Resilience and post trauma responses often coexist, however, for the past decades, the trauma paradigm has served as the dominant explanatory framework for human suffering in post-conflict environments, while the resilience of individuals and communities affected by mass violence has not been given equal prominence. Consequently, mental health interventions in post-conflict zones often fail to respond to local realities and are ill equipped to foster local strengths. Drawing primarily from trauma, feminist and structural violence theories, this study strengthens understanding of adult resilience to traumatic exposure by examining the resilience of Quechua women in the aftermath of the political violence in Peru (1980-2000), and their endurance of racially and gender-targeted violence. The study uses a cross sectional survey to examine the resilience and posttraumatic responses of 151 Quechua women. Participants were recruited from an urban setting and three rural villages in Ayacucho, Peru. The study examines the associations between resilience, past exposure to violence, current life stress and post-trauma related symptoms as well as the individual and community factors associated with the resilience of Quechua women. In doing so, this study makes a unique contribution by simultaneously examining posttraumatic responses and resilience in a post-conflict society, an area with a dearth of research. Results indicate that resilience was not associated with overall posttraumatic stress related symptoms, but instead higher resilience was associated with lower level of avoidance symptoms and therefore with lesser likelihood of chronic symptoms. Findings also demonstrate that enhanced resilience was associated with women’s participation in civic associations, as well as being a returnee of mass displacement. Lower resilience was instead associated with lower levels of education, absence of income generated from a formal employment and the experience of sexual violence during the conflict. These results were triangulated with qualitative findings, which show that work, family, religion, and social participation are enhancing factors of resilience. The study highlights the courage and resilience of Quechua women despite persistent experiences of everyday violence. The importance to situate trauma and resilience within historical processes of oppression and social transformation as well as other implications for social work practice and research are discussed.

<p>\abstract</p><p>This dissertation seeks to explain the role of governmental and non-governmental actors in increasing/reducing the emergence of intergroup conflict after war, when group differences have been a salient aspect of group mobilization. This question emerges from several interrelated branches of scholarship on self-enforcing institutions and power-sharing arrangements, group fragmentation and demographic change, collective mobilization for collectively-targeted violence, and conflict termination and the post-conflict quality of peace. This question is investigated through quantitative analyses performed at the sub-national, national, and cross-national level on the effect of elite competition on the likelihood of violence committed on the basis of group difference after war. These quantitative analyses are each accompanied by qualitative, case study analyses drawn from the American Reconstruction South, Iraq, and Cote d'Ivoire that illustrate and clarify the mechanisms evaluated through quantitative analysis. </p><p>Shared findings suggest the correlation of reduced political competition with the increased likelihood of violence committed on the basis of group difference. Separate findings shed light on how covariates related to control over rent extraction and armed forces, decentralization, and citizenship can lead to a reduction in violence. However, these same quantitative analyses and case study analysis suggest that the control of the state can be perceived as a threat after the end of conflict. Further, together these findings suggest the political nature of violence committed on the basis of group difference as opposed to ethnic identity or resource scarcity alone. </p><p>Together, these combined analyses shed light on how and why political identities are formed and mobilized for the purpose of committing political violence after war. In this sense, they shed light on the factors that constrain post-conflict violence in deeply divided societies, and contribute to relevant academic, policy, and normative questions.</p> / Dissertation

s can play their most useful role only after the state is able to contain the radicals and secure conditions that are congenial for views different from those of radicals to be expressed. / India Ministry of Defense author (civilian).

This study develops a model of different types of political regime changes and their effect on life integrity violations. The data covers 147 countries from 1977-1993. Basic bivariate analyses and multivariate pooled cross-sectional time series analyses employing Ordinary Least Squares regression with panel-corrected standard errors are used. The results show that political regime change in general has no effect on state-sponsored violence. Looking at different types of regime changes, the regression analysis indicates that change from democracy to anocracy is positively correlated with levels of repression at the level of p < .001. A change toward democracy from autocracy is negatively related to human rights violations at the level of p < .01, once relevant control variables are considered.

As South Africa’s struggle against apartheid entered its final, turbulent decade, African students and youth rose to the forefront of the liberation movement, engaging in non-violent protest and militant confrontation with the apartheid state. In the existing historiography, the “comrades” – as young activists were known – are predominantly depicted as male, with little attention paid to the experiences of politicised girls and young women. This thesis is the first extensive study of South Africa’s female comrades, focused on activists from the township of Soweto. In analysing the experiences of young female activists, it introduces their voices into male-dominated historical narratives, and complicates and challenges existing histories of gender, generation, identity, and political violence in late-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on oral history interviews with former comrades, the thesis provides new insight into why girls joined the struggle, what roles they played, how they were treated by their male comrades, and their experiences of political detention. It argues that the struggle, despite being a male-dominated arena, could provide girls with a sense of agency and empowerment at a time when girls’ lives were otherwise marked by their confinement to the private sphere, social subordination, and susceptibility to sexual violence. Thus, just as the struggle offered young men a means of asserting their masculinity, so too did it offer young women a means of challenging emphasised femininities and constructing oppositional gender identities that defied social expectations and limitations of traditional girlhood. Additionally, this thesis improves current understandings of girls’ experiences of conflict on a global scale by challenging widely held assumptions of girls’ predisposition to peaceful behaviour and lack of political agency. In so doing it places Soweto’s female comrades within broader narratives of liberation movements across Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. This thesis thus makes an important and original contribution not just to South African history, but also to histories of nationalism and liberation movements, feminist conflict studies, and girlhood studies.

El periodo de violencia política en el Perú dejó una serie de secuelas psicosociales que afectaron en mayor medida a cierto grupo de la población. A los indultados por los delitos de terrorismo y traición a la patria se les reconoció como legalmente inocentes después de pasar años en prisión. Objetivo: Describir la relación entre la resiliencia y el autoconcepto personal en indultados por el delito de terrorismo y traición a la patria, quienes son parte de la población afectada por la violencia política en el Perú. Método: La muestra está conformada por 34 indultados y se les administró la Escala de Resiliencia (ER) y el Cuestionario de Autoconcepto Personal (APE). Resultados: Se encuentra una correlación positiva significativa y de magnitud moderada entre resiliencia y el componente Autorrealización e Integridad del autoconcepto personal (r = .657, p < .001). Conclusiones: La elaboración emocional de la vivencia de los indultados necesita ser trabajada para poder integrarla con las percepciones positivas. / The period of political violence in Peru left a series of psychosocial consequences that affected a certain group of the population to a greater extent. Those pardoned for the crimes of terrorism and treason were recognized as legally innocent after spending years in prison. Objective: To describe the relationship between resilience and personal self-concept in those pardoned for the crime of terrorism and treason, who are part of the population affected by political violence in Peru. Method: The sample consisted of 34 pardoned who were administered the Resilience Scale (ER) and the Personal Self-concept Questionnaire (APE). Results: There is a significant positive correlation of moderate magnitude between resilience and the Self-realization and Integrity component of personal self-concept (r = .657, p <.001). Conclusions: The emotional elaboration of the experience of the pardoned ones needs to be worked so that it can be integrated with the positive perceptions.

The agrarian conflict in the Aguán Valley of Honduras is among the most violent and distressing in contemporary Latin America. It has roots in both local and global political economic processes, including structural adjustment and the proliferation of neoliberal economic policies in the region. In particular, the Ley de Modernización y Desarrollo del Sector Agrícola, or Law of Modernization and Development of the Agricultural Sector, drastically altered the landscape in rural Honduras, both literally and figuratively. An analysis of this policy reveals much about the nature of the current conflict, as well as that of the campesino (small farmer) movements that have organized to regain their land. This thesis seeks to shed light on the interconnectedness of economic policy, political violence, and popular resistance in the Aguán Valley and to examine the ways in which campesino movements frame their struggles and assert themselves as legitimate actors in the policy realm.

This thesis outlines the perception of homegrown political violence in The United States during the 1970s, as personified by the Symbionese Liberation Army, through a reconstruction and analysis of the critical narratives used to ascribe meaning to them contemporaneously. Scholarship thus far has failed to recognize the importance of this group, dismissing their ineffectual actions and ideology rather than recognizing the broader importance of their cultural permeation. Although the SLA was informed by juvenile political awareness and characterized by largely ineffective revolutionary actions, the failure by most historians of the period to address the form and function of their ubiquitous public image has contributed to the groundless historical assumption that the political violence of the early 1970s was no more than the inevitable result of the personal and political self-indulgences of the 1960s. This misconception has thus far preempted meaningful analysis of this chapter of unprecedented American political violence and the American public's first interaction with political extremism, articulated through civilian casualties, bombings, kidnapping, and the co-option of print and broadcast media. This experience, and particularly the way in which the SLA was portrayed at that time, contributed to the construction of simplistic dichotomies and vague explanations for political violence that were used contemporaneously to delegitimize protest by the left and justify the governmental abuse of civil liberties and have carried through largely unchanged to public discourse today. A careful analysis of the construction and reception of the SLA's meaning is therefore essential to a more lucid understanding of the times. Accordingly, the goal of this thesis is to reconstruct and analyze the narratives of the SLA in order to understand their role in American culture and 1970s political violence and ultimately to chart their loss of agency and the devaluation of their meaning in both history and public memory.

By the 1960s violence became institutionalized in modern Jamaican politics. This endemic violence fostered an unstable political environment that developed out of a symbiotic relationship between Jamaican labor organizations and political violence. Consequently, the political process was destabilized by the corrosive influence of partisan politics, whereby party loyalists dependent on political patronage were encouraged by the parties to defend local constituencies and participate in political conflict. Within this system the Jamaican general election process became ominous and violent, exemplifying how limited political patronage was dispersed among loyal party supporters. This dissertation examines the role of the political parties and how they mobilized grassroot supporters through inspirational speeches, partisan ideology, complex political patronage networks, and historic party platform issues from 1940 through 1980. The dissertation argues that the development of Jamaican trade unionism and its corresponding leadership created the political framework out of which Jamaica's two major political parties, the Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) and People's National Party (PNP) emerged. Within the evolution of their support base Jamaican politicians such as Alexander Bustamante utilized their influence over local constituencies to create a garrison form of mobilization that relied heavily upon violence. By investigating the social and political connection between local politicians and violence, this dissertation examines how events such as the Henry Rebellion in 1960, the 1978 Green Bay Massacre, and the public murder of the PNP candidate Roy McGann in 1980 demonstrate the failure of traditional Jamaican political patronage to control extremist violence among grassroot supporters, giving rise to a general public dissatisfaction with the established Jamaican leadership. This transformation of the political system resulted in the institutionalization of political violence by the late 1960s, and a pattern of general elections destabilized by vicious conflicts between JLP and PNP gangs. This political violence was reflected in the rise of gang dons such as Jim Brown and Wayne "Sandokhan" Smith who became independent of the patronage system through their exploitation of the drug trade. Consequently, modern Jamaican politics in the twenty-first century is fractured and local political leaders have lost control of the gangs.

On Violence and Tyranny examines historiography as a vehicle for the production of a theory of tyrannicide in the aftermath of the murder of Pedro I de Castilla (1369). The thesis of this work is that by considering the royal chronicle as a vehicle and locus for political theorization, we can appreciate the formulation of a theory of tyrannicide as a medium for dynastic legitimation that is not reducible to political propaganda. Rather, it becomes a meditation about monarchy itself, the limits of power, and the underlying causes and consequences of political violence. The chronicle of the king Pedro's rule conceives an economy of violence coded in terms of saber (political wisdom), justice and the law, as a means to face the ideological, political, and social challenges that civil war and regicide pose to a community. I will focus on two fragments of the chronicle, a pair of letters attributed to a wise Moor that the chronicler chose to include in a second stage of his composition and that establish extra textual connections to other political genres such as the specula principum and political prophecy. Through them, I will explore how a theory of tyrannicide allows the chronicler to confront three major problems that regicide poses. First, how to explicate the dynastic break that king Pedro’s murder brought about, and minimize the discontinuity that the advent of a new, and illegitimate, dynasty (the Trastámaras) represented for a historical tradition that deeply valued the continuity of history. Second, how a theory of tyrannicide served to repair the broken ties provoked by the civil war. And third, how to represent that founding violence, the violence against a sovereign, to render it legitimate, but not available for anyone else to exploit.