This dissertation presents data to support the continuity of warfare throughout the Maya lowlands, and adjacent regions. I discuss the current problems with the archaeology of warfare, the continuity of conflict beginning with the Late Preclassic through the Terminal Classic. Additionally, I emphasize the influence that Teotihuacan had during the Early Classic throughout Mesoamerica, while in some areas there is evidence of diplomatic and economic relations, there is also clear evidence of forced relations at other sites. Conflict is identified on the archaeological record through the heterarchical analysis of a variety of data encompassing defensive features, settlement patterns, epigraphy, iconography, and forensic data. I examine data from San Jose Mogote, Monte Alban, Montana, Izapa, Kaminaljuyu, and sites located within the northern, central, and southern lowlands. The primary goal is to present a cohesive series of war-related events per lowland zone, and chronological time period. Some of the primary questions deal with how land use, and economic trade relations transform political relations and alliances throughout time. Additionally, how do changes in political alliances affect trade routes? By recognizing the important role warfare played in the lowlands, we also recognize how these events affected the elites and their interaction with other polities, and most importantly how these events affected the commoner populace. In the process of investigating conflict throughout the Preclassic and the Classic periods, we can attempt to pinpoint continuities, political and economic changes, and the sociopolitical responses undertaken by polities in a time of war. / text

This thesis examines the role of national defence in British parliamentary politics between 1794 and 1812. It suggests that previous analyses of the late eighteenth-century political milieu insufficiently explore the impact of war on the structure of the state. Work by J.E. Cookson, Linda Colley, J.C.D. Clark, and Paul Langford depicts a decentralised state that had little direct involvement in developing a popular “British” patriotism. Here I argue that the threat of a potential French invasion during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France provoked a drive for centralisation. Nearly all the defence measures enacted during the period gave the government a much greater degree of control over British manpower and resources. The readiness of successive governments to involve large sections of the nation in the war effort through military service, financial contributions, and appeals to the British “spirit”, resulted in a much more inclusive sense of citizenship in which questions of national participation and political franchise were unlinked. National identity was also affected, and the focus on military defence of the British Isles influenced political attitudes towards the regular army. By 1810, however, the nation was disillusioned by the lengthy struggle with France. The result of lingering political weakness was that attention shifted from national defence onto domestic corruption and venality. The aftermath of the Irish Act of Union, too, demonstrated the limits of attempts to centralise the policy of the whole United Kingdom. Significantly, however, the debates over the relationship between the centre and the localities in the 1830s and 1840s, and the response to a new French invasion threat in the 1850s and 1860s, revived themes addressed during the 1790s and 1800s. The political reaction to the invasion threats between 1794 and 1812 ultimately had more in common with a Victorian state bureaucracy than an eighteenth-century ancien régime.

In this essay I attempt to examine critically Michael Walzer's just war theory. I begin by pointing out what I take to be philosophically sound about his conception; in particular, his philosophical commitment to a doctrine of human rights as being morally decisive for questions of war. He argues, and I think correctly, that questions of justified wars and justified means within wars are ultimately questions about whether or not human rights are being respected. Unfortunately, Walzer does not always formulate his war principles in light of his fundamental commitment to human rights, and where he fails to do so, supreme emergencies and nuclear deterrence, I argue that his account becomes incoherent. At bottom, Walzer supposes, in these instances, that while individual rights may not be overriden for purely utilitarian reasons, rights may, nevertheless, be overridden for the sake of the political community. What this amounts to, for Walzer, is the following claim: that it is more just to secure the rights of a collection of individuals than it is to secure the rights of one individual. If so, it is morally permissible to suspend some individual rights for the sake of many individual rights. And even though I will hold that this argument is very persuasive, I will suggest that it is mistaken from a moral point of view which takes human rights to be morally conclusive.

Recent findings from circum-Basin central highland Mesoamerica have dramatically altered perceptions of the nature and intensity of Late Classic (A.D. 600-900) warfare in the hinterland of the Teotihuacan state. The acropolis centers of Cacaxtla, Cerro Zapotecas, Xochicalco, Teotenango, and Tula Chico, were the focus of a Late Classic pattern of Gulf lowland-central highland interactions that culminated in the militarization of circum-Basin society. The focus of this dissertation concerns a Gulf lowland-based pattern of militarized developments that enveloped highland central Mexico in the period dominated by the decline of the paramount center and polity of Teotihuacan at circa A.D. 550-850. This study seeks to demonstrate that highland central Mexico underwent a profound economic and sociopolitical transformation involving the displacement of an existing Middle Classic horizon (A.D. 400-650) commerce-based system of interregional interaction, to one structured upon a conquest-based system of inter-elite interaction. Particular attention is devoted to the examination of data bearing upon the evolution of conquest-based systems (Fox 1978); specifically, settlement patterns and mortuary data; architectural configurations; ceramic and other artifactual distributions; as well as ethnohistoric and iconographic themes documenting patterns of circum-Basin militarization. These data sources serve to demonstrate a shift toward military statecraft, human sacrifice, and a conquest-based political rhetoric in central highland Mesoamerica for the period after A.D. 550. A secondary objective of this study is to trace the proliferation and spread of Gulf lowland stylistic and sociopolitical patterns into highland central Mexico during the course of events that culminated in the militarization of circum-Basin Mesoamerica in the period after A.D. 550. It will be argued that Late Classic Gulf lowland patterns were replicated in highland contexts, and that Gulf lowland elites are implicated in this process by four primary sources of data; mainly, ethnohistory, iconography, physical anthropology, and archaeology. Finally, Zeitlin's (1982) findings on the emergence of a Gulf Coast-Isthmian exchange network are examined for implications bearing on patterns of interaction that are proposed to have dominated Late Classic highland-lowland commerce. This study concludes with a discussion of the proposed role of Gulf lowland elites, Historic Olmec, or a confederation of Oloman city-states, in the transformative process.

William Selby Harney, born in Tennessee in 1800, entered the United States Army as a lieutenant at age seventeen. Like many officers, he learned on the job, and in some ways he resembled the stereotypical, hell-raising, blood-and-guts, Indian-fighter of modern-day novelists and movie makers. He was quarrelsome, quick-tempered, and sometimes vicious, and his frequent bickering typified the entire officer corps. After years of routine duty, in 1829 Harney participated in the Atkinson Expedition against Arikara Indians on the upper Missouri River. Promoted to captain, he performed garrision duty in the Old Northwest and in 1832 fought in the Black Hawk War. In 1833 Harney married Mary Mullanphy of St. Louis and secured a paymaster's appointment and major's rank. He failed at this job, though, and in 1834 murdered a slave. He avoided punishment and in 1836 was appointed lieutenant colonel in the Second Dragoons. Subsequently Harney earned widespread recognition for effective Indian campaigns. During the Second Seminole War he developed new amphibious riverine tactics. During the Mexican War his attack on Cerro Gordo prepared the way for American capture of Mexico City. Afterward in Texas, he advocated using more mounted troops against plains Indians. In 1855-56 he decisively defeated the Sioux in Nebraska and set precedents for future army operations. In the 1850s Harney helped maintain civil order in "Bleeding" Kansas and in Utah, where Mormons resisted federal authority. He was subsequently promoted to brigadier general, but the remainder of his career proved frustrating. While commanding the Department of Oregon in 1859, he almost thrust America into war with Great Britain by occupying jointly claimed San Juan Island. In 1861, while commanding the Department of the West, he failed to take firm action to assure Union control of Missouri, and that called into question his loyalty to the Union. President Lincoln removed him from command. Harney's career illustrates both the army's successes and its failures in facilitating westward expansion and suggests that the military performed as well as it could with its limited resources. Harney died in 1889.

In 1655 and again in 1686-1689, the Waldensians of Piedmont were massacred by the Duke of Savoy after he issued edicts forbidding the practice of their religion. The Waldensians were later followers of the medieval religious movement of the Poor of Lyons, declared heretical in 1215. The Waldensians associated with the Reformation in 1532, and thus formed a link with diverse groups of Protestants across Europe. In the periods immediately surrounding both massacres, an outpouring of publications dedicated to their plight, their history, and their religious identity appeared, a large number of which emerged in London. On both occasions, the propaganda gave rise to international sympathy and encouraged international intervention, eventually provoking the Duke to rescind the edicts that had instigated the massacres. While most contemporary scholars consider the Waldensians to have been fully absorbed into Protestantism after 1532, it is clear from the writings of both the Waldensians and their sympathizers that they considered themselves a separate entity: the inheritors of a long tradition of dissent from the Catholic Church based on their own belief in the purity of the Gospel. The Waldensian identity was based on a history of exclusion and persecution, and also on a belief that they had transmitted the true embodiment of Christianity through the centuries. The documents that were published surrounding the massacres address the legitimacy of the Waldensian identity based on centuries of practice. English and continental Protestants identified with the Waldensians, who provided ancient ties and legitimacy to their ‘new’ religion, and the Waldensians adopted that identity proudly, all the while claiming continuity. Protestants also used the Waldensians in propagandist documents, most often to justify political or religious actions and ideologies. The continuity of Waldensianism through the Reformation became crucially important for the wider umbrella of Protestantism as a legitimizing factor for the movement. This thesis investigates the claims of continuity and finds that while the Waldensians underwent a dramatic change in religious doctrine to conform to the Reformation, their belief in the continuity of their religious identity can be validated by examining religion from a socio-cultural perspective that takes aspects other than theology into consideration.

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Pierre Schoendoerffer fait irruption dans le paysage médiatique en 1965 avec La 317ème section ; ce film met en scène une section locale supplétive à la fin de la guerre d’Indochine. Avec ses œuvres suivantes, jusqu’à Là-haut, sorti en 2004, le cinéaste poursuit un récit qui va de l’Indochine à l’Algérie, du Vietnam en guerre aux mers du grand Nord. C’est le destin d’une génération que Pierre Schoendoerffer porte à l’écran, de ces officiers qui, adolescents sous l’Occupation, sont devenus des hommes dans la guerre d’Indochine et ont dû faire des choix décisifs en Algérie. Alors qu’aucun imaginaire national n’émerge vraiment sur cette période, son œuvre occupe une place originale. Le parcours du réalisateur lui-même fascine les critiques et le public : né en 1928, Pierre Schoendoerffer est entré dans le cinéma par la guerre, en devenant caméraman pour le Service Presse-Information des Armées en Indochine en 1952. Fait prisonnier à Dien Bien Phu, c’est avant tout pour ceux qu’il a vu mourir à ses côtés qu’il dit vouloir témoigner. La manière dont son œuvre est reçue et comprise est révélatrice des évolutions de la mémoire sur ces guerres de décolonisation. L’œuvre de Pierre Schoendoerffer marque incontestablement son public, même si certains films remportent un succès mitigé. Dans le vide de représentations sur la guerre d’Indochine et alors que la guerre d’Algérie demeure une blessure ouverte dans l’imaginaire nationale, sa fresque contribue à l’édification d’une mythologie. / Pierre Schoendoerffer burst into the media landscape in 1965 with La 317ème section (The 317th platoon), a film about a local auxiliary platoon at the end of the First Indochina War. In his next works, till the last one Là-haut – a movie released in 2004 –, the movie maker carried on a tale from Indochina to Algerian, from Vietnam at war to the Arctic Seas. Thus, the destiny of a whole generation has been screened by Pierre Schoendoerffer : officers who were in their teens during the Occupation have become men in Indochina War and, as such, faced decisive choices in Algerian. While no national mythe really emerged during this period, his work takes a special meaning. The very development of the director’s art fascinates critics as well as the audience: war led Pierre Schoendoerffer (he was born in 1928) to cinema as he was a cameraman for the Service Presse-Information des Armées en Indochine, i.e. the Military Information Department in Indochina, in 1952. Captured in Dien Bien Phu, he pledged above all those who were killed around him to testimony. The way his work was welcome and understood is a good illustration of how memory on decolonization evolved. Pierre Schoendoerffer’s cinema undoubtedly reached its audience, even though some movies happened to meet a lesser/minor success. In the context of lack of representations of Indochina War, and while Algerian War remained an open wound in the imagined community, his fresque contributed to build a mythology.

The topic of diploma thesis was to analyze the narrative structure and transmedia storytelling of Star Wars processed into a film by director George Lucas. The work is mainly focused on narrative analysis of both the original and more recent films and further analysis of transmedia narrative that makes Star Wars extend mainly into the field of literature and computer games. In addition to narrative analysis subject of the work was also the analysis of the fictional world where the story takes place. Another point of diploma thesis is to analyze transmedia narrative that makes the original Star Wars story transform into a books, computer games and more. The whole concept of Star Wars can be described as a modern narrative, moreover, whose stories are from the genre of science-fiction and take place in a completely fictional environment. During the analysis of narrative structures, author primarily used the classical theoretical literature about the narrative theory. For example the Morphology fairy tales from Vladimir J. Propp, according to which it is possible to extent the analyse of the original and other episodes of Star Wars. For analysis of transmedia storyteling was also used studies of Mary Laure Ryan, who discusses the possibility of altering the basic narrative in transmedia narrative. The aim of...

This thesis will work on implementing the Political Economic Theory of Wall Construction on the case of Saudi Arabia. To further contribute to the study of border walls, the PETWC is applied to a different methodology than in the original paper where it was first introduced, taking into consideration neighboring countries without border walls into analysis. Ultimately, the thesis will show that PETWC sets good foundation for further development of a broader border wall theory, and that border walls concerning Saudi Arabia are consequence of low regional integration and internal instability at home and abroad.