Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / The purpose of this mini-thesis is to address International Humanitarian Law (IHL) violations occurring within the Occupied Palestinian Territories relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war. Importantly, various IHL violations that occur within the Green Line will be expanded upon. The mini-thesis will shed light on the lack of international action, specifically the inaction of the UN and the ICRC, in ending the decades of IHL violations by both the Israeli and Palestinian forces. As a means to an end, further destruction of property and loss of life that inhibits the quality of life of Palestinians and Israeli citizens trapped within the ongoing conflict, this mini-thesis will endeavour to provide solutions to ending the occupation. These solutions include: a UN Resolution directed toward the demolition of the wall; establishing permanent means of access to all basic needs; and lastly, addressing the influence of the United States of America (USA) and Egypt, respectively.

This thesis examines the rise and fall of a coconut-based enclave economy in the administrative post of Micaúne in the district of Chinde, Zambézia Province. Residents of Micaúne derived their livelihoods from the coconut economy for over a century. My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between 2010 and 2014 over a period of eight months in this administrative post. Although coconut had been a familiar crop to people in the Micaúne area for centuries, it became central to the local economy only after the advent of colonial settler capitalism in the 1880s. I argue that the longevity of the coconut economy, and the stability and predictability that it brought to Micaúne residents, were the outcome of its embeddedness in the local social organisation and mode of production. From the last decades of the 19th century, Micaúne's economy was dominated by Société du Madal, initially a French-owned company that established coconut plantations in the area and produced commodities derived from the coconut palm for sale on international markets. Madal became a 'total institution' in Micaúne because it was the major landholder, employer of local labour, supplier of goods through its shops and the main purchaser of coconut from growers in the area. This study suggests that a 'customary' law relating to inheritance in Micaúne reinforced the centrality of the coconut economy in local society for much of the 20th century by making specific reference to the inheritance of trees. The implication of this law was that control and ownership of trees rather than land was the major determinant of local livelihoods. But as in any enclave economy, when the resource on which it is based is depleted, the collapse of the whole system is inevitable. In the case of Micaúne, an ecological crisis in the 1990s, in the form of a plant disease known as Coconut Lethal Yellowing Disease (CLYD, infected and killed most of the palm trees, both on Madal's and local families' land, which were the backbone of the local economy. As a result, the company-based welfare system that Micaúne residents enjoyed for more than a hundred years disappeared overnight, a catastrophe that caused unprecedented uncertainty and despair in the area. The local people's main sources of income and employment shrank and there have been many confirmed reports of hunger and starvation amongst the Micaúne population in the 2000s and after. In sum, the majority of Micaúne residents are now 'food insecure', except for a few who are local businessmen and people employed by or getting stipends from the state. It is evident from my research that attempts by the government and NGOs to promote food security initiatives failed to solve the problem. On the contrary, these initiatives have fuelled a growing demand for land, which has led to its increasing commodification (including the emergence of an illegal land market). This development has also triggered emergent claims of land ownership based on a new notion of autochthony. A clear distinction between 'natives' and non-'natives' (newcomers) is now being drawn in Micaúne. Claiming to belong to the category of autochthons is seen as a basis for entitlement to prior rights over resources such as minerals recently discovered in the district. I argue that the promise of minerals resources might explain why, despite the extremely harsh living conditions that local residents have faced since the demise of the coconut economy, they have decided to remain in this area while scouting in the interim for alternative livelihoods options, which are limited to subsistence farming and fishing, and petty trade. They seem to be waiting for the materialisation of big investments in mineral resources or in other development initiatives often touted by the central government in Mozambique. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Anthropology and Archaeology / DPhil / Unrestricted

With a focus on legitimacy, accountability, and protection equality, this thesis aims to investigate the impact of domestic institutions on the likelihood that peace succeeds in the aftermath of armed conflict. The argument is that the presence of such domestic institutions should facilitate the construction of a peaceful post-conflict environment by reducing commitment problems in the peacemaking process. A quantitative analysis is conducted on 82 peace agreements signed between governments and rebel groups during the time period 1989 to 2004. The findings suggest that the extent to which social groups within the state are protected equally by the government most significantly impacts the likelihood that peace prevails.

This MA Thesis explores the effect of the armed conflict on modern contraceptive utilisation in Colombia, using a departmental random-effects logistic regression model on novel cross-sectional data from the Uppsala Peace and Conflict Database Georeferenced Event Data and the Colombian Demographic and Health Surveys from 2000, 2005 and 2010. Reproductive health and rights has enormous consequences for women’s lives, but their relationship to conflict in Colombia has barely been analysed. Exploring how armed conflict as context shape individual life choices such as family planning, the results showed that women in departments where conflict had occurred recently had significantly higher odds of using modern contraception on average than women in non-conflict. Women are likely more careful to avoid unwanted pregnancy because of increased impoverishment, insecurity, and emotional and physical stress of armed conflict. Conflict may also have reduced or more firmly decided their demand for children. Adding an interaction term between conflict and type of place of residence revealed that rural women in conflict departments were driving this finding, possibly due to the lack of access to abortion and post-abortion care in rural areas in Colombia.

Thesis advisor: Philip G. Altbach / "Education and conflict" has emerged as a new field of study during the last two decades. However, higher education is still relatively absent from this debate as most of the research has focused on primary and non-formal education. This dissertation is an exploratory qualitative study on the potential role of higher education in peacebuilding processes. The conceptual framework for the study is a taxonomy of the functions of higher education designed by the author. The questions guiding the dissertation are: 1) What can we learn about the role of higher education in conflict and postconflict from the experience of countries that have suffered internal conflicts in the last century? 2) How are universities in Colombia affected by the ongoing armed conflict in the country? 3) How can Colombian higher education contribute to build sustainable peace in the country? First, based on secondary sources, the dissertation explores seven armed conflicts that took place during the twentieth century. Then, the focus turns to the Colombian case. The research incorporates the analysis of 23 semi-structured interviews, published and unpublished documents, institutional websites, and government statistics, among others. In most of the conflicts included in the international overview, higher education institutions (HEIs) played instrumental roles during the conflict and the postconflict. Yet, those roles were not always conducive for peacebuilding. Universities, professors and students have been affected by the conflict, have participated in it, and sometimes, have been used by the combating parties for logistical purposes or to promote an ideology. In contrast, delegating a peacebuilding role to higher education is a relatively new phenomenon. Armed conflict in Colombia tends to affect public HEIs more than private ones. Public and private HEIs in Colombia have participated in peacebuilding activities. Sometimes they collaborated with government agencies and NGOs; other times, they worked independently. The contribution of higher education to peacebuilding goes beyond its traditional teaching function and includes many other functions that are hardly mentioned in peacebuilding literature. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

This research project addresses the question of how violent groups emerge and act under specific identity mantles in complex local, national and transnational conflict environments. It takes as a case study the example of violent Islamist groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and seeks to understand what influences the emergence and dynamics of violence under this specific 'brand.' It explains Islamist violence as a strategic tool in contexts of political and socio-economic marginalisation, deliberately mobilised under an Islamist brand in order to leverage a powerful and cross-ethnic identity among otherwise disempowered communities. The project explains variation in the intensification of conflict, use of anti-civilian strategies, and groups' relationships with transnational actors, as strategic choices, shaped by features of the wider conflict marketplace, including the presence, relative strength and transnational linkages of conflict actors. Using quantitative conflict event data, supplemented by qualitative fieldwork, the findings of this research project are four-fold: first, it demonstrates that Islamist violence should not be conceived of as unique from other non-state violence. Rather, Islamist violence can be studied in comparative context, and through some of the same explanatory frameworks that have effectively traced the origins, drivers and dynamics of other forms of non-state armed violence. Second, it finds that Islamist violence is a strategic response to local political environments, shaping the emergence and dynamics of violence under different brands. Third, it presents evidence that in spite of a dominant narrative of a single, homogeneous, global threat of Islamist violence, local conditions shape this phenomenon, and undermine the assumption of a highly transnational, mobile and rootless network of homogenous militant groups. Finally, it shows that the contours of those local environments - reflected in the number, strength and relative activity of other non-state armed groups - shape the intensity and targeting of Islamist violence in important ways.

This thesis explores the relationship between social capital and conflict in two different contexts, by answering the following two questions: How does exposure to violence affect social capital in urban Maharashtra, India? How does returning home affect social capital amongst internally displaced persons and returnees from Nahr el Bared camp in North Lebanon? This thesis then goes on to look at the labour market implications of returning home to Nahr el Bared camp, exploring the role of social capital (amongst other mechanisms) in this relationship. The following paragraphs are abstracts from the three empirical chapters that address these questions. The first empirical chapter explores the relationship between exposure to riots and social capital in urban Maharashtra. We exploit a panel dataset collected by the authors and apply a random effects model with lagged covariates to estimate an exogenous relationship between neighbourhood exposure to riots and four forms of social capital: membership in a group or organisation, trust in neighbours, participation in community discussions and participation in community festival preparations. Consistent with Bellows and Miguel's study of conflict and social capital (2009), we find that households living in neighbourhoods that experienced a riot are more likely to be members of groups and organisations. On the other hand, we find that these households are less likely to join community discussions, which lends more to the hypothesis of fragmented post-conflict societies with a damaged social fabric (Colletta and Cullen, 2000). We explore various mechanisms behind these results and find that the increased membership in organisations is greatest in diverse neighbourhoods that have not experienced recent changes in composition. However, riots reduce trust and the likelihood of participation in fragmented and polarised riot-affected neighbourhoods. Riots also decrease participation in festival preparations in neighbourhoods where out-migration has been low. Our analysis suggests that individuals and households instrumentally use social capital to their advantage, a type of insurance to protect against potential communal violence in the future. However, riots can have adverse affects on different forms of social capital that go beyond the surface level of social networking to feelings of trust and sense of community. The second empirical chapter studies the effect of returning home after conflict induced displacement on social capital, compared to remaining displaced. I have collected a household survey of displaced Palestinians from a refugee camp in Lebanon, and this chapter assesses the impact of return on the different dimensions of social capital based on a diverse and rich set of questions. An instrumental variable is used to model the return decision in one part of the camp, and the exogenous nature of return is exploited in another section of the camp. Results show that return can improve social capital if households return within one year of the war ending and with their friends and family. If households have been displaced for too long, then social capital is decreased upon returning home. This indicates that social capital is not simply carried over from displacement to return, but is rebuilt in a process that takes time and effort. The third and final empirical chapter studies the effect of returning home on labour market outcomes. Theoretically the effect of return is ambiguous, depending on changes in both the demand and supply of labour. I empirically study the effect of return on four labour market outcomes: participation in the labour force, working, wages and number of days worked. I analyse a dataset of individuals originally from Nahr el-Bared camp in North Lebanon, displaced within Lebanon after a war in 2007 between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam. I use an instrumental variable and exploit the exogenous nature of the return process in order to estimate a causal effect of return. The results show that return increases the likelihood of working by 117 percentage points. This effect is greatest for those who have returned within two years, reaping the benefits of greater aggregate demand as the market increases. Women returnees are more likely to be working compared to the displaced, but there is no difference in employment between men who have been displaced and those who have returned. This could be because women possess skills that are adaptable in labour markets, working in cottage type industries from home, as opposed to the more specialised skills that men tend to possess.

La protection des droits de l’enfant victime des conflits armés est une problématique récente et actuelle qui s’appuie sur l’évolution des droits de l’homme et sur la mutation de la nature des conflits. Elle pose la question de l’existence d’un cadre normatif international consistant, apte à assurer protection et assistance à l’enfant en proie à des hostilités. Sur ce point, il apparaît que le droit international prévoit un ensemble de mécanismes juridiques applicables à l’enfant, qu’il soit victime directe ou indirecte des conflits, ou qu’il participe directement aux hostilités. Aujourd’hui encore trop d’enfants meurent chaque jour à cause de conflits, de maladies, de Malnutrition beaucoup trop sont exploités et n’ont pas la possibilité de suivre des cours dans une école, voyant ainsi leur avenir leur échapper tous les jours un peu plus. Cependant, l’examen de ces instruments montre qu’ils se caractérisent souvent par la généralité de leurs dispositions qui ne sont pas toujours adaptées à la prise en compte de la spécificité de l’enfant. De plus, ils soulèvent parfois des questions d’applicabilité. Ainsi, si l’on ne peut pas leur nier toute effectivité, celle-ci reste, à bien des égards, partielle. L’adoption de mécanismes juridiques spécifiquement applicables à l’enfant, avait d’ailleurs pour objet de remédier à cette inadaptation et d’établir l’exhaustivité du cadre juridique. Ce respect les oblige à protéger les enfants afin de leur offrir la possibilité de bénéficier des programmes d’aide mis en place sur le terrain par de nombreuses organisations humanitaires clamant haut et fort que tout le monde doit agir, d’une manière ou d’une autre, pour permettre le développement d’actions de plus en plus variées et de plus en plus efficaces malgré les difficultés. La persistance des violations fait, cependant, prendre conscience des insuffisances normatives et impose une redéfinition de l’objectif de protection. Dans ce contexte, l’implication grandissante du Conseil de sécurité, mais aussi la criminalisation des violations commises lors des conflits armés, définissent une nouvelle approche de la responsabilité de la communauté internationale en la matière. Cette intervention a, en effet, permis de rappeler aux Etats leurs obligations et d’adopter des sanctions à l’encontre d’individus contrevenants. De même, les condamnations prononcées par la Cour pénale internationale et le Tribunal spécial pour la Sierra Léone pour crimes de guerre consistant au recrutement et à l’utilisation d’enfants soldats marquent la fin d’un déni de justice. / The protection of children's rights a victim of armed conflict is a recent and current problem which is based on the evolution of human rights and the changing nature of conflicts. It raises the question of the existence of an international legal framework consisting capable of providing protection and assistance to child plagued by hostilities. On this point, it appears that international law provides a set of legal mechanisms applicable to the child, whether direct or indirect victim of the conflict, or participate directly in hostilities. Today too many children die each day due to conflict, disease, malnutrition too are exploited and do not have the opportunity to take classes in a school, seeing their future away from them every day a little more. However, examination of these instruments shows that they are often characterized by the generality of their provisions which are not always adapted to take account of the specific nature of the child. In addition, they sometimes raise questions of applicability. So, if we can not deny them any effectiveness, it remains, in many respects, partial. The adoption of legal mechanisms specifically applicable to the child, had also intended to remedy this inadequacy and the completeness of the legal framework. This respect the obligation to protect children and offer them the opportunity to benefit from support programs implemented in the field by many humanitarian organizations claiming loudly that everyone must act in one way or another, to enable the development of actions increasingly diverse and increasingly effective despite the difficulties. Continuing violations did, however, become aware of the normative gaps and requires a redefinition of the objective of protection. In this context, the growing involvement of the Security Council but also the criminalization of violations committed during the armed conflict, define a new approach to the responsibility of the international community in this regard. This intervention, in fact, served to remind States of their obligations and adopt sanctions against individuals offenders. Similarly, sentences imposed by the International Criminal Court and the Special Court for Sierra Leone for war crimes of recruitment and use of child soldiers mark the end of a miscarriage of justice.

In many conflict-ridden countries, food insecurity prevails. However, the relationship between food insecurity and armed conflict onset is a complex one, and scholarly attention has increasingly been directed towards furthering our understanding of its nature. In this study, the proposition is brought forth that the effect of food insecurity on armed conflict onset should be contingent on certain features of the economic, social and political environment. Specifically, it suggests that (i) food insecurity should increase the risk of armed conflict onset by generating deprivation in absolute terms, and (ii) that the risk should be heightened when such insecurity disproportionally affects certain groups in society. The latter point pertains to the level of horizontal inequality – i.e. inequality at the group level –, the presence of which is expected to compound the risk of food insecurity leading to armed conflict onset by adding a relative dimension of deprivation to the absolute. A logistic regression analysis is employed using global data for the years 1961 to 2009. The findings do not support the hypothesized relationship. Rather, although food insecurity does increase the risk of armed conflict in cases where the level of horizontal political inequality is low, it decreases the risk in cases where it is high. This indicates that the impact of food insecurity on the risk of armed conflict indeed is contingent on certain features of the political environment, which calls for conditionality to increasingly be taken into account in future research on the relationship between food insecurity and armed conflict onset.

This thesis makes the case for eliminating the distinction between types of armed conflict under international humanitarian law (IHL). Currently, IHL makes the distinction between international and non-international armed conflicts. International armed conflicts are regulated by more treaties than their non-international counterparts. Furthermore, the regulation of international armed conflicts is also considerably more comprehensive than that offered for participants in and victims of non-international armed conflicts. This bifurcation of the law was logical at the time the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were drafted and adopted, as the majority of armed conflicts prior to that point had been international in character. However, in the years following the adoption of the Conventions, there has been a proliferation of non-international armed conflicts, which presents challenges to a body of law that has few tools to adequately address such occurrences. The adoption of the Additional Protocols in 1977 went some way to addressing the legal lacunae that existed, but significant gaps still remain. Mindful this history, this thesis tracks the growth and evolution of the laws of armed conflict in the modern era, since the first document of the laws of war produced for the American Civil War. In doing so, this thesis demonstrates how the law of armed conflict has become increasingly harmonised in its application, with more rules of IHL being generally applicable in all instances of armed conflict, regardless of characterisation. This thesis then makes the argument that the time has come for the final step to be taken, the elimination of the distinction between types of armed conflict, and the complete harmonisation of the laws of war. Focusing specifically on the issue of combatants and POWs in armed conflicts, this thesis draws on considerable legal precedent, legal theory, and policy arguments to make the case that it is time for the law relating to the regulation of armed conflicts to be more uniformly applied.