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Scholarship concerning relations between North and South Korea has focused on the political and economic areas of relations between the two Koreas, and the unification issue has been mainly considered a work of government conducted in the formal political domain. However, this thesis examines the Olympics and international sporting events as major sources and vehicles of discourse reflecting but also shaping relations between North and South Korea. The thesis, adopting a Critical Realist ontology, applies a constructivist theory of International Relations to establish how the framework of North and South Korean sports relations contributes to, and at times drive, political relations. The study adopts Critical Discourse Analysis as method, and the analysis protocols employed were established by adapting frames of reference from the work of Fairclough (2005) and Jäger and Meyer (2009). In terms of the sources employed the North Korean newspaper Roh-Dong, which is subject to state control we take to represent the view of the North Korean regime. This was selected as a resource to illustrate how the North Korean government sought to construct a particular discourse concerning national identity, political position and sport. South Korean newspapers Dong-A and Hankyoreh were chosen to identify two relatively different (relatively right and left in Korean terms) political views evident in the South Korean context and their constructions around these issues. In addition, the summaries of North and South Sports Talks published by the South Korean government provide a source of data reflecting South Korean governmental interests. From 1978 to 2007, the changes in the international context from Cold War to post-Cold War and the domestic political changes in particular in South Korea, framed each decade s North and South Korean sports relations. The shared notion of national identity and of nationhood, reflected in the primordial nationalism evident in both North and South Koreans view of themselves (and of one another) as drawn from the same bio-cultural stock, is a factors shaping the actions of governments and other stakeholders. This ideology of shared heritage goes some way to explain why despite regularly occurring political tensions, there was a recurring appeal to common identity which manifest itself in sporting activity in for example the consideration of building unified teams in major competitions, or marching together at Olympic opening ceremonies. Thus the role of sport in developing relations between North and South Korea is one which is more than simply a reflection of the state of diplomatic relations, but is actually a significant shaper of such relations. Sport diplomacy, though a form of soft diplomacy, is in this case a key factor to be incorporated with the explanation of developing political relations.

published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

In my dissertation, I argue that historians of Africa have overlooked the intersection between nationalism and sexuality, despite the fact that these two themes are related. In addition, instead of focusing on the now stale paradigm which emphasizes the importance of race and class in the discourse of sexuality, I offer a revisionist idea that stresses the importance of age. Hence, I contend that the contrast between underage and adult sexuality largely informed the pattern of reformist condemnation of casual sex work in colonial Lagos. A clash between tradition (crudely defined as African traditional customs, values and ethos) and modernity (the so-called ideals of “modernization” and “civilization” imported by the British colonialists) was inevitable as the reformists vied to establish favorable legislation and combated laws that threatened their belief system and practices. What is more, debates around prostitution went beyond casual sex work to involve more complex matters such as the protection of soldiers, marriage, and cultural nationalism; the place and role of women and children in African society; and African or colonialist conception of morality/immorality. Because of the complex nature of the politics of sex in colonial Nigeria, it was effectively impossible to reach common ground on dealing with the alleged medical and social nuisance caused by prostitutes. Indeed, while the ostensible subject of the popular debate was “prostitution,” the issues contested concurred with cultural nationalism and the protection of individual and group interests. Prostitution became a camouflage for negotiating issues that threatened the social, political, and sexual ideologies and orientation of a wide range of people—Africans and Europeans alike. / text

This thesis explores how Anti-Japanese War Drama in Chinese TV becomes a field of negotiation in which the forces of dominant state ideology, liberal market and alternative discourses meet. Focusing how the notion of Chinese nationalism has been constructed in the negotiation, this work examines TV dramas as a homogenizing national project in which market forces and state intervention are no longer at odd with each other. By critically reading representations and narratives of bandits and women in two dramas To Advance towards the Fire and Auntie Duohe, the study points out how dominant nationalist discourses attempt to incorporate the marginalized or disadvantaged group as a consistent part of the nation. However, the anti-Japanese war dramas still allow a space for the alternative discourse to emerge which disturbs the perceived coherence of the nation. / text

The emergence of supranational organizations like the European Union (EU) raises questions fundamental to the sociological study of regions and nation-states. Hypothetically, the EU could provide regions within nation-states most of the governmental services that they currently receive from the state. For regions with strong ethnic and cultural identities that have sought to break away from the nation-state over time, decreased political and economic dependency may provide the autonomy that they have been seeking. On the other hand, if the emergence of supranational organizations like the EU represents state-building at the global level, then the EU can pose a threat to regional groups seeking autonomy from the nation-state. At issue is how the growing influence of supranational organizations like the EU is affecting the demand for autonomy within ethnically, politically, and culturally distinct regions. This dissertation attempts to answer these questions by examining variations in nationalism over time for three regions in Spain (Basque Country, Galicia, Catalonia) from 1977-2002. In order to begin to answer this question, I created a new dataset of protest events in Spain in order to assess variations in demands for autonomy over time. The protest event counts were incorporated into a comparative historical analysis that seeks to explain the effects of the influence of the evolving European Union (EU) on contentious demands for autonomy within those three regions; the variations in the protest event counts over time were analyzed against additional economic and political data collected from archival materials. I find that, while nationalism declined overall over time, it did not disappear but rather took on a different character. The classical manifestations of nationalism transformed into distinct movements centered on human rights. I argue that this transformation took place as a result of three interrelated factors: 1) Forced cooperation between the regions and the central Spanish government; 2) Elite abandonment of the nationalist movement; and 3) The state of the regional economies. In contrast to what extant theory might predict, my results indicate that nationalism continues to exist for the following reasons: 1) The EU has not rendered the nation-state irrelevant, but rather has altered their competencies; 2) The EU has not resolved the tensions between the nation-state and regions, but rather has created new ones; and 3) The EU has not leveled the economic playing-field between regions, but rather has opened them up to new forms of competition. In conclusion, this dissertation argues that supranational organizations like the EU have altered the relationship between regions and nation-states, thus transforming - but not solving - the nationalist question.

This dissertation addresses the different ways in which Americans define citizenship and nationhood and the associated implications for politics and political rhetoric. I argue that the contesting of the national identity--the ways in which a given image of the United Sates is privileged over other images of the nation--is central to the ideological divisions of the United States today. The dissertation begins by examining existing scholarship on the nature of ideological divisions and arguments in contemporary US politics, and the survey demonstrates that each of these approaches tells us a great deal about how certain individual factors influence ideological arguments, but these insights tend to come at the cost of minimizing the roles played by extremely powerful societal forces like race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. I propose, therefore, a view of the left-center-right political spectrum in the United States as a spectrum based on competing--and sometimes overlapping--nationalist ideologies, with opposing groups competing for control of the state agencies that sustain and diffuse the national high culture. According to this view, individuals define their position in the ideological spectrum based on whom they culturally identify with, and practitioners of political rhetoric would benefit from identifying the culture of their ideology with the American "mainstream." Toward this end, the dissertation draws on nationalism theory to establish a theory to examine how competing national identities are contested both in political rhetoric and in popular media that is not explicitly political. The dissertation then concludes by identifying rhetorical strategies that have been effective at crossing ideological lines in the past and proposing new strategies that can be effective at crossing ideological lines in the future.

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