Após os atentados terroristas de Onze de setembro de 2001 os Estados Falidos passaram a ser considerados uma das principais ameaças à paz e segurança internacional. A maior parte dos estudos sobre o tema argumenta que a melhor maneira para se lidar com esta ameaça são as chamadas operações de Nation-Building, lideradas por agentes externos e cujos objetivos principais são reconstruir as instituições políticas, promover eleições democráticas e consolidar uma economia de mercado no país alvo. Assim sendo, na primeira parte do trabalho, intitulada O Colapso, esta dissertação almeja analisar as características do conceito de Estado Falido à luz do caso do Afeganistão. Na segunda parte, intitulada A Reconstrução, ambicionamos entender o que são e como são levadas a cabo as operações de Nation- Building, analisando as missões lideradas pela ONU e pelos EUA e realizando um estudo da atual operação no Afeganistão. / After the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, Failed States have been considered one of the greatest threats to peace and international security. The great majority of the studies about this theme argue that one of the best ways to cope with this threat are the so-called Nation-Building operations, leaded by external agents and whose main objectives are the reconstruction of political institutions, the promotion of elections and the consolidation of a marketoriented economy in the target country. Therefore, in the first part of this work, called The Collapse, this dissertation aims to analyze the characteristics of the Failed State concept through the Afghan case. In the second part, called The Reconstruction, we intend to understand what Nation-Building operations are and how they have been carried out, analyzing the missions leaded both by the UN and the United States and doing a case study over the current operation in Afghanistan.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was one of the great blunders in American foreign policy. This thesis examines Neoconservative thought and policy, and its effect on the nation and state building effort in Iraq. It provides an analysis of the Iraqi Constitution and uses the faults of the Constitution to paint a picture of the larger instabilities and difficulties in Iraq today.

This dissertation examines the discourses of race, nation and ethnicity in late Qing and early republican China, focusing primarily on representations of the Han. It argues that the competing and changing representations of the Han in this period formed an integral part of the process of modern Chinese nation building. The empirical basis of the dissertation consists of three layers: intellectuals discourses, school textbooks and dictionaries. These layers constituted interconnected layers of discourses that were involved in the broader process of Chinese nation-building. The dissertation demonstrates that intellectuals discourses played a central role in constructing new notions of Chinese identity and the role of the Han, and thereby also in producing different templates or for Chinese nation-building during the late Qing and early republican period. After the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911, these modern perceptions of Chinese national identity were endorsed by the ruling elites and were gradually disseminated and popularised further by means of school textbooks and dictionaries. Taken together, the examination of discourses on the Han in these three types of sources therefore offers an account of how early Chinese nationalist ideas were produced among the elites and then disseminated among the broader population.

This study analyzes female friendship in four novels written by black diasporic women and examines the impact of race, class and gender on women’s relationships. The novels emphasize how women face the challenges of patriarchal institutions and other attempts to subjugate then through polygamy, neo-colonialism, constraints of tradition, caste prejudice, political instability and the Biafra war. This dissertation uses characterization and plot analysis to explore the different stories and messages the novels portray. As findings this study foregrounds the healing powers of female bonding, which allows women to overcome prejudice and survive, to enjoy female empowerment, and to extend female friendship into female solidarity that participates in nation building. However, another conclusion focuses on the power of patriarchy which constitutes a threat to female bonding and usually causes women’s estrangement.

New states are often born in a volatile environment, in which the survival of the new country is uncertain. While analysis of the nationalizing new governments exists, research focuses mainly on domestic politics. I argue that the treatment of minority that remains in the new states is a function of the interaction of the dual threat posed by the minority itself domestically on one hand and the international threat coming from the mother state to protect its kin abroad on the other hand. Specifically, I argue that there is a curvilinear relationship between domestic and international threat and the extent of discrimination against the politically relevant minority. Most discrimination takes place when domestic and international threats are moderate because in this case there is a balance of power between the government, the minority, and the rump state. With time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) data analysis this dissertation systematically tests the treatment of Russian and Serbian minorities in all post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav states between 1991 and 2006 and finds statistically significant results for the curvilinear hypothesis. Territorial concentration of the minority and the ratio of national capabilities between the mother and the seceded states prove to be especially important predictors of minority treatment. In addition, with most similar systems (MSS), most different systems (MDS) design methods, and directed case studies I apply the curvilinear hypothesis to the Russian minority in the Baltic States and the Central Asian Republics, and also to the Serb minority in the countries of the former Yugoslavia to present a detailed analysis.

The aim of this thesis is to examine the relationship between language and nation-building. The research is based on critical analysis of nation, nationalism, nation-building and language ideology theories. These theories are applied in the case study: Language as a symbol of the Ukrainian national identity. In order to analyze the origins of such symbolism, the Ukrainian nation-building project is analyzed in historical and political context. In the case study the model of the Ukrainian nation-building is examined through the prism of language policy. This thesis outlines the shortcomings of current state language policy and suggests recommendations for its future improvement.

Thesis advisor: Ernesto Livon-Grosman / This dissertation takes a literary and cultural studies model to explain the textual representation of these unique islands since their discovery until present day. The main argument suggests that the depiction of this crucial space for modernity in Western thought, given the rhetoric of travel and fiction writers, deploys the insular area with the intention of conceiving new forms of political displacement and identity endeavors in addition to those of the nation building project that took place in the mainland. As a result of colonial enterprises, scientific excursions, exile, tourism, journalistic pieces, expeditions, etc., travel writings of the Galápagos record the experience of reshaping this space à propos of a theory of travel and travel writing mediated by narratives that complement the formation of the state and its national imagery. The insular space functions as a vacant signifier where travelers are able to communicate their own signified upon narrating the experiences of their journeys. This phenomenon creates a profound conceptual and political division between the identity of the isles and the nation of Ecuador, and the findings of this study can be extrapolated to a historical specificity of explorations and representations that deal with narrative constructions of highly condensed spaces throughout Latin America as a whole, if one can claim they are a case study of an "unfinished" modernity. This separation created a rupture leading to fundamental variations in the manner in which local inhabitants and foreign entities interpret the insular province nowadays. The literature of the Galápagos reflects the scale of friction, migratory tendencies into the islands, and how global interests prevail in the appropriation of the space, reshaping the subjective individuality of the host culture. The first chapter examines texts of discovery written during the colonial enterprise of Spain. Given the anthropological void in the Galápagos, these initial pieces of writing emphasize the monstrosity of the landscape and the biota, but also portray a possibility to find riches. This description ignites a dichotomist infernal-paradisiacal appraisal of the archipelago, and recreates it as a warped textual space which, in turn, develops an imagery that demonstrates the flexibility of the deserted island: writers set forth almost any form of representation that favors imperial interests. The second chapter analyzes travel literature written in English during the nineteenth century. These texts define the islands as a world within itself rather than as a province of Ecuador, and have a major impact on its imagery given the authority of its writers. In the midst of Latin-American independence, the nation-building project, and the quest for a cosmopolitan state, foreign texts are detached from the social and political reality of the entourage, and transmit a fallacious notion of desertedness, which allows for future occupations of transcontinental scope. These books also create a bilingual literature that preludes the migratory movement and touristic commerce that currently defines this province. The final chapter focuses on three books written by local authors and how they combat or appropriate previous insular narratives providing a native perspective. A historiographical novel, defined as a "foundational fiction" that portrays the Galápagos as a prison and pirate hideout, exhibits the violent environment of the newborn Ecuadorian Republic. This piece generates a fissure in the international community that regards the islands as paradise and still is, therefore, largely ignored. A second narrative shows how the Galápagos occupation of the United States during World War II is crucial for interpreting and understanding the archipelago during the twentieth century. It preludes current international interests that dominate policy-undertakings, particularly the ones concerning tourism, environmental, and geopolitical endeavors. Finally, a quarto book exemplifies how texts have enticed and caused not only a critical political and national divorce between the nation and the insular region, but also a market-oriented global milieu triggering migration towards this zone. The discussed works include Tomás de Berlanga's "Carta a su majestad describiendo su viaje" (1535), Sarmiento de Gamboa's Historia de los incas (1572), Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle (1839), Melville's The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles (1854), Manuel Bilbao's El pirata del Guayas (1855), Bolívar Naveda's Galápagos a la vista (1952), and Hugo Idrovo's Galápagos: huellas en el paraíso (2005). I use critical theory from Adorno, Bartkowski, Bloom, De Certeau, Deleuze, Edmond, Mignolo, Molloy, Musgrove, O'Gorman, Pratt, Sommer, Todorov, Van den Abbeele, and others to show the impact of the construction of an imaginary space that morphs incessantly and responds more to writers' interests than to the inherent qualities of the isles. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Romance Languages and Literatures.

Afghanistan has been one of the most protracted conflicts modern era, but theories of civil war onset fail to explain the war’s causes or its patterns of violence. This thesis examines the origins of the post-2001 period of the conflict through the perspective of state formation; although many civil wars today unfold in newly-forming states, the processes of center-periphery relations and elite incorporation have been little studied in the context of political violence. The thesis first describes how Afghanistan’s embeddedness in the international state system and global markets undermined the nascent state’s efforts to centralize and bureaucratize, leading instead to warlordism and neopatrimonialism. Second, it demonstrates that the development of an insurgency after 2001 was due not to ethnic grievance or rebel opportunities for profit, but rather to the degree to which local elites were excluded from state patronage. Third, it examines the role of ideology and social position in the Afghan Taliban movement. The dissertation seeks to offer a theory of political violence in Afghanistan that can, mutatis mutandis, help explain key features of civil war in newly-forming states.

This dissertation explains how the Republic of China (ROC), overseas Chinese (huaqiao), and the Philippines, sometimes but not always working with each other, produced and opposed the threat of Chinese communism from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. It is not a history of US-led anticommunist efforts with respect to the Chinese diaspora, but rather an intra-Asian social and cultural history of anticommunism and nation-building that liberates two close US allies from US-centric historiographies and juxtaposes them with each other and the huaqiao community that they claimed. Three principal arguments flow from this focus on intra-Asian anticommunism. First, I challenge narrowly territorialized understandings of Chinese nationalism by arguing that Taiwan engaged in diasporic nation-building in the Philippines. Whether by helping the Philippine military identify Chinese communists or by mobilizing Philippine huaqiao in support of Taiwan, the ROC carved out a semi-sovereign sphere of influence for itself within a foreign country. It did so through institutions such as schools, the Kuomintang (KMT), and the Philippine-Chinese Anti-Communist League, which functioned transnationally and locally to embed the ROC into Chinese society and connect huaqiao to Taiwan. Through these groups, the ROC shaped the experiences of a national community beyond its territorial boundaries and represented itself as the legitimate “China” in the world. Second, drawing upon political theory, I argue that the anticommunist relationship between the ROC, the Philippines, and the Philippine Chinese constituted a form of what I call shared, non-territorial sovereignty. Nationalist China did not secure influence over Chinese in the Philippines by exerting military or economic pressure, as a neocolonial regime might. Vast disparities in power did not obtain between Manila and Taipei, as they did between them and Washington. Rather, for reasons of law, culture, linguistic incapacity, and ideology, the Philippines selectively outsourced the management of its Chinese residents to the ROC. In turn, both depended on the Chinese being able to govern themselves with state support, coercive and otherwise. The Philippine Chinese, as in colonial times, were thus semi-autonomous actors who participated in the construction of shared sovereignty after World War II by forging ties with states to advance their anticommunist agenda. This three-way relationship provides a framework for thinking about postcolonial sovereignty in East Asia that focuses on relations of relative equality between states and the relative autonomy of the Chinese as a minority population, rather than between dominant and dominated or in terms of territory. Nationalist China and the Philippines’ nation-building projects had profound consequences for the Philippine Chinese. While these peoples were in many respects acted upon by the ROC and Philippine states through legal and coercive means, they by no means lacked agency. Rather, they performed their agency as consensual participants in making anticommunism. In focusing on them, the dissertation shifts from international and transnational history to social and cultural history and the history of civic life. Existing scholarship, whether in the social sciences or Sinophone Studies, largely depicts the postcolonial hua subject as a non-ideological businessman or cultural producer. I argue, by contrast, that the overseas Chinese could be eminently ideological and politically active. From informing on suspected Chinese communists to the ROC and Philippine states to proclaiming their loyalties to the ROC and Chiang Kai-shek, anticommunist social practices enabled Philippine huaqiao to come to terms with being legally disadvantaged and ideologically suspect minorities in their country of residence. Unlike racial and cultural Chineseness, which they could or would not give up, they could and did choose to behave ideologically; and in doing so, they legitimized their community to the Philippine state and Filipino society.

Este trabalho procura conhecer os caminhos que levaram a construção da imagem do poeta Gonçalves Dias que conhecemos hoje. Procura-se entender de que forma ele veio a construir o nome, no cenário letrado do Império do Brasil, que o fez ser identificado como o poeta nacional por excelência, e também, identificar, em que esferas e projetos ele atuou durante o processo de construção de sua imagem. Nesse caminho, trabalhou-se com a análise de sua correspondência, de modo a perceber qual o peso que suas relações sociais exerceram na formação de sua identidade autoral. Entende-se também que a imagem/memória de Gonçalves Dias hoje conhecida foi fruto dos esforços de seus biógrafos, se não em criá-la, ao menos em fixá-la, ao longo dos anos, de modo a reservar para Gonçalves Dias, definitivamente, um lugar no panteon nacional. / This paper seeks to understand the images related with the construction of Gonçalves Dias as a recognized author and poet, in the literary scene of Brazils Empire. In this way, we are working with the analysis of his correspondence, in order to see how much weight their social relations exercised in that self construction. We also understand those images and representations of Gonçalves Dias as the result of an effort done by his biographers. If his biographers did not invent him, certainly they have contributed to fix, over the years, a place for Gonçalves Dias in the national pantheon.