This dissertation follows the activism of Korean students in New York City and the trajectory of their American education as it applied to Korea’s colonization under the Empire of Japan. As a focused historical account of the educational experiences of Korean students in New York from 1907 to 1937, this dissertation uses archival evidence from their associations, correspondence, publications, and the institutions they studied at to construct a transnational narrative that positions the Korean students operating within and outside the confines of their colonial experience. The following dissertation answers how the Korean students applied their American education and experiences to the Korean independence movement, and emphasizes the interplay of colonization, religion, and American universities in contouring the students’ activism and hopes for a liberated Korea.

Firms require policies that are supportive to their operating environment and competiveness. Few firms, however, interact with policy makers and it is suggested in the literature that they do so in a self-interested manner. Policy makers are faced with the challenge of ensuring positive sum outcomes in a highly politicised process. Innovative firms could possible request more value creating policies with noninnovative firms requesting value capturing policies. A firm that is more networked is more innovative, but this also increases the management complexity of the firm. The purpose of this study was to enable policy makers to make more informed political decisions in the public policy process. A secondary dataset focused on firms in the innovation context. Groups of firms were categorised by their innovativeness, involvement with policy and network richness through Chi-square tests, Exploratory Factor Analysis and Cluster Analysis. The policy requests of these firms were analysed through the Kruskal-Wallis test, with post hoc analyses using Mann-Whitney U tests. The study found that firms could be categorised based on their innovativeness and involvement, but that network richness played an important role in increasing both. Innovative and non-innovative firms had similar needs in policies. It is suggested that richly networked firms are not independently rent seeking as they request policies that are to the benefit of the broader innovation network in order to sustain and grow the collaborative relationships. Policy makers are advised to ensure the inclusion of network rich firms in the policy process. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Over the past years, particularly during 2018, Chilean society has experienced a robust feminist movement led by high school students. At the same time, mainstream society and researchers claim that Chile is experiencing a youth civic and citizenship education crisis, particularly among young women. I address this apparent contradiction by challenging the futuristic approach in citizenship education taken in the country and exploring how young women are currently politically engaged and challenge gender oppression within their high schools and their activist spaces. I have used a post-human and post-colonial feminist theoretical framework to answer the following research question, How do female public high school students in Chile who identify as feminist or politically active produce their gender/political subjectivities in the 2018 context of contentious feminist politics? And, sub questions; How do they do this while engaging with feminist discourses and practices in and outside of school? How do they do this while engaging with historical narratives? Finally, how do they do this while engaging with formal political education in school? A context of contentious feminist politics will be understood as a context where feminism is prevalent in public discourse, which forces people -in this case students- to take a stance concerning this subject. To answer the research questions, I conducted a critical ethnography, observing classes and other activities at Edelbina González High School, a Chilean all-female public high school with an active group of high school feminists. During my fieldwork, I invited six 12th-grade participants to be my focal group of observation and to take part in individual testimonios interviews and collective art-based testimonios workshops. Through these methods, I produced fieldnotes of observations, transcriptions and audio-recordings of the interviews and workshops, and photographs of the school space and students’ art pieces. I analyzed the data through a three-layer process using thematic coding analysis, narrative structural and content analysis, visual analysis, and “plugging in with theory” analysis (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). This study engages with lengthy discussion regarding education and reproduction of gender regimes; it explores how oppressive systems transform but remain, particularly in regards to citizenship and formal political education through neoliberal discourses of girl empowerment. It also shows how feminist female high school students communally and creatively respond, theorize, and re-imagine political engagement within these frames, providing insights into what is, and what can be education for democratic citizenship and gender justice. The Feminist students in this study produced themselves as nomadic mestiza bodies engaging with pre-existing political frameworks but at the same time built something more. The students assembled themselves within an antagonistic us/them framework within the Chilean Student Movement, which considers the state and school as adversaries attempting to oppress them. Their high school attempted to reproduce them as feminine, successful, conflict-free neoliberal girls. Regardless, the feminist students displaced both the antagonistic and neoliberal model producing their gender/political subjectivities as nomadic, ever-shifting, vulnerable and strong, and connecting themselves with collective memories and historical narratives. The production of the feminist students’ gender/political subjectivities through “affectivism,” resistance, and political caring rendered the participants as nomadic mestiza bodies, always becoming, collectively connected and empowered by one another to produce political change.

The main purposes of this study are to elaborate on the concept of ethnic military mobilization and to identify the factors that contribute to its occurrence.

Bibliography: pages 316-351. / In both scholarly and popular literature on the South African business sector, a high premium is commonly placed on the role of business in promoting political reform. This study investigated the perceived extent of such influence on political and socio-political aspects of public policy in the period 1978 to 1989. Using the "elite" and "group" approaches in Political Science as a point of departure, the perceptions of government and business elites in this regard, in particular the perceptions of the Afrikaner business elite, were analysed. Data from the government elite was gathered by means of postal questionnaires, and the business elite's input was obtained via interviews. The government elite's attitude towards, and perceptions of, interest groups were examined in the light of the premise that the latter's influence is largely determined by their legitimacy in the eyes of the decision-makers. These attitudes were established by moving from an assessment of the government elite's general perception of interest groups, to more specific perceptions of, amongst others, the business sector's access to decision-makers, and their perceived influence. The second part of the study primarily focused on the perceptions of the Afrikaner business elite vis-a-vis the influence of the business community on various dimensions of public policy. It was found that the government elite's attitude towards the existence of interest groups was largely dependent on the latter's utility with regard to the implementation and maintenance of policy, via mainly "positive" and "constructive" research. Government perceptions confirmed that several elite groups exercised specific influence on various dimensions of public policy. The Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut (AHI), for example, was found to have the greatest influence on economic policy formulation, whereas the Afrikaner Broederbond and the Dutch Reformed Church exercise more significant influence on socio- political policy than the AHI. Apart from these traditional Afrikaner elite-groups, the "insiders" were found to include those whose economic ideologies, amongst other variables, were reconcilable with those of government Due to the fact that the National Party was compelled to enlarge its power base in the early 1980s, certain English business organisations such as ASSOCOM and the FCI and the black political organization, lnkatha, have to some extent, been included as "insiders" despite divergent political convictions or cultural differences. Both the government elite and the business elite felt, however that the Afrikaner businessmen and their organizations still retained the decisive influence on aspects of economic and socio-political decision-making. With regard to political decision-making, that is the forms of state, government and authority, the business elite did not express a desire to have a role in this arena. The government elite, on the other hand, was prepared to grant the business sector a role in this regard, on the condition that business input exercised a reactive legitimising role to their policy, rather than initiating change.

This dissertation documents a pattern of policy-making in Muslim majority (predominantly authoritarian) countries, whereby incumbents demonstrate higher responsiveness to citizens' economic concerns and expand their distributive policies during the Islamic season of Ramadan. Why do autocratic governments (weakly constrained by formal political institutions) address economic inequalities and expand their distributive policies in religious seasons? I argue that the religious environment imposes normative constraints on governments in Muslim societies, acting as an additional accountability mechanism to formal political institutions. The case of Ramadan exemplifies this claim. Ramadan's religious norms increase the salience of distributive issues and raise the political costs of governments' non-responsiveness to their constituents' economic insecurities. Specifically, governments underperforming on distributive issues could suffer reputational costs and face mobilization threats in Ramadan. Hence, incumbents expand their distributive policies in Ramadan to contain these short-term political threats (i.e., reputational and mobilization threats) arising during the season by delivering to threatening constituencies to co-opt them and buy their political acquiescence. The project integrates multiple methodological approaches to test this argument both cross-nationally and sub-nationally. I first document a systematic increase in the religious salience of distributive matters in Ramadan, by applying text analysis tools to an original cross-national dataset of 32,000 Islamic sermons. I then show that Ramadan imposes two main costs on incumbents that underperform on economic and distributive issues in Muslim societies. First, leveraging quasi-random variation in the timing of existing cross-national surveys using a difference-in-differences design, I find that Ramadan exacerbates Muslims' evaluations of the incumbent's economic performance and their perceived morality/religiosity, proportionally to the incumbent’s performance on distributive policy areas. Second, using machine learning to classify the types of protest activities reported in the ACLED dataset, I report that Ramadan facilitates economic and religious mobilization in economically insecure Muslim societies. A qualitative analysis of five cases reveals that incumbents respond to these pressures by distributing in Ramadan, particularly when facing rising political threats. I then complement these results with a sub-national analysis of Ramadan's distributive policies. Focusing on Egypt (2014-2020), I employ web-scraping to construct a municipality-level dataset of daily reports of the regime's distributive efforts. I find that the regime reports more distributive interventions in Ramadan, particularly in places where political threats to its rule are higher. As a follow-up, I also show that government expenditure on welfare increases in Ramadan after periods of political contention, creating fiscal policy cycles similar to electoral budgetary cycles. This dissertation underlines the role of informal institutions in explaining regularities in policy-making in more traditional and less democratic societies, hence approaching the question of how political accountability and government responsiveness can be attained without democracy. It also specifies conditions under which religion becomes a source of public pressure for government distribution, challenging the Marxist notion of religion as opium.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology, Johannesburg, February 2018 / The common narrative of social movements and protest action in recent years, indicates that young eole globally are doinating suh oveents n outh fria, students’ ontinued engageent in protests around politics and public issues at the local level, as well as their low levels of participation in formal democratic processes such as elections, calls for an assessment on whether students are knowledgeable and understand the role of local government, as well as local governance. This study looks at young outh frian students’ (1-24 years) knowledge and understanding of local government, and local governance in the Johannesburg Metropolitan. For the purpose of this qualitative research study, 56 young students in two universities and two TVET colleges in the Johannesburg metropolitan were interviewed through 35 semi-structured in-depth, one-on-one interviews, and three focus group discussions. This study confirms that students present a very narrow knowledge and understanding of democratic governance and the political system at the local level. This, it is argued, is a key reason behind their lack of engagement and participation at the local level, as well as their identification of protests as the only effective form of political activism. This study also indicates that, desite students’ awareness of traditional olitial latfors suh as eletions and taking art in community meetings, their perceptions of poor local leadership, eroding trust in traditional democratic institutions, patronage party politics and general disillusionment with the political future of the country, are hindering these students’ artiiation in loal governane / XL2019

In the history of opposition to white supremacist rule in South Africa, the 1950's stand out as a period of intensive legal resistance by black political bodies on an unprecedented mass scale. Undoubtedly, for all its weaknesses and difficulties, the Congress Alliance, with the African National Congress its senior partner, was the major source of opposition faced by the apartheid state in this period. More than is generally realised, however, the 1950's were also a decade of mass political action by black women in South Africa, that section of the population which a 1956 pamphlet aptly described as "the most oppressed, suffering and downtrodden of our people". At the centre of this outburst lay the Federation of South African Women (FSAW), an organisation that was linked to the Congress Alliance. It is the history of this organisation that forms the subject matter of this thesis. Little historical work has been done on women in South Africa, politically or otherwise: for this reason, the scope of this study is broad and, in addition to material on the history and make-up of the FSAW itself, several chapters have been devoted to background developments to the establishment of the FSAW in 1954.

The period 1954 to 1958 saw an unprecedented level of mobilisation and active political campaigning by women of all races in South Africa. These campaigns were split along lines of race and class, as evidenced in the demonstrations against the extension of pass laws to African women by the Federation of South African Women [FSAW] and the campaign against the Senate Bill by liberal white women of the Black Sash. What they had in common is that both groups of women organised their action into separate structures exclusive to women, with independent identities from the male-dominated structures of the Congress Alliance and of white party politics. This separate organisation from men was not carried out with an explicit feminist agenda or a developed awareness of women's oppression, however. Nevertheless, their existence constituted a challenge to the dominant patriarchal discourse that constructed women's role as domestic and exclusive to the private sphere. Newspaper representations of the two organisations by both their political allies and their political opponents, provide evidence of this dominant discourse on "women's place" and insight on the public perception of political activity by women at the time. Within the texts of FSAW and the Black Sash one finds tensions between accepted notions of women's primary role as wives and mothers, and an emerging self-conception of women as politically active in the public realm. To an extent, the self-representation of these texts mirrors the patriarchal representations of women found in the newspaper reports. However, there are also definite departures from the traditional formulations of womanhood that can be conceived of as "contestations" to the dominant discourse. The patriarchal discourse was, therefore, a discursive constraint, both external and internalised, on women's ability to become active and effective in South Africa politics in the 1950s. Paradoxically, through the practical process of women's mobilisation in FSAW and the Black Sash, new space was opened on the political terrain that allowed for the alteration of the dominent discourse on women's place in society, as well as for the emergence of contestatory feminist discourses in South Africa.

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