The purpose of this research was to study the effect of the conflict settlement process on the degree of expressed organizational commitment of employees in a collective bargaining setting. The research was done in a basic industry in northern Alabama. The instrument included the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) developed by Mowday, Porter, and Steers. Demographic variables measured were education, age, and sex. Main effects variables were tenure; union membership; and self-described experience with and feeling toward grievance/arbitration as a category 1 grievant, category 2 grievant, witness, and supervisor. Data were analyzed with hierarchical multiple regression. No statistically significant results were found. Limitations included the economic climate of the region and the industrial relations climate of the company.

This thesis deals with role of the European Union in the ethnic conflicts of South Caucasus, notably in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In the first part, the author concentrates on the evolution of situation in South Ossetia and Abkhazia as well as on the role of international actors in these territories, before the outbreak of war between Russia and Georgia in August 2008. The master thesis continues with the analysis of the EU's engagement in break-away territories where author focuses on the evaluation of specific policies and instruments used by the EU towards the two ethnic territories and Georgia. The final section assesses the EU's responsiveness during the Russian-Georgian war and also the steps taken in the period after the violence. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to evaluate the Union's policies in South Ossetia and Abkhazia before, during and after the breakthrough war in August 2008. In this context, the author concludes that EU policies have failed because of unability to prevent a renewed outbreak of violence. Failure depended on the EU's reluctance to get involved in political and security issues and also on Russia's influence on decision-making process of the EU member states.

This thesis attempts to provide both an explanatory model and to forecast settlements using large-n statistical analysis and machine learning. By asking the question of how costly signals affect the likelihood of conflict settlement, and drawing upon the literature on bargaining and signaling, it argues that when the challenging actor publicly state their demands and policy desires, they are sending costly signals, revealing information about their willingness to fight. This information is used by conflict parties to recalculate costs of war, causing them to eventually locate an agreement which both parties prefer continued fighting. As such, the mechanism suggests that a greater number of such signals means a greater chance at locating such an agreement, resulting in a greater chance of settlement. Additionally, connecting the signal to the issue at stake, I argue that territorial signals would be especially important, in part because they are often seen as indivisible, suggesting that signals relating to territory would be especially important relative to signals of comparable policy domains. The results are statistically significant in support of the first hypothesis but findno benefit to predictive performance from costly signals. In contracts territorial signals are neither statistically significant, nor contribute to predictive performance.