This research explains the formation of territorial autonomy regimes, arrangements enabling ethnic groups to express their distinct identity. The origins of territorial autonomy arrangements is an important topic due to the great potential of such institutions to prevent ethnic strife or reduce ongoing conflict. While the literature has explored the consequences of autonomy regimes, its contribution to our understanding of the origins of territorial autonomy is limited. In answering why territorial autonomy regimes are adopted, I develop a theory that focuses on the bargaining strategies of ethnic groups. Specifically, I posit that nonviolent bargaining strategies adopted by ethnic groups influence national leaders’ decision-making processes. In this dissertation, I also address the question of why ethnic groups employ peaceful, as opposed to violent, tactics. Hypotheses derived from this theorization are tested using 197 ethnic groups in 95 states. In the empirical analysis I use data from 1945 to 2000 and employ the duration model and the modified Heckman selection model as my primary statistical methods. To trace the process of territorial autonomy formation I use a case study conducted in the Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation. The results suggest that while groups with access to easily extractable resources choose to employ violent strategies, ethnic collectivities who use peaceful protest tactics are in fact more successful in obtaining territorial autonomy arrangements from central governments.

No / Lithuania restored her independence, after half a century of Soviet occupation, in the immediate aftermath of the failed Moscow coup in August 1991. As the multi-national Soviet state disintegrated Lithuania evolved, without war or violence, from a communist state and a command economy to a liberal democracy, a free market, and a society guaranteeing human and minority rights. Lithuania therefore offers a notable example of peaceful transition, all the more impressive in the light of the bloody conflict elsewhere in the former Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, where the aspirations to independence of the constituent republics were either violently resisted or dissolved into inter-ethnic violence. Equally remarkable has been Lithuania's evident determination to 'return to Europe' after half a century of separation, even at the price of submerging its recently restored sovereign rights in the supranational European Union. The cost of membership in western economic and security organization are judged to be.

The rise or the decline of a country, the development of the international community will be deeply involved in, especially to the greet powers, his deportments which everybody points an accusing finger at are enough to all the changes in international relations. Chinese rapidly economic growth and rising military power, causing global concerns about the rise of China having led to ¡¨China¡¦s rise¡¨, the issues have become multi-focus on academic field and international relations / politics discussed by the multiplicity. Applied the historical method to the thesis and in addition to the comparative method on the collection of documents so as to analyze it .The following conclusion based on the experience of the Chinese history whether the Han people or the peoples of non-Han established the dynasty, it is impossible to rise the country strength peacefully. Neither did the consolidating the great country position at peace. Not to mention, it is kind of the defeated country peacefully. Under the dual influences of the Economic Globalization and the reform opening-up economic policy, it let China hide his light under a bushel to rapidly economic growth, though the country was called Celestial Kingdom, and return the Great Power status again. The rapid economic rise of China threats to all the other countries in the world because it had carried out non-democratic institutions, encroached the human rights, and threatened to security in the Taiwan Strait to unable to trust the democratic countries which were worried. For it adhered to the leadership of the Communist party of China and sustained development of China¡¦s military, after all, the war might be due to its non-compliance with the international order. In fact, the ¡§Peaceful rise ¡¨put forward the following functions: First, the ¡§ rise ¡¨of it is accountable the its people to raise so called, ¡¨our-group consciousness ¡¨as a slogan, a kind of propaganda. Secondly, it is subject to the international environmental situations and the product of its domestic political struggle power, attempts to recapture the hegemony in order to establish ¡§China-centrism ¡¨by mutual confrontation with ¡§Western centrism ¡¨to fight it out. Third, its peace responses to the ¡§China Threat ¡¨by eliminating the phobia and worrier and reflect the fear of China to the West almost being simultaneous with it in fact. In a word, China¡¦s¡§ Peaceful rise ¡¨is attempt to hold their own ¡§point of view of sovereignty ¡¨to improve its state image.

This thesis provides insights into approaches to regional peacebuilding with reference to the Mano Union River region of West Africa, comprising Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire and Guinea. Using the case of the interrelated conflicts in these countries, particularly of regional fighters that fought in two or more countries, it investigates the constraints of conventional peacebuilding theory and practice in addressing regional conflict. Drawing largely on a constructivist International Relations approach, it argues that state-centred perspectives of conflict and peacebuilding, undertaken by institutions made rigid by ritualised practice, preclude an understanding of cross-border conflicts as localised conflicts, within the framing of a micro-region, and also block their effective engagement with the narratives articulated by combatants about their motivations for participating in cross-border conflict. Fieldwork was largely undertaken in Liberia, with the analysis supported by in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with regional combatants of Sierra Leonean, Liberian and Ivoirian descent, based in Liberia, as well as an institutional ethnography of United Nations peace operations, drawing on participant-observation, interviews and documentary analysis. The thesis demonstrates that while economic motivations feature prominently in regional combatants' motivations, they also subscribe to other motives, in part mediated by socially constructed regional identities. These motives, however, receive limited or misguided attention from peacebuilding institutions, resulting in responses that are, in turn, limited in scope and effectiveness. A key lesson is the importance of understanding the opportunities and challenges arising from localised yet transnational imperatives that translate into violent cross-border movements in marginal border areas, to ensure adequate responses and sustain peace in the region in the long term.

Contemporary peacebuilding debates centre on questions of effectiveness, relevance, and sustainability, broadly contrasting a ‘liberal peace' model and more ‘critical' perspectives. The critical peacebuilding literature calls for a transformative approach addressing inequalities and systemic violence underpinning conflict, promoting ‘local' engagement, and responding to ‘everyday' priorities. Education systems play central roles in reproducing or challenging relations of power, privilege, and inequality associated with violent conflict, and represent key sites of ‘local' and ‘everyday' engagement. However, the critical literature has paid limited attention to education's potential, and political, peacebuilding role. In this thesis, I explore the importance of education in peacebuilding and argue that peacebuilding scholarship should seriously engage with education. Using a case study approach and a critical cultural political economy framework, I explore links between education, inequality, and peacebuilding in South Sudan, through analysis of donor and government policies and interviews with 217 education and peacebuilding actors. I suggest that education policies and practices reproduce political, economic, and cultural inequalities and violence and undermine peacebuilding aims in three broad ways. First, education resource and service distribution reproduces, justifies, and institutionalises geographic and intergroup disparities and grievances associated with ‘real' and perceived inequalities. Second, ‘local' participation strategies based on ‘decentralised' governance reproduce patterns of political exclusion, exploitation, and mistrust between ‘local' communities and authorities. Third, formal education practices and informal narratives concerning identity and difference, in relation to inequality, conflict, and peace, reproduce colonial forms of oppression and violence. These findings demonstrate the complexity of education's peacebuilding role, expanding critical discussions concerning inequalities, the ‘local', and the ‘everyday' and providing insight into specific sociopolitical processes through which these can be addressed, both analytically and ‘practically'.

Even though scholars and researchers have suggested that the Liberian civil war arose as a result of socioeconomic and political inequalities, oppression, discrimination, and marginalization of a certain group of people, Social Dominance Theory (“SDT”) suggests an alternate understanding: social group-based hierarchy is produced and maintained in society by legitimizing myths. SDT explains how these legitimizing myths tend to produce discriminatory and/or anti-discriminatory policies that are endorsed by dominant and subordinate groups, which, if left unattended, eventually lead to conflict.

Since the Oslo Accords, the two-state solution has dominated, and frustrated, the official search for peace in Israel/Palestine. In parallel to it, an alternative struggle of resistance — centered upon the single state idea as a more liberating pathway towards justice to the conflict — has re-emerged against the hegemony of Zionism and the demise of a viable two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. This thesis inquires into the nature of this phenomenon as a movement of resistance and investigates its potential to become a counterhegemonic force against the processes of Zionism as embedded within the peace process since Oslo. To this end, it reconstructs the re-emergence of the single state solution both intellectually and organizationally. This reconstructive analysis is undertaken in two interlinked ways. On the one hand, this thesis analyzes and evaluates the single state alternative from within its own self-understandings, strategies and maps to power. In doing so, it centers the political practices of the situated resistances of the oppressed themselves. On the other hand, it mobilises a classical Gramscian theoretical approach—one that re-centers the processes of counterhegemony, and Gramsci's radical embrace of the transformative power of the human being—through the writings of Edward Said. This theoretical lens enables the analysis of the counterhegemonic potential of this alternative through an evaluation of the extent to which it meets the more stringent demands of becoming a Gramscian-Saidian counterhegemonic force of liberation. Hence, this thesis represents both an empirical contribution to knowledge, and a theoretically informed analysis of the nature of the single state alternative. The thesis finds that the single state alternative can be seen as a Gramscian-Saidian movement of critical pedagogy aimed at creating a reconstructive moment within the conflict. It argues that it has laid much of the groundwork required to become an expansive counterhegemonic force. However, this potential has yet to be seized through a unified, officially led vehicle openly endorsing a single state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and has several obstacles left to overcome in its process of becoming an established political force.

This dissertation takes a cultural-constructivism socialization approach in analyzing the mutual construction of international human rights norms, theories of self-determination, and changes of Hong Kong¡¦s democratic rights. With survey data on Hong Kong¡¦s political rights before and after 1997, it also investigates the attitudes of the people of Hong Kong toward democratic rights and their impact on the development of Hong Hong¡¦s democratic rights. The results signal that the power of international human rights norms have positive effects on constructing a consciousness of human rights both in China and the world¡¦s community of democracies. Hong Kong¡¦s democratic opposition and international forces are two major agents driving the direction and strength of the socialization of democratic rights in Hong Kong. This dissertation further finds that the different sub-cultures within Hong Kong¡¦s democratic opposition weaken the ability of the democratic movement to reform the institutions of democratic rights in Hong Kong. The results reflect a clear trend that while norms and theories of self-determination are evolving towards adopting the right to internal self-determination as part of the right to democratic governance, the discourse of ¡§peaceful democracy¡¨ has been the mainstream for improving democratic rights through the recognition of the right to internal self-determination. This dissertation indicates that the respective discourses on rights to democratic participation within the international community, China, and Hong Kong are adaptive to one another, which contributes to the survival of the unique, autonomous regime of democratic rights in Hong Kong. It concludes that whether or not norms and theories of the right to internal self-determination are legitimized and internalized by the global human rights system will have effects on the further development of the right to democratic participation in Hong Kong and other regions.

Frequency-dependent earthquake coda attenuation values are often reported; however such measurements usually depend on the types of the attenuation models employed. In this thesis, I use numerical modeling of Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) codas at far regional to teleseismic distances to compare two of such models, namely the conventional frequency-dependent attenuation with parameters (Q0, ¦Ç) defined by Qcoda(f) = Q0f¦Ç and frequency-independent effective attenuation (Qe) with geometrical attenuation (¦Ã). The results favour strongly the (¦Ã, Qe) model and illustrate the mechanisms leading to apparent Qcoda(f) dependencies. Tests for variations of the crustal velocity structures show that the values of ¦Ã are stable and related to lithospheric structural types, and the inverted Qe values can be systematically mapped into the true Swave attenuation factors within the crust. Modeling also shows that ¦Ã could increase in areas where relatively thin attenuating layers are present within the crust; such areas could likely be related to younger and active tectonics. By contrast, when interpreted by using the traditional (Q0,¦Ç) approach, the synthetic coda shows a strong and spurious frequency dependence with ¦Ç ¡Ö 0.5, which is also similar to many published observations.<p> Observed Lg codas from two Peaceful Nuclear Explosions located in different areas in Russia show similar values of ¦Ã ¡Ö 0.75¡¤10-2 s-1, which are also remarkably close to the independent numerical predictions in this thesis. At the same time, coda Qe values vary strongly, from 850 in the East European Platform to 2500 within the Siberian Craton. This suggests that parameters ¦Ã and Qe could provide stable and transportable discriminants for differentiating between the lithospheric tectonic types and ages, and also for seismic coda regionalization in nuclear-test monitoring research.

Frequency-dependent earthquake coda attenuation values are often reported; however such measurements usually depend on the types of the attenuation models employed. In this thesis, I use numerical modeling of Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) codas at far regional to teleseismic distances to compare two of such models, namely the conventional frequency-dependent attenuation with parameters (Q0, ¦Ç) defined by Qcoda(f) = Q0f¦Ç and frequency-independent effective attenuation (Qe) with geometrical attenuation (¦Ã). The results favour strongly the (¦Ã, Qe) model and illustrate the mechanisms leading to apparent Qcoda(f) dependencies. Tests for variations of the crustal velocity structures show that the values of ¦Ã are stable and related to lithospheric structural types, and the inverted Qe values can be systematically mapped into the true Swave attenuation factors within the crust. Modeling also shows that ¦Ã could increase in areas where relatively thin attenuating layers are present within the crust; such areas could likely be related to younger and active tectonics. By contrast, when interpreted by using the traditional (Q0,¦Ç) approach, the synthetic coda shows a strong and spurious frequency dependence with ¦Ç ¡Ö 0.5, which is also similar to many published observations.<p> Observed Lg codas from two Peaceful Nuclear Explosions located in different areas in Russia show similar values of ¦Ã ¡Ö 0.75¡¤10-2 s-1, which are also remarkably close to the independent numerical predictions in this thesis. At the same time, coda Qe values vary strongly, from 850 in the East European Platform to 2500 within the Siberian Craton. This suggests that parameters ¦Ã and Qe could provide stable and transportable discriminants for differentiating between the lithospheric tectonic types and ages, and also for seismic coda regionalization in nuclear-test monitoring research.