The aim of this study is to determine the security relevance of farm attacks in South Africa. This is based on the propositions that indications exist that farm attacks in the RSA reflect more than common criminality; that the combating of farm attacks requires specific measures; and that farm attacks in other African states, as well as prior to 1994 in some instances also in South Africa, had demonstrated specific political motives. In the search for the underlying causes behind the incidence of farm attacks, aspects such as the occurence of farm attacks elsewhere in Africa; the political history of the RSA; the dynamics associated with an increase in crime during political transition; land reform; and the extent of farm attacks in the RSA, were analysed. The occurence of farm attacks seems not to be unique to South Africa, as attacks of this nature also occurred in other African states such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. As could have been expected from international experience, crime increased substantially in South Africa during a period of radical political transition. Farm attacks, which inherently manifest as violent crimes, also increased, especially during the period between 1997 and 2001. Developments during South Africa’s political past led to a situation in which a substantial part of the population lost not only their political rights, but also their land. As a result, land reform is high on the agenda of those who feel deprived, as well as that of the government. The findings reached by commissions of enquiry and research into the causes of farm attacks reveal that crime is the single most important motive for farm attacks. Other motives were identified in single cases, but no common sinister motive or any specific organisation instigating farm attacks could be established. Although the level of trust between the farming community and government has in some cases suffered considerable harm, both parties are bound to the combating of farm attacks, including participation in the implementation of combined strategies such as the Rural Safety Plan. The occurrence of farm attacks is clearly a significant security issue. Although it is not yet considered as posing an immediate direct threat to national security, it has already been recognized that farm attacks could negatively impact on food security. The possibility of this phenomenon developing into a full-fledged national security issue, can thus not be excluded. / Dissertation (M (Security Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Political Sciences / unrestricted

This dissertation explores the ethnic and religious dimensions of the northern Nigeria conflict in which gruesome killings have intermittently occurred, to determine whether there are genocidal inclinations to the episodic killings. The literature review provides the contextual framework for examining the conflict parties and causation factors to address the research questions: Are there genocidal inclinations to the ethno-religious conflict in northern Nigeria? To what extent does the interplay between ethnicity and religion help to foment and escalate the conflict in northern Nigeria? The study employs a mixed content analysis and grounded theory methodology based on the Strauss and Corbin (1990) approach. Data sourcing was from 197 newspaper articles on the conflict over the study period spanning from the 1966 northern Nigeria massacres of thousands of Ibos up to present, ongoing killings between Muslims and Christians or non-Muslims in the region. Available texts of the conflict cases over the research period were content-analyzed using Nvivo qualitative data analysis software involving processes of categorizing, coding and evaluation of the textual themes. The study structures a theoretical model for determining proclivity to genocide, and finds that there are genocidal inclinations to the northern Nigeria conflict, involving the specific intent to ‘cleanse’ the north through the exclusionary ideology of imposition of the Sharia law through enforced assimilation or extermination of Christians and other non-Muslims who do not assimilate or adopt the Muslim ideology. The study also suggests that there is latency in the recognition of these genocidal manifestations due to their episodic nature and intermittency of occurrence. he study provides further understanding of factors underlying and sustaining the violent conflict between Muslims and Christians in northern Nigeria. It contributes new perspectives and theoretical model for determining genocidal proclivity to the field of conflict analysis and resolution, and proffers alternative strategies for relationship building and peaceful coexistence among different religious groups. The findings will guide recommendations on policy formulations for eliminating religious intolerance in northern Nigeria. The study creates further awareness on the need for global intervention on the region’s sporadic killings to avert full blown Rwandan type genocide in Nigeria.

The master thesis called "Czech films based on well-known criminal cases: from reality, newspaper/TV news to feature film and film reviews. Causa Velvet killers" deals with the notorious so-called Orlík Murders from the early 1990s. This case is considered as the biggest criminal case of the post-communist era in the Czech Republic. The group of five members killed five people, mainly for the money, between the years 1991 and 1993. Three of their victims were found in the Orlík Dam - two corpses were sealed in metal barrels and one was hidden in a mesh. The murderers were sentenced in 1997 after a four-year-long investigation. The movie called Velvet killers or The New Breed, which was directed by Jiří Svoboda, is based on these true events. This thesis focuses on the TV version of this motion picture and then also on the reviews published after the movie was released in 2005. This thesis mainly wants to reflect how the Czech media - specifically newspapers and television news - informed about this criminal case in analysed years from 1995 to 1997. The determining factor is the accuracy of the information. The aim of the work is to summarize the results of reporting on this case, which is still considered as one of the most brutal in the history of our country.

The "Death penalty as a response to the growing brutality of criminal offenses" diploma thesis discusses the increasing trend of the violent and brutal criminality and the resolution possibilities of the situation. As the main goal of this thesis, the author deals with the idea whether returning the death penalty back into our justice system would be the right response to the increasing degree of brutality of violent criminals. In the theoretical part, the term "death penalty" is explained in general, as well as its history and use. Next the thesis acquaints us with the use of the death penalty on our territory in the past and its legislative question in our history. The next part of the theoretical part is a comparison of the several past years in the development of violent criminal offenses and their brutality in the Czech Republic. The empirical part of the thesis is focused on the research of the public opinion of the citizens of the Czech Republic and the USA regarding the degree of the increasing trend of brutal criminal offenses as well as their opinion on the use of the death penalty. The development of criminality in the USA is described here, as well as the use of the death penalty there. Another point is the evaluation of the situation of the use of the death penalty in the world. The...

No description available.

In the early 1990s, a series of gruesome murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, a city located in the U.S.-Mexico border, shook the political landscape of Mexico. A decade later, the strange and violent murders, known as the feminicides or feminicidios of Juárez, reached international infamy across hemispheres and continents. During this time, the city and the cases became the subjects of an extensive body of scholarship and of any imaginable artistic medium (narrative, poetry, theater, performance, music, and so on). Eventually, the complexity and overexposure of the cases and the sociopolitical conditions of Ciudad Juárez placed them at the center of a paradoxical debate: on one hand, the work of activists, feminists, and scholars of social sciences (like anthropologists and sociologists) studied the murders as a localized example of a larger phenomenon of mysoginistic violence; on the other, journalistic and media investigations of Juárez understood the murders as the products of specific agents (serial killers, murderers, drug cartels, amongst others) and the fractures within the Mexican Nation-State. And yet, despite the expansion and overlapping of these discourses, fictional representations of Juárez remained tangential to this intricate debate. Thus, this research explores the different ways in which writers, artists, and filmmakers deployed and negotiated existent perspectives on the feminicides within fictional environments. As a result of the vast amount of published work available on Ciudad Juárez, I narrowed the objects of my research through a transnational scope. The resulting sample of texts transverses borders (Mexico and the U.S.), continents (Latin America and Europe), genres (fiction and nonfiction), and mediums (literature and film). The first chapter explores the connections of Sergio González Rodríguez’s Huesos en el desierto and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the theoretical framework of the possible worlds of fiction. The second chapter moves to issues of representation, gender, and race through the analysis of two novels written by Chicana scholars: Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders and Stella Pope Duarte’s If I Die in Juárez. Finally, the third chapter focuses on film representations of Juárez and the feminicides in the form of Gregory Nava’s Bordertown and Carlos Carrera’s Backyard/El Traspatio. / text

The researcher attempts to establish the significance of video evidence analysis in the investigation of murder cases against the police. The evidence obtained could be crucial and admissible in court and ultimately resulted in the successful prosecution of an accused person. In order for investigators to conduct an effective investigation, it is important that they become familiar with the application of video evidence, its purpose, benefits and shortfalls. In order to achieve the intended goals and objectives of video evidence, the investigators should know how to collect, package, process and analyse video evidence. The clarification and processing of the crime scene of video evidence as well as the identification of a suspect at the scene of crime is very much important and without video evidence it would be difficult to convict an accused person in a court of law. / Police Practice / M. Tech. (Forensic Investigation)

At the start of the George H.W. Bush administration, American involvement in El Salvador‘s civil war, one of the last Cold War battlegrounds, had disappeared from the foreign policy agenda. However, two events in November 1989 shattered the bipartisan consensus on US policy toward El Salvador: the failure of the FMLN‘s largest military offensive of the war and the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter by the Salvadoran military, the FAES. Despite more than one billion dollars in US military assistance, the war had stalemated, promoting both sides to seek a negotiated political settlement mediated by the United Nations. The Jesuit murders demonstrated the failure of the policy of promoting respect for democracy and human rights and revived the debate in Congress over US aid to El Salvador. This thesis argues that the Bush administration sought to remove the burden of El Salvador from its foreign policy agenda by actively pushing for the investigation and prosecution of the Jesuit case and fully supporting the UN-mediated peace process. Using recently declassified government documents from the George Bush Presidential Library, this thesis will examine how the Bush administration fundamentally changed US policy toward El Salvador. Administration officials carried out an unprecedented campaign to pressure the FAES to investigate the Jesuit murders and bring the killers to justice while simultaneously attempting to prevent Congress from cutting American military assistance. The Bush administration changed the objective of its El Salvador policy from military victory over the guerrillas to a negotiated political settlement. The US facilitated the peace process by pressuring the Salvadoran government and the FMLN to negotiate in good faith and accept compromises. When both sides signed a comprehensive peace agreement on January 16, 1992, the burden of El Salvador was lifted.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - James Cook University, 2004. / Thesis submitted by Sally Marie Babidge, BA (Hons) UWA June 2004, for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the School of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology, James Cook University. Bibliography: leaves 283-303.

This by-practice project is the first to provide an extensive investigation of the marginalisation of era appropriate science (EAS) and professional investigators by detective and historical detective fiction authors. The purpose of the thesis is to analyse specific detective fiction authors from the earliest formats of the nineteenth century through to the 1990s and contemporary, selected historical detective fiction authors. Its aim is to examine the creation, development and perpetuation of the marginalisation tradition. This generic trend can be read as the authors privileging their detective’s innate skillset, metonymic connectivity and deductive abilities, while underplaying and belittling EAS and professional investigators. Chapter One establishes the project’s critique of the generic trend by considering parental authors, E. T. A Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Émile Gaboriau and Wilkie Collins. Reading how these authors instigated and purposed the downplaying demonstrates its founding within detective fiction at the earliest point. By comparing how the authors sidelined and omitted specific EAS and professional investigators, alongside science available at the time, this thesis provides a framework for examining how it continued in detective fiction. In following chapters, the framework established in Chapter One and the theoretical views of Charles Rzepka, Lee Horsley, Stephen Knight and Martin Priestman, are used to discuss how minimising EAS and professional investigators developed into a tradition; and became a generic trend in the recognised detective fiction formula that was used by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Freeman Wills Crofts, H. C. Bailey, R. Austin Freeman, Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and P. D. James. I then examine how the device transferred to historical detective fiction, using the framework to consider Ellis Peters, Umberto Eco and other selected contemporary authors of historical detective fiction. Throughout, the critical aspect considers how the trivialisation developed and perpetuated through a generic trend. The research concludes that there is a trend embedded within detective and historical detective fiction. One that was created, developed and perpetuated by authors to augment their fictional detective’s innate skillset and to help produce narratives using it is a creative process. It further concludes that the trend can be reimagined to plausibly use EAS and professional investigators in detective and historical detective fiction. The aim of the creative aspect of the project is to employ the research and demonstrate how the tradition can be successfully reinterpreted. To do so, the historical detective fiction novel A Hidden Life uses traditional features of the detective fiction formula to support and strengthen plausible EAS and professional investigators within the narrative. The end result is a historical detective fiction novel. One that proves the thesis conclusion and is fundamentally crafted by the critical research.