Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-06-29 22:05:58.284 / The growing global awareness of sexual violence as a weapon of war has been accompanied by the strategic and pervasive inclusion of womens personal stories of war rape. This representational strategy of Western media, academia and humanitarian policies was critically examined in order to understand how war raped women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are discursively situated as Other. Drawing on the theoretical concepts of abjection and objection, the study did not question the truth of womens experience but rather examined whether the pervasive inclusion of war rape stories constituted a true feminine subjectivity. A foucaldian notion of discourse provided a method to expose meaning and dominant discourses, which render certain identities and stories of war rape more visible than others. The purpose of this study was to critically engage with dominant Western discourses of war rape and provide a more complex understanding of how diverse power structures, identities and representational practices impact the struggle of Congolese women to end rape and open self-determined pathways of empowerment. A qualitative method of critical discourse analysis was used to examine the textual and visual processes of representation. Samples of text were taken from three main areas: media coverage (print, television, web based, magazines, and films), feminist academic literature (journals, reports and books), and humanitarian policies (UN mission reports, security council resolution, mandates and reports). The results revealed that war rape victims, the DRC and acts of rape were all positioned as Other and as a media spectacle that was further consumed by Western audiences. It was also found that certain war rape identities and social factors remained invisible, including the Wests complacency in the DRC conflict. Ultimately, the study finds a tension between discourse as a tool of liberation and a tool of power and control. This thesis recommends that anti rape activists must examine their own dominance over war rape victims and consider new strategiesbeyond the simple act of storytellingthat will position rape victims as the subjects (not objects) of their own struggle to end war rape. / Master

Colombian state and non-state actors are engaging in an important conceptual debate concerning the nature of a "new" type of armed group in the country. The state labels these groups "BACRIM" (criminal gangs), arguing that they are actors of organized crime. Members of civil society reject the state's conceptualization, arguing that these groups are paramilitaries operating in the context of the armed conflict. These organizations explain that "new" groups commit the same systematic human rights violations and adhere to the same modus operandi as the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, an umbrella organization of over 30,000 paramilitaries that the government supposedly demobilized in a 2005 negotiation. The state, in turn, argues that paramilitarism no longer exists in Colombia and that these "new" groups do not adhere to the counterinsurgent political ideology that was characteristic of paramilitarism. My research project is a nuanced analysis of the Colombian state and non-state debate concerning these "new" armed groups. I combine interviews with state and civil society representatives with historical contextualization in order to understand what is at stake in the positions that both sides are aggressively fostering in the debate. In conceptualizing these "new" groups, many key informants engaged in a renegotiation of the state-formed historical memory concerning paramilitarism. An analysis of the trajectory of paramilitary activity reveals the protection of important elite economic and political interests as the driving force of paramilitarism; this paramilitary project fits within the goals of a state-sponsored economic process of capital accumulation. In utilizing the paramilitary label, civil society highlights these as the structural causes of paramilitarism. The state, in turn, attempts to cement its simplified definition of paramilitarism as a counterinsurgency project in removing the term 'paramilitary' from the official discourse. Furthermore, in erasing paramilitarism from the discourse, the state attempts to disassociate itself with a dark history of human rights violations against civilians. To fully understand the debate in Colombia is to understand more generally the power and weight of words in denouncing or, conversely, in silencing important issues of human rights and, ultimately, in accurately or inaccurately constructing historical memory of armed conflict. / text

The more than half a century long armed conflicts in the Northeast of India have created a condition of existence in the region that is often described in pathological terms like ‘crisis’ or ‘disorder’. Such diagnostic attitude towards the region invites ‘solutions’ to ‘fix’ it. This has result in increasing militarization of the region on the one hand and opening up markets on the other. In the rush for a ‘solution’ we might have denied intelligibility to the everyday life of people in the region. The report examines some of the creative ways in which people constantly navigate and negotiate a field of contesting powers. In 2000, Hindi films were banned by militant Manipuri nationalist groups in an effort to stop what they have called the process of Indianization. The report explores the circumstances in which the ban took place as well as the trajectories that the ban has taken. In this engagement with the ban, the report uncovers that any attempt, by the Indian state as well as the militant Manipuri nationalist, to put bodies in fixed categories is often frustrated and negotiated in everyday practices. / text

Thesis advisor: S Anukriti / This dissertation strives to understand the short and long-run consequences of armed conflict. In short-run, as conflict increases, parents are less likely to send their children to school or take them to health facilities and more likely to keep them home. Less time in school might translate to more time spent at work for these children. Coping with conflict can disrupt human capital accumulation of children and exposes them to adverse experiences, the effects of which can also last into adulthood. Some of the persistent effects of conflict on educational and health outcomes have been widely studied in the literature. Nevertheless, relatively less is known about how these childhood exposures affect adult behavior, beliefs, and attitudes. One of the goals of this dissertation is to study such long-lasting impacts of childhood exposure to conflict. In the first chapter, “Victims of Consequence: Evidence on Child Outcomes using Microdata from a Civil War”, joint with Giri Subramaniam, we study the short-run impacts of violent events on child time allocation, curative health-care, and education. Exploiting the spatial and temporal variation in exposure to local-level armed conflict, we find that an increase in violent events: (i) leads to an increase in contemporaneous hours worked by children, with the effect being substantial for agricultural work; (ii) decreases the likelihood of parents taking their children to visit a health-care facility to seek curative care; and (iii) results in a reduced likelihood of attending school, along with a decline in years of education. Overall, the results indicate that war affected schooling and time allocation of boys whereas girls were less likely to get curative health-care. The second chapter of this dissertation, “Do Adverse Childhood Experience Shape Violent and Abusive Adult Behavior?", is motivated by the fact that family violence is pervasive and has detrimental economic consequences. Nevertheless, very little is known about how childhood experiences influence this behavior. In this study, I explore long-run determinants of family violence by linking exposure to adverse circumstances in childhood to the perpetration of abuse and neglect in adulthood. In particular, I examine the effects of men’s exposure to the Nepalese Civil War (1996-2006) in childhood. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in childhood exposure to the armed conflict from ages 0 to 16, I find that exposed men are less likely to perpetrate spousal violence and to display controlling behaviors. Additionally, children of exposed fathers are less likely to experience violent disciplining at home. They also work fewer hours per week and are less likely to be involved in dangerous working conditions. In the third chapter, “Exploring the Channels”, I study the potential mechanisms that underlie the empirical results established by Chapter 2. I find that exposed men are more likely to complete secondary schooling, be employed at skilled non-agricultural occupations, and marry women who are more likely to have completed primary school and currently working. The most pertinent channel is that these men are less likely to justify wife-beating in different scenarios. Next, I assess the implications of the empirical results on the theories of domestic violence. Existing theories highlight two broader motives for perpetrating domestic violence: “Expressive” and “Instrumental”. Violence is instrumental if it is used to extract resources from the victim whereas it is expressive if the perpetrator gains direct non- pecuniary (dis)utility from it. I find that my results resonate strongly with “Expressive” theories of domestic violence where men who were exposed to conflict in childhood find using violence at home distasteful. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

How does poverty relate to why internal armed conflicts occur and intensify? This dissertation explores gendered dimensions of poverty related to minor internal armed conflict onset in poor contexts and suggests pathways through which nutritional insecurity may mediate conflict escalation by amplifying real dimensions of poverty. This dissertation analyzes positive-feedback dimensions between poverty and internal armed conflict by asking how minor internal armed conflict may occur because of gendered dimensions of poverty obscured by a focus on income per capita. This dissertation frames the decision to rebel within impoverished contexts as an issue indivisibility problem and engenders the rationalist logic as masculinist. By assessing how changes in national patterns of divorced males may reflect lost access to gendered resources within households and by analyzing how gendered structures may instantiate masculinist reactions to the gendered dimensions of poverty, this dissertation elucidates how the real effects of poverty and violence may align to lay the foundations for the amplification of internal armed conflict through the conflict cycle. By identifying three pathways through which nutritional insecurity may operate, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how countries may develop self-reinforcing patterns of real poverty and internal armed conflict. I argue that the willingness and ability to rebel in contexts of poverty may be partially affected by lost access to resources produced at household levels by forms of feminized labor, as well as to resources that are distributed with gender inequality. I argue that nutritional insecurity may be captured by examining levels of per capita protein from meat consumption and offer three mechanisms through which protein from meat per capita consumption may proxy nutritional insecurity within poor countries that experience minor internal armed conflict: the proliferation of security dilemmas as conditioned by minor internal armed conflict; the loss of soil fertility as an amplified function of fighting; and the reliance on food exports. I examine data on 186 countries in the 1961-2008 period to interrogate why some countries develop the dynamics associated with the poverty-conflict trap and to find general support of the hypotheses.

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Children are particularly vulnerable individuals and therefore, they have particular rights under international law that recognize their special need for protection. Armed conflicts constitute the biggest threat to them. I have chosen this topic for admiring the strength of children affected by armed conflicts to face all the problems brought by armed conflicts. On the other hand, children are indispensable in reconciliation and reconstruction of society. The aim of the thesis is to describe and analyze the protection provided by law to the children affected by armed conflicts and the application of those provisions. Chapter One deals with these questions. Chapter Two is introductory and is subdivided into five parts. Part One describes the relation between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law and their applicability. Part Two deals with the absence of universally applicable definition of "armed conflict" and the applicability of legal instruments. Part Three briefly introduces basic ideas of protection of children in armed conflicts. Part Four defines the term "child" and explains possible problems of universally accepted definition. Part Five analyzes contemporary armed conflicts and the impact on children, whether they participate (directly or indirectly) in...

The diploma thesis is concerned with the protection of journalists in armed conflicts. From my point of view this topic is relevant in connection with the recent war in Iraq and many other conflicts of local character. Many professionals in the world deal with this issue but in our country almost nobody opens it, with a few exceptions. The aim of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive overview of the protection of journalists in armed conflicts - it means the applicable legislation and also proposals of new regulation. The main question is whether applicable law is adequate to provide an appropriate protection for journalists and news media personnel in armed conflicts. I suggest a new convention, which contains a special status for journalists and determines a protective emblem for them, should be adopted and in this thesis This thesis is composed of thirteen chapters which are subsequently divided into subchapters. It consists of two main parts. The first one focuses on applicable rules - especially Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949. The beginning of this part is concerned with the interpretation of the term "journalist" and then briefly describes a history of the protection of journalists in armed conflicts. These two chapters are followed by the third one, which...

South Sudan's recent war-to-war transition, and its post-conflict statebuilding experience prior to renewed mass violence beginning in December 2013, has upended conventional wisdom on post-conflict peacemaking. Analysts have been left scrambling to explain the apparent implosion of South Sudan's political and military system, often reverting to problematic or discredited analytical frameworks - including 'ethnic conflict', 'failed states' or variants of the 'greed not grievance' argument - to interpret the violence, or else have emphasised the chaotic and disorderly nature of conflict and governance in South Sudan. This thesis argues that in order to make sense of South Sudan's tragic and unshakeable relationship to political violence, an explanation grounded in the concepts of militarism and militarisation, and the framework of militarised statebuilding, is required. The post-conflict statebuilding process in South Sudan has further militarised social relationships whilst considerably expanding the state, creating an enabling environment for war to occur either on the margins of the political system established in the course of statebuilding, or from within it. Simultaneously, it has compelled those making political and economic claims on the state to do so through engaging with this militarised state infrastructure, or else through organising violence to gain entry into the state. However, this militarised statebuilding project entered a state of crisis since independence in 2011, culminating in the mass violence of December 2013, when the same forces which had propelled the expansion of the state would propel its sudden and violent contraction. This militarised statebuilding process has provided much for some sections of South Sudanese society (and especially its elites), but has also left the country particularly vulnerable to large-scale violence among its vastly expanded and heavily armed military. This framework of militarised statebuilding has the potential to speak to enduring militarism and violence in cases of post-conflict statebuilding beyond South Sudan, and advances debate on the relationship between statebuilding and violence in contemporary international politics.

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