Mammal species often live in social groups, but the factors that promote group cohesion can be difficult to analyze due to the prevalence of strong group affiliations. Feral horses maintain stable harems of one or two males and several females, and harem stability is strongly related to individual fitness. Anecdotal evidence and an early study in the non-breeding season suggest that management of the Shackleford Banks island horses with immunocontraception reduces harem stability in the population, providing an opportunity to study the factors that influence harem stability. I investigated the effects of the immunocontraceptive PZP on harem stability during the breeding season and examined mare activity budgets and harassment rates to determine if these factors influence harem stability. I hypothesized that 1) immunocontraception would increase the rates at which mares changed harems during the breeding season 2) activity budgets of contracepted individuals would differ significantly from those of uncontracepted individuals, and 3) contracepted mares would experience greater levels of harassment associated with changing harems than uncontracepted mares. I found that the immunocontraceptive does increase harem changes during the breeding season. I also found that contracepted mares have different activity budgets than uncontracepted mares; as predicted, contracepted mares grazed less and moved more than uncontracepted controls. The factors that influence mare activity budgets included immunocontraception, harem stallion, number of individuals in the harem, number of mares in the harem and body condition of the mare, as well as some interactions between factors. I found that high harassment rates by both harem stallions and other mares in the harem are correlated with higher harem change rates and that contracepted mares are harassed more than uncontracepted mares. These results indicate that the immunocontraceptive does influence harem stability in this feral horse population, potentially through alterations in activity budgets and harassment rates.

Student Number : 0401052V - MA research report - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / This research report analyzes the representation of violence in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and She Plays with the Darkness. Ways of Dying questions whether social stability and democracy would be fully realized in post-apartheid South Africa as is predicted in Black South African literature written between 1970 and 1994. Mda’s disillusionment is shown in his examination of undemocratic and violent practices committed within the liberation movement against the oppressed and of “black-on-black” violence in South Africa. She Plays with Darkness posits that political corruption and repression in Lesotho occurred as a result of the erosion of African values and traditions, which caused political leaders and the middleclass to dismiss the well-being of their society for personal gains. For Mda, however, societies and individuals can be redeemed from violence through memory, testimony, fantasy and art. Both novels reveal his endeavor to creatively narrate the experience of violence.

abstract: What causes social systems to resist change? Studies of the emergence of social complexity in archaeology have focused primarily on drivers of change with much less emphasis on drivers of stability. Social stability, or the persistence of social systems, is an essential feature without which human society is not possible. By combining quantitative modeling (Exponential Random Graph Modeling) and the comparative archaeological record where the social system is represented by networks of relations between settlements, this research tests several hypotheses about social and geographic drivers of social stability with an explicit focus on a better understanding of contexts and processes that resist change. The Valencian Bronze Age in eastern Spain along the Mediterranean, where prior research appears to indicate little, regional social change for 700 years, serves as a case study. The results suggest that social stability depends on a society’s ability to integrate change and promote interdependency. In part, this ability is constrained or promoted by social structure and the different, relationship dependencies among individuals that lead to a particular social structure. Four elements are important to constraining or promoting social stability—structural cohesion, transitivity and social dependency, geographic isolation, and types of exchange. Through the framework provided in this research, an archaeologist can recognize patterns in the archaeological data that reflect and promote social stability, or lead to collapse. Results based on comparisons between the social networks of the Northern and Southern regions of the Valencian Bronze Age show that the Southern Region’s social structure was less stable through time. The Southern Region’s social structure consisted of competing cores of exchange. This type of competition often leads to power imbalances, conflict, and instability. Strong dependencies on the neighboring Argaric during the Early and Middle Bronze Ages and contributed to the Southern Region’s inability to maintain social stability after the Argaric collapsed. Furthermore, the Southern Region participated in the exchange of more complex technology—bronze. Complex technologies produce networks with hub and spoke structures highly vulnerable to collapse after the destruction of a hub. The Northern Region’s social structure remained structurally cohesive through time, promoting social stability. / Dissertation/Thesis / Webpage with data tables and R code / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2020

This study investigates the subject of Muslims’ citizenship in contemporary Western European societies from the viewpoint of John Rawls’s political liberalism, in particular in light of the ‘idea of public reason’ [see John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) and the 1997 essay “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” originally published in University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997), 765-807 and now included in Political Liberalism, expanded edition, 440-490]. By its very nature, political liberalism does not prescribe a single model for being Muslim in contemporary Europe. Thus, one may wonder if it is too vague as a point of departure for the analysis. On the other hand, however, here I argue that political liberalism specifies a peculiar evaluative framework that allows citizens to answer questions such as “What is politically at stake when citizens of Muslim faith are publicly presented as permanent aliens in contemporary European societies?”, “On what grounds is such exclusion based?”, and “What requirements can European citizens be reasonably expected to meet?” in a distinctively political way and, ideally, to solve the political and social problems from which those questions spring. In this research, I claim that public reason provides a common discursive platform that establishes the ground for a public political identity and for shared standards for social and political criticism. Together, these two elements solve the two dimensions of the problem of ‘stability for the right reasons’ (in Rawls’s terms) in contemporary European societies, because they secure both the political inclusion of Muslims on an equal footing as citizens and civic assurance that they will remain committed to fair terms of social cooperation. A joint solution of these two apparently conflicting demands of stability for the right reasons (i.e. inclusion and mutual assurance) requires an effort in political reconciliation. After having compared public reason citizenship with two prominent normative alternatives, I will conclude that the former is an adequate ideal conception of citizenship for European societies. Finally, I will apply the justificatory evaluative methodological framework (whose requirements I will specify starting from the idea of public reason itself) to a conception of citizenship elaborated by one of the most renowned Muslim public intellectuals in Europe: Tariq Ramadan. (I justify the choice of this author in sections 2.3 and 6.1). Such an evaluation sheds light on one of the main insights of this research, that is, the idea that public reason makes a decompression of the public space possible: it frees the public space from those forces that would prevent citizens from the possibility of exercising effectively their two moral powers (once more in Rawls’s words, the ‘capacity for a sense of justice and for a conception of the good’) as free equals. In this sense, public reason tries to reconcile ideal political consensus and the fact of reasonable pluralism on a public political ground. I believe that this is the deepest meaning of what Rawls calls ‘reconciliation through public reason’: its aspiration is to reabsorb reasonable pluralism politically without annihilating it.This research is structured in three parts: the first is methodological, the second is reconstructive, and the third is evaluative. Each part is composed of two chapters.In chapter one (“General Framework”), I begin from some empirical observations about the role of perceptions and identities in relation to the issue of Muslims’ citizenship in contemporary Europe. I claim that from this point of view Islam seems to “make problem” in a very specific sense. This does not mean that Islam is a problem, but that Islam is frequently publicly presented and perceived as a problem. This is the background problem from which my work starts. Thus, I explore some dimensions of such a problem (see 1.1). Subsequently, I provide a more specific formulation of the research problem and questions and of the aims of this study. Then, the main research question (Q) is stated in these terms: Which ideal conception of citizenship should provide the common normative perspective in contemporary Western European societies, which are characterised by both demands of inclusion of Muslims and the need for solving a ‘problem of mutual assurance’ [on which, see in particular Paul Weithman, Why Political Liberalism? On John Rawls’s Political Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)] concerning citizens’ commitment to shared terms of social cooperation, so that those societies can be stable for the right reasons? In order to answer this question, I also specify three sub-questions that I call respectively Q1, Q2, and Q3 (see 1.2).In chapter two (“Toward a Justificatory Evaluative Political Theory”), I firstly try to frame the problem of public justification within Rawls’s political liberalism (see 2.1). I then consider a specific approach to the question of Muslim citizenship in liberal democracies which can be adopted from a Rawlsian perspective: namely, reasoning from conjecture (see 2.2). Finally, I explain my own approach (which I call justificatory evaluative political theory) by means of comparison with the method of reasoning from conjecture (see 2.3). In presenting the evaluative framework specified from a political liberal standpoint, I point out three political liberal evaluative requirements: the reciprocity requirement (RR), the consistency requirement (CR), and the civility requirement (CiR).Chapter three (“What is Public Reason?”) deals with the history of the notion of public reason from Kant to Rawls and its enunciation within Rawls’s work (see 3.1 and 3.2 respectively). In doing so, I also identify three specifications for the three political liberal evaluative requirements considered in the second chapter. Furthermore, in chapter three I also unpack CR in three different dimensions (PR1, PR2, and PR3).Chapter four (“Public Reason and Religion. Reinterpreting the Duty of Civility”) completes the reconstructive stage by analysing Rawls’s ‘wide view’ of public reason and two major lines of objection to it (see 4.1). After having discussed such criticisms, I then introduce my own interpretation of the ‘proviso,’ which is structured around a two-level (or bifurcate) model of the ‘duty of civility’ (see 4.2).Chapter five (“Reconciliation through Public Reason: Justificatory Evaluative Political Theory between Modelling and Application”) bridges the second and the third part, that is, the reconstructive and the evaluative stage respectively. In the first section of the chapter, I summarise the political liberal evaluative requirements developed in the second part. In doing this, my purpose is to present my justificatory evaluative model of public reason citizenship (see 5.1). In the second section, I firstly argue that a conception of citizenship grounded in public reason is not only possible in existing European societies, but also preferable if compared with alternative conceptions (I consider liberal multiculturalism and Cécile Laborde’s critical republicanism [Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)]) with reference to the problem under scrutiny in this research. In conclusion, I show that public reason citizenship is able to solve the theoretical problem and the main research question mentioned above: Which ideal conception of citizenship should provide the common normative perspective in contemporary Western European societies, which are characterised by both demands of inclusion of Muslims and the need for solving a problem of mutual assurance concerning citizens’ commitment to shared terms of social cooperation, so that those societies can be stable for the right reasons? In the final part of chapter five, I try to demonstrate that public reason citizenship can both include Muslim citizens and solve the assurance problem because it provides both shared standards for political criticism and a common political identity on the basis of which citizens politically recognise one another as free equals. If my argument succeeds, then public reason citizenship not only could but also should be adopted as the ideal conception of citizenship in European societies (see 5.2).In the sixth chapter (“Tariq Ramadan’s European Muslims and Public Reason”) I apply the evaluative framework based on public reason to the conception of citizenship for Muslims in Europe developed by Tariq Ramadan. (According to a principle introduced in chapter two which I call the “plausibility principle” PP, I argue that Ramadan’s theory of citizenship can be plausibly presented as a “European Muslim” approach to the issue of citizenship, see 6.1). The purpose of such an evaluative work is twofold. Firstly, it aims at examining whether and how the idea of public reason accounts for a version of European citizenship for Muslims coming from Muslims themselves. Secondly, it aims at disclosing whether what such a Muslim conception of citizenship in Europe says about the two dimensions of ‘stability for the right reasons’ of the system of social cooperation (namely, inclusion and ‘mutual assurance’) is consistent with the provisions of public reason citizenship (see 6.2-6.5). / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / N.B. 1) Le lieu de défense de la thèse en cotutelle est ROME (Luiss Guido Carli)2) L'affiliation du co-promoteur de la thèse en cotutelle (Sebastiano Maffettone) est: LUISS Guido Carli / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished