Thesis advisor: Christopher P. Salas-Wright / Around the world, attacks against humanitarian aid workers pose a pervasive and intransigent threat to health and human rights, but evidence about the complex factors that predict perpetrators' behavior as well as attack outcomes remains quite limited. While previous studies have addressed several aspects of local and global trends of attacks against humanitarian assistance, more evidence is also needed to understand the dynamics of recurrent incidents, small-scale attacks, as well as patterns of events across time and space; and how the observed trends are driven by conflict-related and contextual factors. In this dissertation, we investigate the predictors and spatiotemporal dynamics of attacks against humanitarian assistance from 1997 to 2022 using publicly-available datasets from the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD, Humanitarian Outcomes, 2022) and the Armed Conflict Dataset version 22.0 (ACD; Glaeditsch et al., 2002; Davies et al., 2022). / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.

During the latest armed conflict in the Central African Republic (CAR) from 2013 to the present, narratives emerged regarding who was an autochthon and who was not, pitting “true Central Africans” against “foreigners”, Christians against Muslims. This new cycle of violence is embedded in a long history of political violence in the CAR. Still, the claim of one group being more autochthon than another has not been a prominent feature of previous conflicts, neither has fighting in the past formed so clearly along religious identities. Being a Son of the Soil, an autochthon, evokes an image that denies CAR’s history of migration of social groups and reify fixity, and such conflicts have also been present in other parts of Africa, as well as in Europe and Asia. To date, most literature seeking to understand autochthony-related armed conflict has been dominated by elite-centric analysis that highlight the mobilization of autochthony as a strategy to retain power in cases of political liberalization or democratization (Cameroon, Kenya or Côte d’Ivoire). When not elite-centric, analyses of autochthony-related conflict have emphasized land, access to land issues or crudely predatory logics of vigilante groups on the local level (Côte d’Ivoire or the DRC). In CAR, neither political liberalization, nor land issues alone were prominent, but autochthony was a strategy as witnessed in other African cases of autochthony-related armed conflicts. In that sense, this research asks how and why is autochthony being mobilized in the CAR politics before and after the 2013 coup? The dissertation argues that elites and ordinary citizens discursively mobilize autochthony as an identity capital across various scales. They do it to access non-land related resources, claim hierarchy, and discriminate against the other. The mobilization of autochthony is tied to longer legitimacy-seeking strategies of the elite, and autochthony is a symbolic myth that can be mobilized at various levels. The dissertation’s main theoretical contribution is to challenge the tendency to consider elites and supporters as belonging and subscribing to different discursive realm. This study has considered that autochthony links leaders and their followers in a type of pre-given conception that no longer needs explanation. This contributes to considering elites and their supporters as tied by the same discursive realm, but the concrete meaning of the discourse is different across multiple levels. To make the argument, the dissertation uses a qualitative multi-method approach predominantly centered on discourse analysis, fieldwork, interviews, and newspapers archival research. My research shows that understanding autochthony violence requires a simultaneous analysis of how autochthony is given meaning at different levels by various actors in everyday practices from the macro to the micro. Instrumentalizing autochthony lies at the interplay of all these levels. In this work, autochthony is vague enough to connect leaders to followers and, at the same time, precise enough for listeners to make sense of the term by connecting it to their daily experience of it. The long-term existence of the autochthony discourse allows it to change and morph at times of heightened crisis. It does not emerge overnight, but it has a longer genealogy that must be understood in context. That is, it is not simply because Bozizé targeted Muslim-foreigners in his speeches that people mobilized against them. Top-down manipulation might have resonated with followers but understanding of autochthony also operated independently of the top-down manipulation. That the conflict manifested around sectarian lines fits within an autochthony framework because autochthony is an empty identity marker whose content can be filled in many ways – most frequently with reference to ethnicity, religion, language, myths of origin, or some combination of such markers.

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No / The analysis of armed conflict in the post Cold War era has been profoundly influenced by neoclassical economists. Statistical approaches have generated important propositions, but there is a danger when these feed into policy prescriptions. This paper first compares the economics of civil war literature with the social movement literature which has also tried to explain collective action problems. It argues that the latter has a much more sophisticated set of conceptual tools, enriched by empirical study. The paper then uses the case of multipolar militarization in oil-rich Casanare, Colombia, to demonstrate complexity and contingency in civil war trajectories. State policy failure and civil actors can be an important source of explanation alongside the economic agendas of armed actors.

Yes / Stark illustrations of the dangers from chemical weapons can be seen in attacks using toxic industrial chemicals and sarin against civilians and combatants in Syria and toxic industrial chemicals in Iraq, as well as more targeted assassination operations in Malaysia and the United Kingdom, employing VX and novichok nerve agents, respectively. Concerns about such malign applications of chemical technology are exacerbated by the unstable international security environment and the changing nature of armed conflict, “where borderlines between war, civil war, large-scale violations of human rights, revolutions and uprisings, insurgencies and terrorism as well as organized crime are blurred” (1). It is thus essential that the global community regularly review the nature and implications of developments in chemistry, and its convergence with the life and associated sciences, and establish appropriate measures to prevent their misuse. With the parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) convening a Review Conference to address such issues beginning 21 November 2018, we highlight important scientific aspects (2)

No / Presents an analysis of Pakistan that features five players: the people, the army, the Islamists, the politicians and the Americans. This book explains how a series of alliances borne of political and strategic expediency between the US and the military have continually undermined the state to the extent that its very existence is in jeopardy.

Yes / This article examines the key features of state failure that have adversely affected the goal of state-building and peace-building in South Sudan. Drawing on interviews with sections of local and international stakeholders in South Sudan, the article analyses the major areas of state reconstruction and peacebuilding that the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM) government has failed to address proactively, areas and issues that seem directly or indirectly linked to the political crisis that started in December 2013 and the relapse into armed conflict. The paper also analyses the recent political developments and ongoing peace process in South Sudan and proffers some complementary policy intervention measures that could be implemented to strengthen the peace process. / This article was made possible through support from the Social Science Research Council’s African Peacebuilding Network (APN) research grant, with funds provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.