Magister Legum - LLM / Currently, one of the most dramatic threats to human security is constituted by internal armed conflicts. In 1998, violent conflicts took place in at least 25 countries. Of these armed conflicts, 23 were internal, engaging one or more non-State armed groups. A crucial feature of internal conflicts is the widespread violation of humanitarian law and human rights by armed groups, from rebel groups to private militias. This thesis aimed at identifying various ways of promoting a better implementation of the Geneva Conventions and its Protocols by NSAGs in the Great Lakes Region. / South Africa

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This study analyzes the relationship between inter rebel group dynamics and rebel biased third party interventions. Concerning the considerable amount of multiparty civil conflicts and internationalized civil conflicts, prior studies largely overlook the cause and effect of inter rebel dynamics in terms of third party interventions. I delve into two related research questions; How do inter rebel dynamics influence a third party’s decision to intervene in a multiparty civil conflict? What kinds of rebel group interactions are facilitated by such third party interventions? Existing rebel group interaction patterns play a key role in determining conflict process and, influence third party’s decision to intervene. I predict that a cooperative interaction pattern between rebel groups generates an intervention enriched environment for the rebel groups, due to the increased likelihood of successful intervention and the decreased cost of war. The third party’s involvement in ongoing multiple party civil conflict generates a change in bargaining structure between rebels in terms of number of bargainers and distribution of capabilities. I predict a conditional effect of rebel biased interventions on inter rebel dynamics; while forceful intervention boosts cooperation between rebels, weak intervention fuels competition between them. To test my theoretical conjectures, the interlocking relationship between rebels’ interactions and rebel biased interventions has been empirically estimated on a large-N framework. The estimated results strongly confirm my theoretical predictions that rebel cooperation encourages rebel biased interventions and, that increased cooperation and competition is dependent upon third party’s commitment. Overall, my findings highlight a distinctive process of multiparty civil conflicts in terms of third party interventions and rebel group dynamics. My first findings regarding rebel biased interventions, expand the existing intervention literature by focusing on rebel group dynamics in multiparty civil conflicts. The empirical evidence showing boosted competition and cooperation caused by intervention, can be linked to studies that discuss the correlation between interventions and conflict terminations. For the policy community, this project suggests that the success of intervention lies in the third party’s measure of intervention.

This dissertation examines the formation and ramifications of the Russian Civil War cult, a system of signs, codes, and meanings that instructed Soviet citizens how properly to be socialist and how to thrive under the regime. By analyzing public rituals of the 1920s and 1930s designed to commemorate the Civil War and its heroes, this project demonstrates the numerous ways in which the state attempted to inculcate Soviet values and a willingness to sacrifice one's life for the state. However, Soviet citizens often responded to war imagery in ways that the regime did not expect, co-opting cult values to suit their own everyday circumstances or to lobby the state for changes in their local regions. Examining the story of the cult of the Civil War through the traumatic years of industrialization, collectivization, and terror recasts how the Soviet state and society came to terms with these dramatic transformations. A central focus of the dissertation concerns the construction of Civil War heroes in literature and film, the most prominent of them being the famed commander Chapaev. The 1934 film Chapaev represented a critical mode of contact between the state and everyday citizens, in which people acted not only as spectators, but as active participants, allowing them to "play out" the Civil War in their own lives through celebratory fanfare, artistic expression like theater and poetry, and a shared cinematic experience. In this way, the state successfully transmitted images of unity and heroism to the population. The film became a cultural phenomenon, providing people with an outlet for feelings of powerlessness. Watching Chapaev was a method of coping with the dilemmas of everyday life. Built on a varied source base, using published literature and archival documents, including letters from citizens, official memoranda, stenograms, newspapers, and journals, this dissertation explores various public forms of Civil War pageantry, such as monument building, exhibitions in Moscow's Red Army Museum, Maxim Gorky's collected war history, and the twentieth anniversary celebrations of the Red Army in 1938. Finally, the dissertation addresses the cult's disintegration in the late 1930s during the chaos and uncertainty of the Great Terror.

Why does civil conflict spread from country to country? Existing research relies primarily on explanations of rebel mobilization tied to geographic proximity to explain this phenomenon. However, this approach is unable to explain why civil conflict appears to spread across great geographic distances, and also neglects the government’s role in conflict. To explain this phenomenon, this dissertation formulates an informational theory in which individuals contemplating rebellion against their government, or “proto-rebels,” observe the success and failure of rebels throughout the international system. In doing so, proto-rebels and governments learn whether rebellion will be fruitful, which is then manifested in the timing of rebellion and repression. The core of the dissertation is composed of three essays. The first exhorts scholars of the international spread of civil violence to directly measure proto-rebel mobilization. I show that such mobilization is associated with conflicts across the entire international system, while the escalation to actual armed conflict is associated with regional conflicts. The second chapter theorizes that proto-rebels learn from successful rebellions across the international system. This relationship applies globally, although it is attenuated by cultural and regime-type similarity. Finally, the third chapter theorizes that governments are aware of this process and engage in repression in order to thwart it. I further argue that this repression is, in part, a function of the threat posed by those regimes founded by rebels.

The terms “refugees” and “refugee crisis” have been prominent in media discourse all over the world – especially since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011 and large incoming numbers of refugees into Europe since 2015. Germany, whose media initially celebrated its “Willkommenskultur”, has become increasingly critical of refugees; political and civic exclusion has intensified, and emphasis has been placed on belonging based on peoples’ passports and hence nationalities, which determine whether or not someone belongs in a country. The author Olga Grjasnow, born 1984 in Baku, Azerbaijan and who is of Russian-Jewish descent, took on the task of describing the horrific circumstances in Syria in the midst of its ongoing civil war in her latest novel, entitled Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017). Moreover, she depicts individuals’ flight across the ocean and their eventual arrival and life in Germany. In her book, Olga Grjasnowa describes the lives of three young Syrian individuals and their extremely limited possibilities of leading a free, peaceful life due to their nationality and the resulting closing of diverse borders for them.Based on the scholarly discourse on transnational fiction and how this work may or may not fit into this notion, especially with regard to globalization and powerful nations’ economic interests, this thesis seeks to analyze how nationalist and capitalist policy makings affect people in drastic ways, as they find themselves uprooted and persecuted.By excluding a Western narrative voice, Olga Grjasnowa zooms in on the lives of Syrians and their hopeless circumstances, while showing how a “wrong” passport makes life for people difficult to navigate in Syria, Germany and beyond. By means of close reading, I analyze the novel pertaining to the war in Syria and the resulting politics, media coverage and individual “fate”, which is tied to limitations for people to escape these circumstances based on documents and national borders.

This dissertation explores questions of African literature and international law through the lens of the Nigeria-Biafra war (1967-1970). A defining trauma of modern Nigerian history, the war produced a rich and sustained vein of writing that stretches from the late 1960s through the present day, encompassing canonical Nigerian novels as well as a number of British and diasporic texts. Drawing on both literary and legal theory, I argue that this body of work mobilizes particular literary features—including narrative, analogy, allegory, and genre—to articulate both familiar and innovative logics of sovereignty. The structure of the project is primarily conceptual and loosely chronological. The first half explores narratives of development in relation to international law’s standard of civilization, focusing on British colonial writing (Chapter 1) and postwar allegorical novels (Chapter 2). The second half attends to how narrative fiction formally registers mid-20th century developments in international law, focusing on writers' use of analogy as a mode of theorizing genocide (Chapter 3) and the role of genre fiction in imagining economic sovereignty (Chapter 4). Throughout, I show how novelists pick up and transform literary tropes first articulated in wartime journalism, propaganda, and activist pamphlets.

In modern history governments have had an active role in responding and influencing the economic circumstances of the state. Whether by allocating resources or administering reforms, peacetime economic policies have traditionally impacted actor's public support as the choice of policy can impact the perception of actor's legitimacy. Despite the plethora of competing definitions, political scientists agree on considering legitimacy as a basic condition of governance -as it entails the acceptance and commitment of a people to a political authority. Rather than a unique characteristic of the state, governance becomes an attribute belonging to any social arrangement that exercises "function of statehood". By focusing on the comparison between the Syrian, the Libyan, and the Yemeni civil war this thesis aim is to enquire whether a positive relationship can be assessed between government economic choices and rebel's legitimacy. Given the neopatrimonial character of the three states this dissertation will focus on the actor's economic behavior to assess legitimacy. For the purpose of this analysis, I have chosen to adopt an Elitist framework as it focuses on bargain dynamics between political actors and elites (or constituencies). The methodological approach utilized is that of a comparative case study.

This thesis aims to create a novel dataset on political violence to estimate the accurate number of political violence incidents and fatalities in Turkey: Political Violence in Turkey Event Dataset (POLVITED). I argue that the reporting bias and differences in the scopes and definition of event datasets impact the quantitative study of conflict and violence. To eliminate the reporting bias and create a comprehensive dataset on political violence, I apply Matching Event Data by Location, Time and Type (MELTT) method to the Global Terrorism Database(GTD) and Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP-GED). The finding suggests that UCDP-GED were able to record 65% of the total number of political violence incidents in Turkey, and GTD was able to record 45% of them while 10% is coded in both datasets. POLVITED enables the researchers to capture the accurate picture of political violence incidents in Turkey by eliminating the double recording and alleviating the reporting bias. Lastly, the comparison of POLVITED and official reports demonstrates that, although the reporting bias is inevitable, integration alleviates the problems associated with it by increasing the coverage of the dataset.

This essay addresses the issue of how the Syrian civil war has impacted Turkey’s state and human security. The study aimed to provide an enhanced understanding of how the Syrian war has impacted Turkey’s security, within the timeframe of 2011-2019. The method that was applied to this study was a single case study where theories of state and human security were used to analyze the Syrian war’s impact on Turkey’s security. The results showed that the advancement of Kurdish forces as well as the Islamic state’s territorial expansion posed a threat towards the Turkish state’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. The war also impacted the authoritarian turn of the Turkish government, which generated in a coup attempt causing additional internal disability and threat towards the state’s security. In terms of Turkey’s human security, increased terrorism within the state as a cause of the Syrian war has impacted the physical security of the people. Moreover, health concerns arose due to the vast number of Syrian refugees in Turkey and posed a threat to the Turkish population. The refugee influx also changed the ethnic balance in some areas showing indications of ethnic tensions to foster, threatening the population. One can conclude that the Syrian war has impacted Turkey’s state security, through direct military threats regarding the rise and expansion the of PKK-YPG and ISIS. In terms of Turkey’s human security one can conclude that increasing terrorism and the vast number of refugees residing in the state caused by the Syrian war has impacted the safety and security of the Turkish people.