<p>The thesis examines continuity and change in the agrarian history of the Mwenezi District, southern Zimbabwe since 1980. It analyses agrarian reforms, agrarian practices and development initiatives in the district and situates them in the localised livelihood strategies of different people within the Dinhe Communa Area and the Mangondi resettlement Area in Lieu of the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) since 2000. The thesis also examines the livelihood opportunities and challenges presented by the FTLRP to the inhabitants of Mwenezi.The thesis contributes to the growing body of empirical studies on the impact of Zimbabwe's ongoing land reform programme and to debates and discourses on agrarian reform.</p>

This thesis focuses on the Governor of Wisconsin’s Hmong Resettlement Taskforce that was charged in 2004 with making policy recommendations for the State about a large resettlement of Hmong refugees. Through participant-observation, interviews, and document analysis, the process of policy formation by the Taskforce is examined. This empirical, ethnographic study depicts this taskforce as a group of cultural agents and its work as a cultural process. Findings in this thesis center on the taskforce report and the constraints on the narrative that limited possible recommendations.

This thesis analyses the return of the relocated Armenians and resettlement of them in former their hometowns between the years 1918 and 1920, with special reference to the relative archival materials. Upon the permission given for their return on the last days of the World War I, most of the relocated Armenians did return either with the help of the Ottoman government or by their own means. The first chapter of the thesis is devoted to the preliminary developments which were influential in taking of the return decision by the Ottoman government. The following chapter elaborates the return of the Armenians from the relocation residences to their former hometowns. In the third chapter, the resettlement process and the government&rsquo / s attempts for care of the returnees are examined. Because it was completed in the most disastrous years of the Ottoman Empire, the return of the Armenians properly reflects the postwar Ottoman panorama with its administrative, financial and social aspects. The postwar Allied interference with and pressures on the Empire are also observable through the return and resettlement processes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1969. / Corrigendum slips inserted. Col. map in pocket of v.3. Parallel title in Chinese. Typewritten. Also available on microfilm. Also availalbe in microfilm.

This dissertation explores the resettlement and integration of Iraqi refugees coming to the United States, and particularly to Austin, TX, from 2008-2012. On a broad level, it seeks to understand how peoples, organizations, and government actors combine to negotiate the controversial practice of third-country refugee resettlement. Data is drawn from 16 months of participant observation at a local refugee resettlement agency in Austin with Iraqi refugees and from one-on-one interviews with many of those refugees and with local agency service providers. The research seeks to explore what (and how) federal, state, and local policies shape the everyday resettlement and integration experiences of Iraqi refugees in Austin. In addition to policy and other structural obstacles in place in the current American resettlement paradigm, the dissertation also seeks to understand aspects of agency utilized by Iraqi refugees and how, if at all, cultural, social, and political factors contextualize and impact their experiences upon arrival to the United States and throughout their first few months in this country. The study finds that Iraqi refugees are highly impacted both by political and social structural issues already in place within the receiving society but also by cultural and social factors and frameworks which they “bring with them” from Iraq. The study also illustrates that the current literature on refugees underemphasizes refugees’ voices. These voices depict the experience of resettlement and integration in the United States as one where many feel a sense of being caught “between here and there” and constantly trying to “catch up with life” but without enough help, support, or guidance. The voices underscore the human experience and struggle of forced migration generally and specifically that of third country resettlement of Iraqi refugees to the United States. / text

This dissertation addresses gaps in anthropological knowledge about how reciprocity--and a specifically Andean form of reciprocity--works in disaster and resettlement settings. This study looks at the practices of reciprocity in a disaster-affected community (Manzano) and a disaster-induced resettlement (Pusuca) in the Andean highlands of Ecuador. Specifically, it examines two aspects of reciprocal exchange practices in these sites. It first looks at some of the factors that affect the continuity of reciprocal exchange practices, which other studies have found to play a vital role in recovery from disasters and resettlement. It then looks to the roles of unequal power relations in the practices of reciprocity and a particularly Andean form of reciprocity and cooperative labor, the minga. The study identifies power-laden dynamics in the practice of reciprocity that tend to be overlooked in studies of social support and mutual aid in disasters and resettlements. I argue that these dynamics are critical to an examination of reciprocity in these contexts because they have important implications for the distribution of relief and development resources. This study employed an iterative, mixed-method, 3-phase research strategy in the recursive discovery and corroboration of analytical domains and the evaluation of study hypotheses. In the first phase, exploratory observation, key informant interviews, and archival searches identified specific terms, practices, and events in order to design effective structured interview questions. In the second phase, I administered structured interviews to obtain quantitative indicators of reciprocal exchanges between group members, distribution of development benefits and collective resources, and occupational and socioeconomic data. In the third phase, I conducted focused observation and documentation of participation in decision-making, plus patterns of influence in public negotiations of development strategies and aid allocation. The expectation of hypothesis 1 was that wage employment and residential distance would be negatively associated with minga participation. The results were mixed between the two sites. In Manzano, wage employment was not significantly associated with records of minga participation, but there was a significant negative correlation with residential distance and minga participation. In Pusuca, there were significant negative correlations with wage employment and residential distance with records of minga participation. The expectation of hypothesis 2 was that household exchange participation would be positively associated with minga participation. Multiple tests of the association between household minga attendance and total household exchange participation found positive associations between these two variables in Manzano, but not in Pusuca. For hypothesis 3a, the expectation was that total household exchange participation would be positively associated with brokerage and decision-making power and statistical tests found a significant positive correlation between these variables in both sites. The implication is that one way that politically powerful individuals exercise and maintain their power is through forming reciprocal exchange ties. Those with more ties are more likely to act as brokers between their neighbors and scarce aid and development resources and more likely to have their views and agendas supported in local decision-making processes. Hypothesis 3b tests the assumption that households connected through reciprocal exchange relations to highly connected households access a greater share of relief and development resources than others. Statistical tests indicated a significant positive association between being connected to highly connected households and project benefit inclusion in both sites. This suggests that it is not only the powerful that access scarce extra-local resources, but also their less connected allies, which can be taken as evidence of privileged inclusion as a form of power in both sites. This study contributes to anthropological knowledge about the political economy of reciprocity in disaster-induced resettlements in two ways. First, it looks more broadly at the range of factors that could influence the continuity or disruption of practices of cooperation and reciprocal exchange in resettlement than other studies, which focuses on the narrow influence of policy practice. In this study, I draw on the economic anthropology of reciprocity and posit a possible role of wider political economic processes--growing integration into the capitalist wage labor economy--as an added explanatory factor for the dissolution of reciprocal exchange relations in post-disaster and resettlement contexts. The second way in which I seek to build upon these studies is by foregrounding the ways in which power relations are bound up in reciprocal exchange relations.

This thesis presents a qualitative study of the experiences of a sample of Afghan refugees who have settled in Canada. The concepts of structure and agency, as articulated in Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory have been deployed as the theoretical framework of this study. I focus on the concept of culture, as both an “enabling” and “constraining” structure and the role it plays in the life of the refugees who form the study group for this thesis. The interviews explore how the respondents use culture as a means to express and explore their agency. Several themes emerge from the interviews, which are analyzed in dialogue with the literature on refugee and immigrant settlement. In light of the research findings, the role of the refugees in Canadian immigration policy is discussed, and it is suggested that there is room for a broader and more comprehensive role for refugees within national policy. / The settlement experience of Afghan refugees in Halifax, Nova Scotia

<p>The thesis examines continuity and change in the agrarian history of the Mwenezi District, southern Zimbabwe since 1980. It analyses agrarian reforms, agrarian practices and development initiatives in the district and situates them in the localised livelihood strategies of different people within the Dinhe Communa Area and the Mangondi resettlement Area in Lieu of the Fast-Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) since 2000. The thesis also examines the livelihood opportunities and challenges presented by the FTLRP to the inhabitants of Mwenezi.The thesis contributes to the growing body of empirical studies on the impact of Zimbabwe's ongoing land reform programme and to debates and discourses on agrarian reform.</p>

This thesis is an ethnographic study of place-making in a war-altered landscape. It describes over a decade of resettlement efforts in a village in northwest Cambodia. As war drew to a close in the late 1990s, land on the former frontlines was allotted to those willing to risk occupancy on possibly mined terrain. Area resettlement was driven by need, forged by hope, and fraught with physical risk and material dangers. Food security and the prospect of acquiring land rights required settlers’ physical presence in and active engagement with the materialities of a forested landscape strewn with the remnants of war and the ruins of earlier settlements. Residents' conceptual and corporeal engagements with place were influenced by longstanding Khmer depictions of the srok, the ordered and cultivated landscape of agriculture and human dwelling, and the prai, the wild and fecund landscape of the forest, replete with powerful but often malevolent spirits. The srok was the landscape that the inhabitants of Handsome village longed to dwell within and struggled to create. The area’s pre-war reputation as a famously fertile agricultural zone had drawn many of its residents to risk the hazards of resettlement. The dream of the srok drove residents' actions in the actively dangerous, ever fluctuating terrain. In addition to being envisioned, the place was intimately known and directly experienced through the corporeal bodies of its inhabitants and their engagements with its material assemblages. Making the srok involved arduous physical effort in a constantly shifting material environment along with concentrated social and conceptual work. Resettlement did not merely entail hewing fields out of forests and removing mines and ordnance, but also encompassed attempts to transition into peacetime—to move from soldiering to farming, to come to rest after years of mobility and displacement, and to recreate social and moral order. This study analyzes successes and failures in place-making processes, illustrating how different aspects of landscape posed both affordances and constraints to these processes. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which material assemblages contributed to uncertainty in place-making efforts, illustrating that the material dimensions of landscape may resist as much as they acquiesce to human alteration. On a material level, place-making was a struggle that pitted human agency and will against an active and agentive landscape. Village residents were interacting with material environs in a constant state of change and becoming. The unsettling material traces of the past and the continuing threat some remnants posed in the present contributed to the ongoing indeterminacy residents experienced about the state and contents of the once famous ground. The landscape that residents sought to form and fix was always in danger of undoing its formation and categorization and revealing itself to be something else. Yet despite their failures at establishing and fixing the srok in the constantly shifting landscape of Handsome village, residents maintained their quest to transform the present configuration of place into the landscape and the future that they desired.

This thesis examines the complexities in the resettlement of Bhutanese refugees. Using anthropological ethnographic field methods, this thesis explores the power dynamics between the employees of a resettlement organization and the refugees and the intricate webs of power within different institutions, such as local NGOs and healthcare institutions. The study argues that humanitarian actions and interventions are often driven by bureaucratic politics and policies that contradict what humanitarianism stands for as apolitical and value-neutral. These contradictions or paradoxes in humanitarianism also are also present in refugee resettlement. Analyzing these paradoxes that characterize resettlement, this thesis illuminates structural discontinuities or gaps that result from differences in expectations between the refugees and the employees of resettlement organization. Drawing on analyses of the paradoxes and complexities in resettlement, the study concludes that bureaucratic management of refugees reinforces social inequalities and hierarchies of power that masks state’s responsibility towards both the refugees and local NGOs making resettlement an unsettling process.