This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of everyday peace through analysing women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah (Karenni) state in Myanmar. I argue that everyday peace cannot be detached from rigid gender hierarchies and persistent power dynamics and that analytic attention needs to be paid to women’s, often neglected, contribution to everyday peacebuilding. Drawing on a theoretical framework of everyday peace and its feminist critique and by using Björkdahl’s concept of gendered peace gaps I illustrate how women’s experience of peace and peacebuilding in Kayah state are shaped by dynamics of care and silence. Both are used as arenas for women’s peacebuilding agencies but simultaneously contributes to, are coupled with or amplify gendered peace gaps. Hence, the results unveil an interesting tension between women’s peacebuilding agency and the peace being built as the peacebuilding limits the grounds in which women can operate consequently contributing to a future gender-discriminatory peace in Myanmar. Through this focus, this thesis adds to the rich and longstanding feminist literature exploring the everyday by illustrating the importance of understanding peace based on everyday experiences shaped by gendered power relations. By exposing the relationship between power and agency I illustrate how women’s ambiguous peace agencies are incused by gendered power relations and might run the risk of reproducing or maintaining existing structures of power.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第20760号 / 工博第4412号 / 新制||工||1686(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院工学研究科社会基盤工学専攻 / (主査)教授 杉浦 邦征, 教授 白土 博通, 教授 清野 純史 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

Gender provisions have the overarching goal of enhancing gender equality, however few peace agreements include strong gender provisions. The presence of strong gender provisions in ceasefire agreements has crucial implications in the immediate and post-conflict phase in improving women’s situation. I use structured, focused comparison in this study to explore when and how strong gender provisions on violence against women are adopted. I focus on conflicts with a high prevalence of sexual violence and contexts where women mobilize in the conflict to advocate for women’s rights. I demonstrate the relationship between international involvement and strong gender provisions. I argue that in civil wars with a high level of international involvement in support of peace, ceasefire agreements are more likely to include strong gender provisions on violence against women. This is possible through the mechanism of international actors serving as brokers for the women’s movement that is already mobilized to access and influence the peace process. This mechanism is particularly crucial for autocratic countries where women’s mobilization is not sufficient to lead to strong gender provisions. However, the findings are applicable to countries with other regime types.

While it is a widely accepted argument that ethnicity and armed conflicts are inextricably linked, there is little understating regarding in which conditions and how exactly ethnicity affects armed conflicts, which this thesis aims to explain through a qualitative case study on Burma, a Southeast Asian nation where what is known as ethnic armed organizations and the national armed forces of Burma-the Tatmadaw-have been at war since Burma got independence from Britain in 1948. While ethnicity can turn into a source of conflict in certain situations, ethnic differences per se are not the cause of conflict. However, ethnicity and ethnic groups can produce negative effects in certain situations. As the main research question, this study asks: In which conditions and how 'ethnicity' produce adverse effects that fuel armed conflicts? In addition to the main research question, this study will test three hypotheses in relation of the main research question to get a clear picture of the adverse effects of ethnicity on armed conflicts. The study concludes by discussing research findings and questions for further research in the area of ethnic armed conflict. Klíčová slova: Ethnicity, Armed Conflict, Recognition, Identity Crisis, Burma/Myanmar

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The purpose of this paper is to examine if economic sanctions is a useful tool to promote the democratic development of a state. I am interested in exploring the effectiveness of the most common reasons for implementing sanctions; to change specific behavior incompatible with democracy or to incur regime transformation. In order to examine this, we look at the intent of implementing economic sanctions, how democratic development is measured, and the importance of human rights as a part of a democratic state. By applying these findings on opposing versions of modernization theory, I find measurable economic data that I can look at in connection with two case studies. The episodes chosen for the case studies are current sanctions being leveled against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Myanmar. In the case studies themselves, I discover that Iran and Myanmar are very different in both the intentions behind their autocratic regimes, and the results of the sanctions against them. In examining the economic effects, I find it difficult to find data for both cases, and I fail to locate parts of the economic data I intended to look at. In the end, I conclude that while economic sanctions can have some impact on specific goals and the foundation for support of democracy, they are unlikely to be the deciding factor in democratic development.

This thesis will focus on the oppression and genocide towards the ethnic minority of the Rohingya in Rakhine state of Myanmar. The interest is upon the ways in which Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) utilizes discourse around national liberation, security and vulnerability to communicate with the international community about the oppression that the ethnic minority in Myanmar faces. In order to explore and understand the ways in which ARSA has communicated with the international community the social media platform X is utilised for a discourse analysis. The findings of the thesis are that the most common discourses that can be found in ARSA’s X output is connected to national liberation and identity.

Being sanctioned by the United States and its allies, Myanmar has long been isolated from the international community and become deeply dependent on China over the past twenty years. Until recently, the country embarked on political and economic reforms and expressed its desire to engage with other countries. The United States positively responded to the opening gesture, consequently the rapprochement between the two countries was commenced. As the competition for influence between China and the U.S. in Southeast Asia has long been existed, the shift in Myanmar’s foreign policy might represent the new challenge in this tug-of-war. This research aims to investigate the continuity or rupture in Myanmar’s foreign policy trend and to re-assess the influence of China and the United States presented in Myanmar. The collected data is analysed qualitatively. The result of the study shows that despite the re-engagement in Myanmar-U.S. relations, Myanmar-China relations remain cordial and the status of China-U.S. influence in Southeast Asia is not challenged.

This thesis explores whether dialogue between a company and a non-profit organisation (NPO) can influence a company’s way of working towards being more conflict sensitive. As a case-study I analysed the dialogue between the French oil and gas company, Total S.A. (Total), and the US based NPO, CDA Collaborative Learning Projects (CDA) relating to the company’s operations in Myanmar/Burma. The objectives of the research were to ascertain if dialogue had a positive impact, and if so, what it was about the dialogue that enabled change, what was the process of change that could be observed and how embedded such change was. Drawing on post-modernism, systems thinking and complexity thinking, I have built on organisational change, conflict transformation, dialogue and cross-sector partnership literature to examine the role of dialogue as an enabler of change. While highlighting parallels in the discourses, I analyse the process and degree of change within the company through two conflict transformation models, one by Lederach (1997) and the other by Lederach, Neufeld and Culbertson (2007), which I feel best synthesise these parallels. The research is a longitudinal case-study (2002-2012), based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The study adds to the limited academic research on conflict sensitivity in general, and on the implications for a company’s way of working in particular. Although I find that within the business sector, the notion of conflict sensitivity is assumed in the wider concept of corporate social responsibility, noteworthy is the relevance of dialogue in change processes. Dialogue is an essential enabler as it sparks transformational levers also recognised in the literature reviewed. However it is not sufficient. The research illustrates that the dialogue between CDA and Total has played a critical role in facilitating a shift in the company’s way of working, with the contribution of other influences at play. As such, I draw attention to the complexity of the change process and discuss the current nature of the drivers of change within Total.

Education harbours some of the most pervasive contradictions in contemporary India. While it produces world famous human capital enhancing the country's rising competitiveness as a global ‘knowledge economy', millions of children still lack access to basic education. In Kerala, a state famous for the success of its educational achievements, the benefits of education that can be gained by those in the lower strata of society continue to be marginal regardless of policies of positive discrimination. Focusing on youth at the higher secondary school level (grades 11-12), ‘the primary bottleneck in the education system today' (World Bank 2012), this thesis seeks to understand the social processes that go into making education a key resource to the (re)production of inequalities. Based upon a year's ethnographic fieldwork in and around two schools in Ernakulam, South India, this thesis examines the ways in which two distinct groups of youth – one attending a top end private English medium school at the heart of a city and the other educated in an institution at the bottom of the schooling ladder – inhabit their final year of schooling and generate future projects and aspirations. I located their experiences at the intersection of the two educational sites par excellence: the school and the house. In the city, middle-class schooling and parental regimes attempt to orient youth's lives towards the acquisition of multiple competences aimed at enhancing their individual prospects towards becoming competitive professionals, depicted as garnering maximum amounts of wealth and prestige in today's globalised economy of paid employment and migration. At the fringes of middle-class urban life and the quest for professionalism, youth are becoming subject of an increasing ghettoisation: only the educationally, financially and socially poor are left to attend their school. In that stark scenario, education emerged as central to both youth performances of class, status and gender. They constructed and embodied identities based on education and more generally with ideas of competence. This creative work revealed an overtly hierarchical field formed of distinctive peer groups engaged in overt practices of exclusion and inclusion according to imagine futures: mostly elusive fantasies that reveal the youth marked by uncertainties in a time shaped by rising expectations and increasingly intricate and unequal paths leading to them.