This thesis reviews the potential contributions of the United States Air Force to stabilization and reconstruction operations. Specifically, the Air Force's On-Scene Commanders Course and Air Force Mission Support Group Commanders are assessed as potential Air Force assets that could be employed in stabilization and reconstruction operations. This research will determine the course's ability to satisfy key needs identified in the post-conflict literature and if the course would be useful for other U.S. agencies with responsibilities in post-conflict operations. Finally, this paper asks if Mission Support Group Commanders can provide critical skill-sets valuable in stability operations. This work will assess the applicability of these Air Force leaders' duties for possible use in post-conflict operations by reviewing the Air Force's Objective Wing Structure and duty histories of current and former Mission Support Group Commanders. / US Air Force (USAF) author.

Thesis (M.Admin.(Public Administration)) -- University of Pretoria, 2008. / Abstract in English. Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: Freie Universität Berlin, Diss., 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Royal Institute of Technology, 2004. / Errata sheet inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis and M.A. in Security Studies (Security Stabilization and Reconstruction))--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2007. / Title from title screen (viewed Feb. 5, 2008). Thesis Advisor(s): Guttieri, Karen ; Simons, Anna. "September 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-122). Also available in print.

Since the late 1980s Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes have been an integral part of post-conflict reconstruction. This was especially true of Sierra Leone's post-conflict reconstruction which has frequently been hailed a 'multilateral success story' by the international community. Nevertheless, within Western-authored DDR literature there is a widespread but little interrogated assertion that, in post-conflict contexts, resettling former child soldiers with their families is always the best option for social reintegration. Family members, it is argued, are most able to provide the psychosocial support that former child soldiers require in order to successfully make the transition to civilian life in the aftermath of war. Using an interdisciplinary and multi-method approach and drawing on empirical research undertaken in Sierra Leone, this thesis questions the universality of this assumption. The thesis analyses conceptual understandings of family and childhood in DDR policy and locally in Sierra Leone focusing on their implications for child soldier reintegration. It also examines the immediate and long-term effects of DDR's policy of family reintegration for child soldiers' social reintegration with a view to determining whether the current approach is indeed always 'in the best interests of the child'. Finally, the thesis examines the effect of local family dynamics on the wider post-conflict reconstruction effort and vice versa. The thesis findings suggest that whilst the policy of family reunification in child soldier DDR has a number of benefits, it may also lay the foundations for renewed conflict in the future by reifying certain contentious pre-war power structures.

This dissertation argues that the operating temporal logic at the core of the state sanctioned models of forgiveness and reconciliation is a view of the past as apocalyptic in the future. The past as an apocalyptic imaginary hovers over the present like a ghost threatening repetition. In this political conception of the past, it is not simply a matter of chronology i.e. genocide and its aftermath. Rather, in the injunction to overcome the past through continuous remembrance, the past is made agentive in the present. This animation of the past in the present renders it continually dangerous lest it return as the future: the present must be continually mobilized, watchful and cautious so that the violent past does not return as the future. This temporal logic is reflected in the juridical demand for apologies and pardons, as mandated by the Rwandan state. The state attempts to control both ends of the equation: it demands collective catharsis on the grounds that without it Rwanda cannot overcome its past, but it simultaneously fixes in advance, and by law, the outcome of catharsis: forgiveness and reconciliation. Using fieldwork, individual and group interviews conducted in labour camps for perpetrators (Travaux d'Intérêt Général) as well as participant observation in 'unity' associations (cooperatives), this dissertation demonstrates how this model for apologies and reconciliation collapses under the weight of the internal contradiction of both demanding catharsis and controlling its result: the necessity for reconciliation. Individuals publicly perform a demonstration of affect that they circumvent and push against in their everyday experiences away from the audience. When the performances themselves fail—as they do on occasion—the language of ‘trauma’ (in the case of the victim) and ‘genocide denial’ (in the case of the perpetrators) is mobilized in order to secure the impossible demand to perform private feelings in public ceremonies wherein the meaning of such performances is juridically defined in advance. The result, I argue, are public scenes of unity, in which individuals perform a socially shared code of acting in public that they often push against away from an audience. In their lives, Rwandans constantly wrestle with this past and its traces in the everyday, sometimes in accordance to the public narrative of reconciling but also in opposition to it. There is in other words messiness on the ground, which suggests that the predominant models for thinking about post-conflict spaces along the binaries reconciliation or violence miss this complexity. I propose, the notion of an afterlife of violence as a conceptual tool. This allows us to move away from the possibility of resolvability and redemptive narratives and instead opens up the possibility of irresolvabilty: that of living with tension.

Thesis (M.S. in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy)--Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2008. / Title from PDF title page; viewed on Nov. 26, 2008. "4 April 2008." Electronic version of original print document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-86).

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-127). Also available via the World Wide Web.

This dissertation examines a key transformation in the history of Jewish nationalism in the 1940s - the decline of autonomist visions in Jewish national thought oriented toward Jewish life as a minority community in Eastern Europe, and the emergence of a Jewish ethnic-nation state in Palestine as the dominant mode of Jewish national expression. The main argument advanced in this dissertation is that this shift cannot be explained exclusively as a Jewish response to the Holocaust, but ought to situated as part of the larger process of the homogenization of the nation- state in East Central Europe during the war and in its immediate aftermath through genocide and ethnic cleansing, population transfers and the rejection of international norms regarding the protection of minorities. Drawing on a variety of archival and published sources in Hebrew, Yiddish and English, this study reconstructs the vibrant Jewish postwar planning scene in New- York, Palestine and London. From the start of the war tens of Jewish leaders and scholars, many whom had bee recent refugees from Europe, turned to plan for the Jewish future after the war. This dissertation examines how these Jewish leaders and thinkers grappled with the question of the future of the Jews as they debated whether Jews would be able reintegrate into Eastern Europe after the war, learned about the extermination of European Jewry and observed the ethnic transformation of the multiethnic East Central European landscape through wartime and postwar population transfers and ethnic cleansing.