Today, the strength of the National Rifle Association (NRA) is understood by the general public and many scholars to be dependent on the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the right of individuals to own firearms. This dissertation challenges that understanding by focusing on three organizations, the NRA, the National Guard and the National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice (NBPRP). While each organization appears in today's world to be distinct and independent, this dissertation reveals how they garnered strength from a symbiotic relationship. The NRA was founded in 1871, originally as a marksmanship organization. The National Guard, which grew from the nation's militia, was formally established in the early twentieth century. The NBPRP was a small organization that was established in 1903 within the War Department at the encouragement of the NRA. Following passage in 1903 of legislation bringing state militia units under federal control, the newly formed National Guard became dependent on the NRA, which in turn leveraged that dependence to create a nationwide grassroots organization. The NBPRP was headed by the Assistant Secretary of War until 1916 when the position of the Director of Civilian Marksmanship was created, to be held by a U.S. Army or U.S. Marine Corps officer. The NRA acted as the surrogate of the NBPRB outside of the halls of government. At the same time, the NBRPB provided the NRA with a voice within those same halls that aided in the development of federal policy and budget positions related to firearms acquisition, competition, and training. The purpose of this dissertation is to reveal how the NRA was able to employ these two organizations to develop an exceptionally powerful grassroots organization that today is recognized as one of the most powerful special interest groups in America. Understanding how this powerful organization grew offers one perspective of how the bureaucracy that has been developed to support America's federal system of government is uniquely susceptible to special interest influence.

Cross-national crime studies are often plagued with conceptualization issues. In specific, some countries may define certain acts of violence as crimes, whereas others may perceive these acts as justifiable or culturally prescribed. This difference in conceptualization is especially the case with the crime of genocide, which the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 defines “as any of a number of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Despite this legal definition, countries, organizations, institutions or individuals may label a crisis as genocide, civil war, or another type of conflict. Because the printed mainstream media reflects and shapes the public perception of international conflicts, this research employs content analysis and quantitative methodology in examining published accounts of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan over the last five years. Using articles from newspapers in the United States, Great Britain, China, and Qatar, I examined the extent to which the term genocide is used to illustrate this conflict within the mainstream media from these four different countries. The results of this study suggest that the geographic location of a news outlet does not necessarily play a role in the conceptualization of genocide. The most important factors in this process are the way in which the author of the article frames the conflict, whether the author chooses to use quotes from certain organizational leaders, and the context in which the term genocide is used when it is chosen in favor of the term ethnic cleansing or civil war. These findings imply that news sources play a large role in public perception of genocide.

Based on the narratives of young people this research explores the rise in youth violence in Kenya's secondary school system and wider society and the potential for peacebuilding to address youth violence. Of particular concern is the gradual change in the profiles, patterns and intensity of the conflict, as evidenced by the increase in the number of youth militias. This increase is often attributed to unemployment and poverty - yet, to date, no systematic research has been produced on the extent to which the youth participation in violence occurs through choice or coercion, or indeed both. Worryingly, a significant number of young people involved in this violence are secondary school students. The findings of this research indicate that despite responses to youth violence in the school and wider Kenyan society, the violence is unabated. Notably, approaches continue to be top-down, generic, superficial and ineffectual. By marginalising the narratives of the youth who participate in and/or observe the violence, current institutional policies and approaches are decontextualised - from both the particular and the wider Kenyan context. This leaves intact the root causes of the violence. This research raises important questions concerning generic, top-down, quick-fix, outmoded cultural paradigms, hierarchical and questionable homogeneous pedagogical approaches to peacebuilding in both the schools and wider Kenyan context. In attempt to address these deficiencies the research seeks to find out approaches to peacebuilding and the Kenyan education systems that can respond to youth violence. This research proffers three key dimensions that can be incorporated in order to ensure effective and sustainable peace: experiences, worldviews and attitudes of the actors. The research, which utilises a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006), was conducted in fourteen secondary schools in Nairobi and the Rift Valley provinces - two provinces that have been at the centre of youth violence and militia activities. These provinces were also selected in order to reflect the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic character, and the different types of schools in Kenya.

In the post-9/11 world, Bangladesh has been identified as a new hub of the Al-Qaeda network in South Asia. Most of the contemporary national and international media reports, security documents, and even academic studies point to the fact that an Islamist movement is on the dramatic rise in Bangladesh in recent years. These reports and studies portray the Islamist movement as closely linked with terrorism and devoid of any historical roots and relations with other types of movement. Contrary to this view, this study argues that the Islamist movement is not an unprecedented phenomenon but historically linked with a broader militia movement which subsequently leads to the emergence of Bangladesh as a nation state in 1971. Since its inception, the nation state is dealing not only with the Islamist movement but also with two other types of militia movement almost simultaneously – the leftwing and the ethnic. Having identified these three types, this study defines the militia movement in terms of five analytical categories – ideology, motivation, mobilization, organization, and ritual – following Freilich and others. It analyzes the Bangladesh militia movement in terms of these five dimensions, providing historical-empirical data from both primary and secondary sources to show how the contemporary militias are carrying forward the legacy of their historical forerunners. This study concludes with policy recommendations on how informed decisions can be made to effectively deal with the militia issue. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-06-02 14:36:43.282

It is a common observation that organizations of violence make use of moral transgression to bond new recruits to the group’s authority figures and to encourage compliance to them. The present study drew on the work of Festinger (1957), Aronson and Mills (1959) and Martens et al. (2007) and, for the first time examined this observation empirically. It was hypothesized that when participants agreed to make a moral transgression for the experimenter that they would come to view him more positively, see him as more professional and become more compliant to him, and that this would happen even more when that choice to comply was made salient. Participants were asked to place a number of bugs into a modified coffee grinder that ostensibly exterminated the bugs and then to activate the device. No bugs were killed in any condition, but participants were either led to believe that they were killing the bugs or informed that it was just a simulation. Subsequent positivity in the perception of the experimenter and how professional they considered him to be was then measured by questionnaire and compliance to him was measured in an optional data-entry task. Results yielded partial support for the research hypotheses suggesting that at least under some circumstances, agreeing to make a personal moral transgression for an authority figure leads to increases in the positivity in the perception of that figure and compliance to him and that making that choice salient enhances this effect. The implications of this finding for the understanding of the processes by which a person can become bonded to unsavory authority-figures and potential applications to community education programs are discussed; as are the limitations of this study and possibilities for future research.

Orientador: Eni de Lourdes Puccinelli Orlandi / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudo da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T13:30:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Costa_GrecielyCristinada_D.pdf: 2413084 bytes, checksum: 47250b6f570f64d6494b3c0326a53646 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: Analisamos, neste trabalho, processos discursivos desencadeados pelo funcionamento da denominação milícia. Essa denominação começou a circular na mídia, em 2006, para se referir à polícia (junto a outros agentes de segurança pública) que invade áreas de favelas, impondo um domínio, intervindo nas relações sociais, a partir da instauração de um dispositivo normativo. Diante desse acontecimento discursivo, perguntamos: por que chamar a polícia de milícia? A partir dessa questão, investigamos quais são os efeitos metafóricos produzidos por essa e outras substituições, que funcionam em discursos sobre a milícia, a saber: discurso de moradores do Rio de Janeiro, discurso jurídico, discurso jornalístico. Examinamos ainda o discurso de imagens. Nesse percurso, abordamos quatro pontos principais. São eles: i) o de que, em certa instância, essa denominação recobre a violência policial ao dar outro nome à polícia, ou seja, desvincula milícia da Instituição Polícia; ii) por outro lado, é o lugar de policial que configura e sustenta o sentido de milícia enquanto protetora; iii) todavia, tem sua prática associada a grupos criminosos, é então significada como criminosa, um desdobramento da polícia; iv) e a existência da milícia está ligada a um espaço material político-simbólico determinado: a favela, pois é nesse espaço que ela tem sua prática instaurada. Esses quatro pontos, que sinalizam sentidos para milícia, levaram-nos a pensar sobre a construção discursiva dos referentes não só na relação com essa denominação, mas com outras que são mobilizadas no decorrer das análises, visando compreender o processo de produção de efeitos de evidência posto em movimento por diferentes sujeitos, em distintos discursos. Nomes, vozes e imagens, permeados de equívocos, são focalizados nesse processo, no qual os sentidos deslizam, se movimentam, se inscrevem, se significam e ressignificam. Observamos que nomear, seja denominando ou renomeando, é explicitar o silêncio que dispersa o discurso dos sujeitos moradores, é tornar visível a indistinção de sujeitos, afetada pelos efeitos da indeterminação, é trabalhar com a diluição dos sentidos, que, por sua vez, são sempre constituídos por relações. É, ainda, situar-se na fronteira em que o dito, o dizível e o silenciado constituem discursos sobre, dentro do jogo de formações imaginárias, da interpretação e da ideologia / Abstract: Discursive processes initiated by the denomination militia are analyzed in this study. The term "militia" started to appear in the media in 2006, as a reference to the police officers (together with other public security officers) who invade Brazilian shantytowns, imposing dominance, interfering with social relations, starting their actions from the introduction of a normative device. Facing this discursive fact, we could raise a question: what is the reason for naming the police as "militia"? From this question, we investigate what are the metaphorical effects produced by this and other substitutions used in the following discourses about militias: Rio de Janeiro inhabitants? discourse, juridical discourse, journalistic discourse. In our investigation, we approach four main points: i) the fact that, in a certain way, this name covers the police violence, giving the Police another name, i.e., the name unlinks the militia from the police as an institution; ii) on the other hand, the police role configures and keeps the sense of the militia as a protector; iii) however, the militia has its action associated with criminal groups, so it might be understood as something criminal, a deployment of the police; iv) and the fact that the militia existence is connected to a determined symbolic political material space, the shantytown, once this is the space where the militia has established its action. Those four points, which signalize significances for the militia, lead us to consider the discursive construction of referents, not only in relation of that name, but also to others, which are found along the analysis, aiming at understanding the effects production process set in motion by different subjects within distinct discourses. Names, voices and images, surrounded by misunderstandings are focused on this process, in which the meanings slip, move, inscribe themselves, mean and re-mean. We can observe that, nominating, either denominating or renominating, is to show the silence that disperses the inhabitants? discourse, is to make the subjects? indistinction, affected by the effects of indetermination, visible, is to deal with the dilution of meanings, which, in turn, are always built up by relations. It is also being in the boundary where what was said, what is sayable and what is silenced compose discourse on and within the game of imaginary formations, interpretation and ideology / Doutorado / Linguistica / Mestre em Linguística

Violent non-state actors have represented a significant challenge for both national and international security in recent decades. One of the many countries that have experienced extensive violence perpetrated by these entities is also Kenya. Particularly armed group called Mungiki managed to become influential security, political, criminal and religious actor. Considering frequent transformations of the group making it difficult to determine what type of violent non-state actor Mungiki is, the group still represents a challenging case for researchers to fully comprehend. To contribute to the understanding of this entity and extend contemporary knowledge of violent non-state actors, this study aims to conceptualize individual phases of Mungiki development and discover mechanisms behind its recurrent metamorphoses from one type of violent actor to another. Based on the review of existing literature focused on violent non-state actors, their conceptualization, emergence, and transformations, the thesis uses a case-centric process- tracing method aimed at explaining particular outcomes of individual transformations. The study consists of an in-depth analysis of Mungiki development in the context of Kenyan security and political environment. The results indicate that Mungiki represented different types...

Based on the narratives of young people this research explores the rise in youth violence in Kenya¿s secondary school system and wider society and the potential for peacebuilding to address youth violence. Of particular concern is the gradual change in the profiles, patterns and intensity of the conflict, as evidenced by the increase in the number of youth militias. This increase is often attributed to unemployment and poverty ¿ yet, to date, no systematic research has been produced on the extent to which the youth participation in violence occurs through choice or coercion, or indeed both. Worryingly, a significant number of young people involved in this violence are secondary school students. The findings of this research indicate that despite responses to youth violence in the school and wider Kenyan society, the violence is unabated. Notably, approaches continue to be top-down, generic, superficial and ineffectual. By marginalising the narratives of the youth who participate in and/or observe the violence, current institutional policies and approaches are decontextualised - from both the particular and the wider Kenyan context. This leaves intact the root causes of the violence. This research raises important questions concerning generic, top-down, quick-fix, outmoded cultural paradigms, hierarchical and questionable homogeneous pedagogical approaches to peacebuilding in both the schools and wider Kenyan context. In attempt to address these deficiencies the research seeks to find out approaches to peacebuilding and the Kenyan education systems that can respond to youth violence. This research proffers three key dimensions that can be incorporated in order to ensure effective and sustainable peace: experiences, worldviews and attitudes of the actors. The research, which utilises a constructivist grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006), was conducted in fourteen secondary schools in Nairobi and the Rift Valley provinces ¿ two provinces that have been at the centre of youth violence and militia activities. These provinces were also selected in order to reflect the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic character, and the different types of schools in Kenya.

This study explores and critically examines the role of indigenous mechanisms (the Inter-Tribal Reconciliation Conferences-ITRCs) in resolving tribal conflicts in South Darfur State of Western Sudan. The fundamental question raised by this study is: have these reconciliation conferences- 1989-2009- been able to address the root causes of the tribal conflicts and are they capable of serving the same role that they once did? Tribal leadership structures, such as Native Administration (NA) and their mechanisms of conflict resolution/management in Darfur, have been subjected to highly significant changes over time. The question is to what extent these changes further fuelled tribal conflicts and/or have negatively affected the capability of the NA and the ITRCs to deal with these conflicts? This thesis relies on archive records and reports of the ITRCs and data generated through interviews conducted with key informants. Through a detailed analysis the study: 1) presents a detailed account of the major conflicts and their causes in South Darfur; 2) identifies the changing identities of the protagonists and of the perceived causes; 3) assesses the effectiveness of the agreements reached by these conferences when considered alongside the causes identified. Analysis of the ITRCs shows that tribal conflicts in Darfur (from1980s), and South Darfur in particular, were connected to the wider political conflict in the Sudan and the region respectively. The analysis suggests that the history of neglect/marginalisation of the region by successive governments, and the political manipulation of the NA and local government, have negatively affected the performance of these institutions. The experience of the ITRCs indicates that they were unable to address the underlying causes of the tribal conflicts, such as land disputes, the manipulation of the NA and local government, rape and mass killings.

Currently Latin America experiences a phenomenon of widely varying levels of violence across the region. Many countries, such as El Salvador and Honduras, have exceptionally high murder rates upwards of 40 homicides per 100,000 people (UNODC 2015). Other countries, such as Uruguay and Argentina, have relatively low rates, below 10 homicides per 100,000 people (UNODC 2015). I believe this variation stems from the use of pro-government militias specifically employed in the past by military governments as tools of suppression. Under the guise of combating subversive elements within their countries, these groups were used to silence and repress those who opposed the military governments. Employing civilians, active military, police officers and high-ranking government officials; these groups often carried clandestine and sometimes public ties to their governments. By examining the origins, afterlives, and level of control exerted over these pro-government militias in Argentina and El Salvador; this study aims to understand the role these groups played in the dispersion of violence throughout society ultimately accounting for the variation we see today.