The history of nineteenth-century Ireland has traditionally been understood in terms of resistance to state coercion imposed ‘at the point of a bayonet’. This thesis offers an alternative approach by shifting focus away from metropolitan centres of power (Westminster, Dublin Castle) and the state's formal apparatus, toward an understanding of power as environmentally constructed. Using the case of Cork, the thesis traces the emergence of a non-sectarian ethos of urban ‘politeness’ rooted in middle-class reactions to the violent upheavals of the 1790s. Here, I argue a range of new public spaces emerged to ‘moralise’ the masses, anticipating state legislation by decades. In chapters on the spread of time-keeping technology and the reform of market spaces, the thesis argues effective authority inhered as much in clocks and weights as ‘at the point of a bayonet’. The corresponding rise of the ‘private sphere’, materialising the ideology of ‘separate spheres’ in the city’s first suburbs, provided an alternative pole of moral reform. Here, the invisible agency of pipes and sewers helped to privatize the burden of ‘healthy living’, severing the link between poverty and disease long before ‘Famine fever’ ravaged the city. And when it hit, John Stuart Mill was not alone in dreaming of a ‘tabula rasa’; the ‘Father of Temperance’ Theobald Mathew and his allies expressed precisely this view, ‘feminizing’ the catastrophe as a moment to ‘cleanse’ the city of morally ‘diseased’ prostitutes. Free from such ‘contamination’, new spaces devoted to recreation – parks, theatres, and racecourses – were engineered as arenas ‘free’ from state oversight, with citizens instead positioned to survey one another. The thesis concludes with a call to reinterpret resistance to the state in terms of the ‘rule of freedom’ as much as that of force. The seven chapters and conclusion of the thesis are divided into three parts: ‘The Polite City’, ‘The Purified City’ and ‘The Liberal City’. These overarching themes provide a framework to the chronological and thematic development of the thesis as a whole. The first three chapters explore the rising ethos of ‘politeness’ as an ‘improving’ ideology which sought to engineer certain forms of conduct – domestic, social, and commercial – into the fabric of everyday urban life. Crucial to this was the notion of non-coercive governance aimed at securing ‘the right disposition of things, arranged ... to a convenient end’. ‘The Purified City’ explores ways in which the Famine helped to ‘naturalise’ the alienation of certain classes of deviant from the ‘social body’ of the urban community. ‘The Liberal City’ looks at how mid-Victorian city also invited the consent of the governed by creating spaces where citizenship could be performed in acts of leisure and recreation. It was in this sense that fin de siècle cultural nationalists saw the greatest threat to a revival of Irish popular culture as arising not from police stations or military barracks, but from the respectable world of suburban ‘politeness’.

The United States confronted new problems of territorial expansion with the Louisiana Purchase, as it involved, for the first time, the transfer in sovereignty of a territory that contained a population who by birth, language and religion differed substantially from the inhabitants of the United States, but who had been guaranteed the rights of full citizens. A series of other colonial powers faced these same problems on the North American continent, notably the Spanish in Louisiana. As with those earlier powers, ultimately the United States pursued processes that both brought Louisiana government and law into line with its institutions, and allowed for continued local control. County and parish officeholders through their interactions with U.S. authorities prove especially useful for an examination of the processes that gradually integrated the Territory of Orleans into the United States. Neither a study of high political figures in Washington nor marginalized groups in Louisiana can accurately demonstrate how this process of accommodation worked. Local elites and U.S. officials served as the middlemen who oversaw the implementation of new policy and therefore were in a position to obstruct these policies if they so chose. Native-born Louisiana elites confronted significant challenges in dealing with a U.S. administration that in some areas chose to accommodate them, but in many others chose to implement policies through Anglo- American or foreign French newcomers to the territory. The change in sovereignty to the United States offered many individuals from local elites new pathways to power in the territorial legislature, and later in a stronger state legislature. Local governance played a central role in the success of U.S. sovereignty within Louisiana.

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The aim of this dissertation is to present work on a number of salient characteristics of elite relations in Sweden, studied from a social network analytic perspective. Elite integration, the distribution of elite power, and the significance of elites’ informal relations represent the three main themes explored in the original studies that comprise the thesis. Studies 1-3 concern elite relations at the local, i.e. municipal level of political decision-making, while research on parliamentary political elites is reported in Study 4. Studies 1-3 draw upon original complete network data collected through personal interviews with 248 local elites (politicians, corporate leaders, civil servants, etc.) active in four mid-sized Swedish municipalities. The question of local elite integration is investigated in Study 1, while the question of women elites’ potential access to structural power is studied in Study 2. These studies conclude that local elites are well integrated around structural cores of politicians and civil servants, and that women elites are on average not structurally disadvantaged due to their sex. Research concerning the role local elites’ involvement in associations like Rotary clubs is reported in Study 3. The results suggest that membership in such semi-exclusive voluntary settings may have an optimizing impact upon the elites’ personal networks, as far as their individual level social capital is concerned. In the final study (Study 4) focus is shifted to national political elites when a social network analytic perspective is utilized to study social cohesion within multiparty opposition coalitions recently formed in the Swedish Riksdag. The study concludes that the right wing-liberal Alliance coalition formed prior to the 2006 general elections was socially better integrated and more cohesive than the socialist-environmentalist coalition formed during the subsequent parliamentary cycle. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted. Paper 2: Submitted. Paper 4: Submitted.</p>

Preparing for Genocide: Community Work in Rwanda How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, before the genocide, regularly used by the local political elites for spreading propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that a one standard-deviation increase in the number of rainy Saturdays resulted in a 20 percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence.   Mobilizing the Masses for Genocide Do political elites use armed groups to foster civilian participation in violence or are civilian killers driven by unstoppable ancient hatred? If armed groups matter, are they allocated strategically to maximize civilian participation? How do they mobilize civilians? I empirically investigate these three questions using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide. To establish causality, I exploit cross-sectional variation in armed groups' transport costs induced by exogenous weather fluctuations: the shortest distance of each village to the main road interacted with rainfall along the dirt tracks between the main road and the village. Guided by a simple model, I come up with the following answers to the three central questions: (1) one additional armed-group member resulted in 7.3 more civilian perpetrators, (2) armed-group leaders responded rationally to exogenous transport costs and dispatched their men strategically to maximize civilian participation and (3) for the majority of villages, armed-group members acted as role models and civilians followed orders, but in villages with high levels of cross-ethnic marriage, civilians had to be forced to join in. Finally, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that a military intervention targeting the various armed groups could have stopped the Rwandan Genocide.   The Legacy of Political Mass Killings: Evidence from the Rwandan Genocide We study how political mass killings affect later economic performance, using data from the Rwandan Genocide. Our results show that households in villages that experienced higher levels of violence have higher living standards six years after the genocide. They enjoy higher levels of consumption, own more assets and agricultural output per capita is higher. These results are consistent with the Malthusian hypothesis that mass killings can raise living standards by reducing the population size and redistributing assets from the deceased to the survivors. However, we also find that the violence affected the age distribution in villages, raised fertility rates among female survivors and reduced cognitive skills of children.   Ethnic Income Inequality and Conflict in Africa This paper shows that income inequality between ethnic groups increases the likelihood of ethnic conflict in Africa. To establish causality, we exploit variation in rainfall over each ethnic group’s homeland. One standard-deviation increase in ethnic inequality increases the likelihood of ethnic conflict by about 66 percent. Our results have important policy implications to the extent that global climate change might affect different regions differently and thus increase inequality and conflict.

This project examines the articulation and application of colonial law in the French colony of Martinique during the eighteenth century through the work of a legal commentator and colonial magistrate, Pierre Dessalles. His compilation of Martinican laws reveals how local elites applied laws usually promulgated in France. His reliance on European political theorists illustrates the dissemination of legal knowledge across the Atlantic, while his comments and explanation of colonial law in light of Martinique’s history anchor this discussion in a local history. Thus, from Dessalles’ creole, local elite perspective, historians can perceive both the operation and ideology behind Martinican law because this document explicitly presented law (as prescription) and legalities (as practice) together. / text

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This study analyses the characteristics and life trajectories of highly educated18 to 35 year old Malawians, how they negotiate their identities in the face of HIV/AIDS, and their opinions regarding the effectiveness of current HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention efforts. These Malawians are among the privileged few who get an opportunity to complete their secondary education and potentially attend post-secondary classes. However, their livelihoods are inevitably tied to HIV/AIDS and public health employment opportunities and discourses due to the high HIV/AIDS prevalence in Malawi. These Malawians routinely presented their identities in the context of their understanding of HIV/AIDS. They also critically discussed the merits of current HIV/AIDS policies and potential alternative methods to decrease the spread of HIV in Malawi. By considering who highly educated Malawians are and why they discuss HIV/AIDS in such a manner, more culturally appropriate and innovative solutions in ridding Malawi of this epidemic may be understood.

Proefschrift Universiteit van Amsterdam. / Met lit.opg. en samenvatting in het Nederlands.

Thesis (doctoral)--Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht, 1985. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.