Thesis advisor: Ingu Hwang / Transitional justice (TJ) measures such as amnesty and lustration laws, truth commissions, and reparation programs have been widely utilized worldwide in an effort to come to terms with dark pasts and mass atrocities. However, these measures have had varying levels of success, which begs the question: how successful really is TJ in enacting the change that needs to take place? To answer this question, an analysis into the imagination and implementation of TJ, its globalization and localization, and its relationship with democratization is conducted. Case studies include TJ measures in South Korea, Chile, Albania, and Rwanda and includes multilingual primary and secondary sources such as government reports, presidential speeches, academic and legal journals, museums, protest picket signs, literature, documentaries, and news articles. It is concluded that TJ measures are both successful and unsuccessful, which depends on (1) a desire from the people, (2) a balance between global and local efforts, and (3) whether one or multiple TJ measures are employed simultaneously. Specific policy and field recommendations are outlined at the end. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: International Studies.

While democracy is the least likely outcome of any given democratic transition from authoritarianism, this dissertation argues that the likelihood for democratization diminishes even further in a praetorian state. This is because the military continues to play a decisive role in the transition either directly or indirectly. If the transitions appears bound to bring about civilian control, the military will decide to rule overtly. At a broad conceptual level, this project adds to the existing literature on democratic breakdown that has been comparatively overlooked in relation to transitions and consolidation. The research also expands on the civil-military literature, and aims to explore the role praetorian militaries play during political transitions and processes of democratic consolidation. In particular, it seeks to explain the conditions under which a guardian or a moderator praetorian army would opt to become a ruling praetorian army, and, therefore, preclude the possibility of democratic consolidation. Indeed, this work aims to identify the factors responsible for the undoing of Egypt’s electoral advances, and whether or not that outcome was inevitable. The general assertion here is that the imbalance of power within the state, caused by the army’s oversized political role, and within society, caused by the Brotherhood’s relative organizational prowess, meant a confrontation between the two was virtually unavoidable. Fearing the prospect of subjective civilian control imposed by a potentially hegemonic party, a praetorian military is bound to check that party’s rise by waging a coup d’état in order to maintain the army’s institutional autonomy, economic privileges and right to rule. The rest of the political class aids this process by playing the role of the disloyal opposition paving the way for the officers to remove civilian officials, and carry out a restorative coup. While praetorian armies prefer to delegate the burden of governing to pliable civilians, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces’ (SCAF) failure to orchestrate a political transition into a tutelary democracy drove the army to shift its posture into ruling praetorianism. Contrary to their wishes and interests, the political transition engendered an intolerable situation for the army: the emergence, in the Muslim Brotherhood, of a potentially hegemonic party that repeatedly attempted (and failed) to subject the military to civilian control. / 2028-02-29T00:00:00Z

This paper examines the political participation of diaspora representatives in Tunisia’s politicalparties with affiliations to the Tunisian labor movement. The study is based on qualitativeinterviews with active politicians and other stakeholders in Tunis as well as participatoryobservations. The findings point towards decreased political participation among the diaspora,although their engagement during the years following the revolution of 2011 can be considered tohave been relatively high. The diminishing participation of the diaspora seems to be part of alarger trend that can explained by the fluid and rather underdeveloped system of political partiesthat has created difficulties in forming an efficient opposition, which has given rise to politicalapathy that has been efficiently exploited by anti-democratic candidates in Tunisia.

This research examines how relative deprivation theory can be applied to study the success of protest movements and their subsequent impact on the process of democratization of the South Korean state. This study hopes to provide a more comprehensive approach to how the role of protests in the development of a democratic state is explained within the field of political science. Utilizing both a quantitative and qualitative research design, this work applied a case study analysis as well as a supplemental data analysis regarding the success of Korean protest movements and their impact on democratization as well as global views of democratization as previously mentioned. For the case study analysis, I focused on four protest movements in South Korea and applied relative deprivation theory in each case. Then, I defined five metrics for protest success based on my previous analysis and used these metrics to conduct a comparative analysis regarding the short and long term success of each protest movement. For the data analysis, I utilized Systemic Peace's Polity Project Series V dataset in order to quantify changes in the qualities of the regime over time, on a scale ranging from highly authoritarian to highly democratic regime qualities. Based on this mixed-mode analysis, I find that protest movements that were linked to progressive deprivation led to most successful shifts towards democratic regime qualities in the long-term. This project is significant to the field as it will address criticisms in previously discounted protest theory as well as explore the changing narrative of democratization in the modern world and dispel historical misconceptions of political culture in East Asia, focusing on Korea.

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Since the early 1990s, more and more people in Taiwan have come to view Taiwan itself as a country independent of China. They consider themselves Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Drawing on a social constructionist perspective to nationalism and Laclau and Mouffe's theory of discourse, this dissertation attempts to analyze the discursive mechanisms that have constructed this new collective imagination by many people in Taiwan that now regard themselves as members of an independent Taiwanese nation. The research questions of this dissertation are: how has the post-1949 national identity of Taiwan been discursively transformed since the early 1990s? What are the discursive and institutional mechanisms that have reproduced the Taiwanese national identity? What challenges is the Taiwanese national identity facing? To answer these questions, this dissertation outlines three nationalist discourses and five representations that have been derived from them regarding Taiwan's status, its relationship with mainland China, and the national identity of people in Taiwan. It examines the changes in Taiwan's discursive regime and symbolic economy since the early 1990s, showing how the rise of Taiwanese national identity has been closely related to political leaders' identification with Taiwanese nationalism. I argue that the rise of Taiwanese national identity in Taiwan has been an effect of a discursive contestation among the three major nationalist discourses and the polarization of the discursive field. This dissertation also explores the provincial origin issue---which has been closely related to ethnic tension in Taiwan---and the relations between the nationalist discourses and democratization. In addition, to explore the possibility for a deconstruction of the Taiwanese national identity, I examine the challenges that the Taiwanese national identity faces, focusing on democracy, the Democratic Progressive Party's performance as the ruling party, and the cross-Strait economic integration and political interactions. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: R. Shep Melnick / Many political thinkers have suggested that religion is a necessary prerequisite for the proper functioning of American democracy. Foremost among them is Alexis de Tocqueville who argues, in particular, that religion serves as a counterbalance to individualism and crass acquisitiveness—two of the most worrisome aspects of American democracy. Yet, Tocqueville’s own analysis bids us to ask whether religion still serves this beneficial purpose nearly 200 years later, or whether democratization and individualism have not remade religion itself. The primary theme of the dissertation is therefore to investigate whether democratization and individualism have wrought changes of real significance in American religion and religious institutions. In the first part, I argue against the secularization thesis on the grounds that contemporary developments in American religion, such as the so-called rise of the “nones” and the growing distrust of organized religion, are explicable not by secularization but by democratization and individualism. To understand this phenomenon better, I return to the French liberal tradition of Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville to articulate a theory of democratic deformalization—a process whereby American democracy breaks down the “formal” elements of religion. In the second part, I argue that individualism has caused a host of quantitative changes in American religion, including declining church membership, dwindling church participation, and a collapse in the perceived importance of organized religion itself. There are notable qualitative changes as well, including increasingly tenuous connections to churches, a proliferation of religious options within churches, and a new megachurch model that is better able to cater to individual taste and preference. In the third and most substantial part, I take up the question of whether individualism itself has changed or evolved over time, in predictable or unpredictable ways. Here, I argue that there has been a general shift from utilitarian individualism towards expressive individualism, with profound consequences for religious institutions and for society itself. The former, with its connection to the Protestant work ethic and Puritan social philosophy tends to cause an inclination in individuals to partake in community, submit to institutions, and follow moral and religious rules; the latter, with its belief in authenticity, causes a profound disdain for communal sources of authority, social institutions, and moral constraints. I conclude by arguing that the anthropology of expressive individualism, and its historical growth since the 1960s, proves to be the fundamental cause behind all these changes. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

The objective of this study is to understand the logic of popular mobilization in Sao Paulo (Brazil) and New Delhi (India) and to explain why subaltern groups use their political freedoms to mobilize on some issues and not on others. More specifically, the study attempts to address a puzzle: Why do the popular sectors not mobilize to make claims for health when the vast majority of the urban poor experience severe health deficits? My contention is that the nature of public discourse determines both the emergence of popular movements and the issues on which they engage in claims-making. Competing ideas about what democracy is and what it ought to be, the meaning of social justice, and the relationship between democracy and social justice, constitute the 'raw materials' around which mobilization frames are created. The empirical evidence presented in this study supports my claim that the nature of public discourse is crucial for democratic deepening from below. / Based on extensive field research in low-income communities in Sao Paulo and New Delhi, my study explains the differences and similarities in the political actions of the urban poor. In India, the near-absence of a public discourse on health accounts for the lack of mobilization by subaltern groups to seek improvements in their health situation. In contrast, I find that there has been a tradition of public discourse on health in Brazil since the 1970s when "external actors" such as doctors and progressive Church officials became engaged in social causes and contributed to the emergence of health movements. However, since Brazil's transition to democracy, this public discourse has fractured, becoming more receptive to "new" health issues such as violence, even though "old" health problems continue to persist. While the popular sectors experience the dual burden of "old" and "new" health problems, they are perceived to be the cause of many "new" health hazards like violence rather than its victims. The disengagement of "external actors" from "old" health issues and the widespread perception that the popular sectors are themselves to blame for the "new" health problems has inhibited popular mobilization for health in democratic Brazil.

Thesis -- Departmental honors in International Relations. / Spine title: Islamists as instruments of change: a study on democratization. Includes bibliography: ℓ. 105-110.