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After ¡§911 Attack¡¨ in 2001, every place in the world suffered destructive attack by terrorists one after another. It caused not only heavy casualties but also a shock to the international society. Religious fanaticism and technology misuse has made terror actions be serious threat to world stability and peace. United Nations Security Council not only critically condemned terror brutalities but also appealed to every member for urgent cooperation to prevent terrorist attack together and punish those who sponsor, plan, prepare for, and support terrorists; legislation sanction against terror actions has become the common consensus of the international society. Viewing the current achievements of countering terrorism, applying military strikes invariably still cannot completely solve this problem effectively. It must trace its source through knowing what problems happened in the society and how to make the most proper adjustment to cruxes of problems by means of double examination, ¡§Efficiency¡¨ and ¡§Rationality,¡¨ plus negotiation of every aspect of politics to enact the law, which conforms to principles of economy. There were a few actions of international terrorists in our country in the past, but we must have the attitude of playing the percentages and draft policies and complete laws in advance to response. At present, our country plans to finish the draft of ¡§Counter-terrorism Act,¡¨ providing the legal foundation of punishing terror actions and plan to set up a chartered counter-terrorism institute by the government to respond to significant terrorist attack. The research of our legal system of counter-terrorism is to discuss how to reach the balance between maintaining national security and protecting human rights by following the basic theory of administrative laws¡Ðprinciple, organization, authority, remedy, and supervision as the foundation of the thesis, and citing professor DENG, Syue-liang¡¦s academic quotation theory. In the light of every research structure, the research made correct description of crucial meaning of the system and explored the merits and demerits in the course of applying the legal system with objective explanation of its administrative measures and personal cognition, and brought up suggestions for follow-up researchers as reference.

Harold Pinter is deeply intrigued by Franz Kafka&rsquo / s fiction. Both writers&rsquo / works are imbued with ambiguity or mystery, and the feelings of disintegration, evasiveness, and domination. The atmosphere of menace and terror permeate their works. Kafka&rsquo / s fiction is characterized by the existence of an invisible guilt, a prevailing sense of ambivalence and the impossibility to obtain knowledge from the omnipotent sources. The mainspring of menace in Pinter is usually the outside forces, which are latent and invisible. In Pinter&rsquo / s violent dramatic world, the individuals are subjected to an unreasonable treatment of torture, imprisonment and dehumanization. His recurrent theme of torture is in fact traceable to Kafka&rsquo / s themes of punishment and execution. The characters can find comfort neither in their physical surroundings nor in an understanding relationship with others, and finally they are driven into a state of disintegration of self-image. Man&rsquo / s predicament is reflected in a layered manner, embarking on his relationship with the outside world, and then moving towards his inner anguish about the self. This study focuses on the common aspects of the two literary figures in terms of the concept of menace. The sense of menace is reflected in certain human feelings like fear, insecurity and hopelessness. Menace may appear in a number of ways including physical, psychological and mental ways. However, the characters, in both Kafka&rsquo / s and Pinter&rsquo / s works, make use of some defense mechanisms to cope with menace. Evasiveness and inaction are efficient in situations where the dominant character exerts his power by means of the information obtained through questioning the victim. Pinter&rsquo / s characters also remain silent to protect themselves from the torture and violence exerted by the mechanism. The characters also question the system to gain insight to its true nature. Lastly, the individuals seek relief in self-delusion and denial of reality as the reality itself is essentially ruthless. All these coping strategies, however, prove fruitless in the end, and both Kafka&rsquo / s and Pinter&rsquo / s characters become a victim of unspecified menace.

The present study tested the mortality salience (MS) hypothesis of Terror Management Theory (TMT) on attitudes towards allowance of headscarf in the universities. Sample of the current study consisted of 208 university students. Religious, secular and liberal views were evaluated by participants. The results of 2 (Attitude: Supporters, Opponents) X 2 (Condition: Mortality salience, Control) ANOVAs showed that despite the lack of significant main effect of condition and interaction effect, MS tended to lead supporters of headscarf to evaluate both religious and secular essay more favorably but the liberal essay less favorably. On the contrary, opponents of headscarf tended to become supportive of the secular essay but critical of the religious and liberal essay following MS. Findings were discussed considering past literature and alternative theoretical perspectives.

<p>The purpose of this study is twofold: First, to inquire how the George W. Bush administration plans to keep America safe from external threats and second – based on the assumption that neoconservatives have influenced the Bush administration – examine how neoconservative ideas have influenced this strategy to protect America. The research questions are as follows:</p><p>What is the content of the Bush administration’s security strategy?</p><p>How are neoconservative ideas reflected in this security strategy?</p><p>To answer the first question, the main points of two studied documents were summarized. The summarized documents were the two versions of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America that the George W Bush administration has released during its tenure. These documents state the official security strategy of the United States and give a general view over the threats against America and how the administration plans to deal with these threats. To answer the second question the author studied literature about neoconservatism and gained valuable knowledge about the neoconservatives, which resulted in the creation of an analyzing instrument. This analyzing instrument was later applied on the empirical material that was gathered by answering the first question and in turn answered the second question.</p><p>The result of the study is that the Bush administration believes that by spreading freedom and fighting tyranny around the world, America will become safer. To accomplish this, the administration will employ the full array of political, economic, diplomatic and other tools at their disposal. Neoconservative influences on the strategy were found repeatedly – one of the most obvious influences being the administration’s adoption of the principle of preemptive strikes against enemies.</p>

The interlocked social struggles waged by overlapping and diverse Britons of color for racial and social equality and everyday survival is the dynamic corollary of the contradictions engendered by the ruling relations of racial differentiation and racism in Britain. Grassroots struggles against routine racist violence and state violence, conceptualized as politically interlinked, are the critical sites that contribute to the recursive racial domination experienced by Britons of color in contemporary Britain, and forms the key ethnographic research focus of this study. Prior studies have already critiqued the dominant state framework of viewing racist violence as random, de-racialized and nonpolitical events – as individual incidents, neighborhood disputes, inter-personal conflict, and robberies gone wrong. These studies have alternately identified the social dehumanizing functions of racist violence, the possessive local white territorialism that they materially support and their relationship with macro-level socio-economic crises and changing racial exclusion ideologies of the liberal democratic nation. What I add to these studies is the argument that the racial subordination and ruling relations inherent in the social processes of racist violence and, by formal extension, state violence are not only derivative of broader ideological forces or local social relations but are in fact constitutive of white racial state formation in Britain’s postcolonial era. I argue that the processes of racist violence and state violence are productive of the domination and hierarchy that is secured for whites, through unevenly empowered and routinized contestations within the re-configurations of white racial state formation and an emergent neoliberal-multicultural national security state. It is within this framework of analysis that the politics of black mobilization by Britons of color and their allies, in the context of contemporary multiculturalism’s contradictions, and against the many-sided form of racial subordination is made legible -- not as an anachronism -- but as socially meaningful, interlocked and politically urgent. / text

This thesis focuses on the importance of truth and memory in the process of transitional justice, within the context of the aftermath of gross violations of human rights that occurred during the military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 in Argentina. The military junta that ruled Argentina took power under the pretext of national security, arguing that an enemy threatened to destabilize and destroy Argentine society. During the period of the military dictatorship an estimated 30,000 people "disappeared"; relatives of those disappeared mobilized and formed human rights organizations to confront the military regime for its abuses. Once the dictatorship collapsed and democratic rule was reestablished these human rights organizations changed their focus, mobilizing once again to find their missing relatives, learn the truth, and prosecute those responsible of any crimes. A series of amnesty laws and pardons protected the perpetrators of many of the crimes of the military regime through most of the 1990's, until in 2005 the Argentine Supreme Court declared those laws unconstitutional. During the period before the 2005 ruling human rights organizations worked hard to gather the truth about the crimes of the military regime and ensure these crimes were not forgotten. Their initiatives included the famous weekly march to the Plaza de Mayo by members of Madres (Mothers), one of the most important human rights organizations in Argentina; escraches (reveal what is hidden) and public protests by HIJOS (Sons and daughters of the disappeared), actions in which members of HIJOS would go to the houses of known members of the military juntas and protest at their front doors; and programs to find missing grandchildren by Abuelas (Grandmothers), a human rights organization dedicated to searching for the missing children of the disappeared; and others. Because of the structure of terror during the military junta, most Argentines did not know exactly what was happening to the missing persons, and they were afraid to ask. The truth gathering initiatives and the official report of the commission charged with investigating the junta, CONADEP, came into being in response to this lack of knowledge. They helped to inform the Argentine people and the new generations of what had happened during the military dictatorship in hopes of making sure that such abuses do not occur again.

Over 20 years of research on terror management theory has demonstrated that reminders of death (mortality salience; MS) heighten individuals' investment in prioritized bases of value and meaning. Research in this vein has shown that MS intensifies people's efforts to demonstrate personal value on tasks relevant to their self-esteem ("self-esteem striving"). Though much work illustrates that such responses function to mitigate death-related concerns, to date no work has directly assessed the particular regulatory mechanisms that implement MS-induced self-esteem striving. The present study aimed to do so by measuring neural indices of performance monitoring. During a tasked framed as diagnostic of self-esteem relevant attributes, participants were randomly assigned to receive subliminal primes of the word death or of control terms. Response-locked brain signals were recorded to assess reactivity to correct and incorrect responses during the task. Results showed that death-primed (vs. control) participants exhibited greater neural reactivity following error commission as indexed by larger amplitude of the Error Related Negativity (ERN). Death-primed (vs. control) participants also exhibited intensified behavioral efforts to improve their performance following error commission (i.e., post-error slowing, post-error accuracy), effects that were likely mediated by the activity of neural mechanisms that generate the ERN. Furthermore, among death-primed participants, behavioral improvements on the self-esteem relevant task correlated with attenuations in death thought accessibility. Receiving death primes did not influence neural reactivity to correct responses (Correct Related Negativity; CRN) nor did it heighten a neural index of explicit error awareness (Error Positivity; Pe). Together these findings suggest that MS-induced self-esteem striving is implemented via automatic monitoring and avoidance of errors. The role of avoidance motivation in self-esteem striving is thus discussed.

This dissertation examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality as they are negotiated through a variety of (new) media contexts. The dissertation demonstrates that media technologies in general, and videogames in particular, serve an existential or “death denying” function, which insulates individuals from the terror of mortality. The dissertation also discusses the hero as a rhetorical trope, and suggests that its relationship with immortality makes it a particularly powerful persuasive device. Chapter one provides a historical overview of the hero figure and its relationship with immortality, particularly within the context of ancient Greece. Chapter two examines the material means by which media technologies serve a death denying function, via “symbolic immortality” (inscription), and the McLuhanian concept of extension. Chapter three examines the prevalence of the hero and villain figures in propaganda, with particular attention paid to the use of visual propaganda in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter four situates the videogame as an inherently heroic, death denying medium; videogames can extend the player’s sense of self, provide quantifiable victory criteria, and allow players to participate in “heroic” events. Chapter five examines the soldier-as-hero motif as it appears in two popular genres, the First Person Shooter, and Role-Playing Game. Particular attention is paid to the Call of Duty series and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Chapter six outlines an “epistemological exercise,” which attempts to empirically test the claims made in the previous chapters via Terror Management Theory, an experimental paradigm which examines the relationship between mortality, self-esteem, and ideology. The conclusion discusses how videogames can contest prevailing views of the heroic, and calls for a departure from contemporary game design practices.

In this study, I use visual and material culture that addresses the contemporary war in Afghanistan to critically assess the ways in which national conflict history is envisioned. I focus in particular on cultural production related to the involvement of Australia and Canada in the conflict. I do so to question the ways in which Australia’s and Canada’s engagements with this particular conflict are visualized in relation to their official narratives, which posit their military activities in Afghanistan as undertaken in the name of security, peacekeeping, and rebuilding. Such a query is important, because it allows me to investigate which visualizations contribute to the history and narrative of national engagements with conflict, and which are ignored. Moreover, it allows me to ask how visual and material culture not only constitutes, but also legitimates national conflict narratives. And finally, it allows me to locate examples within this field of cultural production that renegotiate, contest, subvert, and resist state representations. These lines of inquiry help to situate my study of visual and material culture by suggesting that such objects can act as lenses through which to address what Jon Stratton and Ien Ang describe as the “unstable, provisional and often jeopardous status of the national” (1996, 381). Following Stratton and Ang, I approach the concept of the “nation” as “a contested terrain between historically specific ‘cultures’ structured in relations of dominance and subordination to each other” (367). Using exhibitions and cultural objects produced post-9/11 in Australia and Canada (that is, after 11 September 2001), I analyze the visual and material culture of conflict within the “contested terrain” of national/ist narratives. The particular process of culture-making exemplified in exhibitions and cultural objects is crucial when it comes to advancing national/ist narratives, since as I argue throughout this study, it represents part of the larger historical transition from the state enlistment of cultural production in support of nation-building to the neoliberal mobilization of visual culture for the global marketplace. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-12-22 00:54:55.819