirable criteria for a strategic conflict management framework are derived and a framework is then proposed which has three components: - Setting thefuture environment The future of the organisation is described by a network of states of nature. Resolving the Conflict Within each of the states which represent the future, the options for participants are identified and the possible outcomes and interim states identified. An analysis of the influence and power of the participants over transitions between states is carried out, which indicates likely development paths in the conflict, from which conclusions can be drawn about both the likely outcomes, and about the actions which should be taken by a company to bring about preferred outcomes. Closing the Loop Feedback of information obtained by analysis and by contact with the real world back into the two structures described above allows examination of the effect of changing perspectives and the differing beliefs of participants. The application of the framework is shown through case studies examining thejustifiability and appropriateness of each of its elements and as a whole. These case studies cover both small and large companies, a variety of business conflict cases, both live and retrospective and draw on the recorded material in international relations for examples of non- . commercial conflict. Future development paths are identified for the concept

The causes of violent conflicts in Ethiopia in general, and in Gambella in particular, are complex. Critically examining and explaining the causes entails going beyond labelling them solely in terms of one variable, such as 'ethnic conflict‘. The contestation of the study is that contemporary conflicts in Ethiopia have remained protracted, untransformed and recurring. This is largely because the past processes which gave rise to them were not properly taken into account and not properly comprehended, thereby giving rise to much superficiality in their explanations, inappropriate policies and a failure of efforts at apprehending them. The thesis identifies four major factors and two contrasting narratives which have framed the analysis of conflict complexity in Gambella. Qualitatively designed, the study focuses mainly on the structural causes of violent conflicts since 1991 and how their constituent elements were conceived and explained by different actors. First, asymmetrical centre-periphery relations entrenched in the state building processes of the imperial and military regimes, continued under the present regime rendering Gambella an object of extraction and repression. Consequently, competing claims of ownership of Gambella between the Anywaa and the Nuer ethnic groups evolved entailing shifting allegiances to the central government. Second, ethnic politics of the new social contract ushered in a new thinking of ‗each ethnic group for itself‘; it made ethnic federalism a means of consolidating the regime‘s political philosophy, depriving the local community of a genuine political representation, leading to broader, deeper and more serious violence. Third, land policy of the incumbent favoured its political party affiliates and foreign investors, thus inducing more violence. Finally, external dynamics impacted on internal conflict complexity. The study has argued that single factor approaches are inadequate to explain what has constituted violent conflicts in Gambella since 1991; it has concluded that internal conflicts are complex, and their constituent elements are conceived of, and explained, differently by the local peoples and different levels of government. Nevertheless, given commitment and a political will, the local and national governments, as well as peoples at grassroots level, have the capacity to transform the present, and to prevent future violent conflicts in the region.

Yes

<p>“War Worlds” reads twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature to examine the social practices of marginal groups (pacifists, strangers, traitors, anticolonial rebels, queer soldiers) during the world wars. This dissertation shows that these diverse “enemies within” England and its colonies—those often deemed expendable for, but nonetheless threatening to, British state and imperial projects—provided writers with alternative visions of collective life in periods of escalated violence and social control. By focusing on the social and political activities of those who were not loyal citizens or productive laborers within the British Empire, “War Worlds” foregrounds the small group, a form of collectivity frequently portrayed in the literature of the war years but typically overlooked in literary critical studies. I argue that this shift of focus from grand politics to small groups not only illuminates surprising social fissures within England and its colonies but provides a new vantage from which to view twentieth-century experiments in literary form.</p> / Dissertation