On Violence and Tyranny examines historiography as a vehicle for the production of a theory of tyrannicide in the aftermath of the murder of Pedro I de Castilla (1369). The thesis of this work is that by considering the royal chronicle as a vehicle and locus for political theorization, we can appreciate the formulation of a theory of tyrannicide as a medium for dynastic legitimation that is not reducible to political propaganda. Rather, it becomes a meditation about monarchy itself, the limits of power, and the underlying causes and consequences of political violence. The chronicle of the king Pedro's rule conceives an economy of violence coded in terms of saber (political wisdom), justice and the law, as a means to face the ideological, political, and social challenges that civil war and regicide pose to a community. I will focus on two fragments of the chronicle, a pair of letters attributed to a wise Moor that the chronicler chose to include in a second stage of his composition and that establish extra textual connections to other political genres such as the specula principum and political prophecy. Through them, I will explore how a theory of tyrannicide allows the chronicler to confront three major problems that regicide poses. First, how to explicate the dynastic break that king Pedro’s murder brought about, and minimize the discontinuity that the advent of a new, and illegitimate, dynasty (the Trastámaras) represented for a historical tradition that deeply valued the continuity of history. Second, how a theory of tyrannicide served to repair the broken ties provoked by the civil war. And third, how to represent that founding violence, the violence against a sovereign, to render it legitimate, but not available for anyone else to exploit.

How do autocrats maintain power? In many cases, autocrats lack the support of a majority of the population. This problem is particularly stark in electoral autocracies, where autocrats must generate millions of favorable votes in order to stay in power. Coercion, or the forcible exclusion of some segments of the population from power, is one tool that many autocrats use to solve this problem. However, creating coercive institutions is also dangerous for autocrats, as the same forces that can be used to coerce citizens can also be used to depose or demand resources from the autocrat himself. In the first paper, I contend that autocracies can use the psychological effects of fear to coerce citizens at a lower cost and at lower personal risk. This psychological theory of autocratic coercion has two core implications that I test. First, I use a lab-in-the-field experiment to show that the emotion of fear reduces participation in pro-democracy action, and that this may work through its effects on perceptions of risk and risk attitudes. Second, I show using correlational evidence that propensity to feel fear predicts variation in participation in dissent. In the second paper, I examine how poverty conditions the way that citizens respond to the threat of coercion. I argue that poverty may make coercion more effective in reducing citizen dissent both by making citizens more prone to fear, and by increasing their physical vulnerability to violence. I test this prediction at the individual and constituency level using data on public opinion and voting in Zimbabwe, drawing on random variation in recent exposure to violence and poverty. The third paper tests whether emotions can also be used by activists to increase dissent among citizens with anti-regime preferences. I partnered with an opposition party that ran an experimental test of angry against enthusiastic campaign messages using video and images sent out via mobile phone chat groups. Analysis of the transcripts of these groups shows that the anger appeals generated significantly more pro-opposition participation in the groups. There is some evidence that anger was most effective in constituencies that had experienced violence in the past.

This dissertation examines how contemporary Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone literature from Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia (1984-present) reconfigures historical archives to negotiate the ethics of representing state violence in repressive societies. I identify new literary forms politically conscious writers are devising to capture and contest human rights violations. Using an interdisciplinary decolonial feminist framework, I closely read works by Cristina Peri Rossi, Michael Ondaatje, M. NourbeSe Philip, Edwidge Danticat, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Roberto Bolaño— a diverse set of postcolonial and post-dictatorship writers never before compared in comparative literature. I call these writers’ endeavors to reframe traumatic history “arts of the impossible,” which defy the alleged unrepresentability of collective trauma to secure justice and forestall impunity. I compare representations of wide-ranging atrocities including forced disappearance, slavery, genocide, and femicide— crimes exemplifying what I term “ontological erasure.” At stake in ontological erasure are not simply lost perspectives from multiply marginalized victims, like women and queer people of color, but the very possibility of citizenship and the will to dissent state recognition enables. To resist the threats posed by the authorization of these crimes to political freedom, these writers, I argue, reinvent evidentiary forms historically suppressed by authoritarian states, including court transcripts, testimonies, forensic reports, and national archives. These authors’ innovations push the boundaries of what counts as “evidence” in acts of state violence that are uniquely determined by erasure; they also imagine new methods for remembering past atrocities without compromising recognition for stigmatized minorities in the future.

This dissertation argues that works of literature offer a valuable critical supplement to historical and legal accounts of colonial violence, due to the common investment of literary texts in thematizing moral complexity and complicity, and by drawing attention to intimate and social forms of harm that might otherwise go unaccounted for. Following the recent successful lawsuit against the British government by elderly Kenyans who survived torture in the 1950s, as well as recent historical scholarship on the colonial government's brutal counterinsurgency, I argue that the paradigmatic anticolonial event commonly referred to as the “Mau Mau” uprising has been reframed in terms of a series of grave human rights abuses. I examine the diverse ways in which the Mau Mau struggle has been figured in narrative fiction, focusing on works by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, and the white supremacist Robert Ruark. The dissertation shows literary texts to be sites of distinct forms of knowledge concerning the harms of political violence. My readings demonstrate that fictions of Mau Mau have figured that crisis as both a crime that demands urgent redress and an event whose damage is permanent and irreparable, each text staging in distinct ways the structuring paradox of historical reparation as an impossible ethical demand that must nonetheless be insisted upon. I think of reparations claims as radical decolonizing demands, countering recent critiques of the “politics of reparations” as a liberal departure from properly emancipationist thinking.

This work is based on the belief that the Provisional IRA developed its combat effectiveness through enhancing its small-unit effectiveness. Although PIRA ultimately failed in its objective to reunify Ireland, it successfully waged a thirty-year long campaign against the British military. The current state of terrorism studies does not explain how this was possible. It can explain the development of PIRA’s strategy, membership type and weapons used but it lacks sufficient explanation of small-unit dynamics. By drawing on the ideas of Huntington and King, among others, this work argues that PIRA successfully professionalised its small-unit tactics and this was the source of its increased effectiveness. By examining changes in structure, training, specialisation, motivation and identity it will be possible to demonstrate whether professionalism did have an effect. Ultimately, the findings of this research will provide an example for others to follow in their efforts to understand past and present terror threats.

Rwanda experienced genocide from April to July 1994 during which over 800,000 people were murdered. Among the far-reaching changes that followed this event among individuals and in society overall, the Rwandan Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) showed that contraceptive prevalence declined from 13% in 1992 to 4% in 2000 among married women of reproductive age. This dissertation has two hypotheses concerning Rwandan women's fertility preferences and behavior following the genocide. It is hypothesized that, first, high levels of conflict reduced women's desire for a child or for additional children and second, that women who experienced relatively high levels of conflict were more likely to act on their wish to not have a child or another child by using modern contraceptives than were women who experienced relatively low levels of conflict. The study's logistic regression dependent (outcome) variables were desire for a or another child and the use of modern contraceptives; the source for these data was the 2000 DHS. Three groups of independent variables were included: socio-demographic variables, also from the 2000 DHS, included age, number of living children, education level, urban/rural residence and socio-economic status; availability of family planning services, assessed using women's perception of distance as a barrier to obtaining health care for themselves, from the 2000 DHS, and quality of health services, assessed with data from the 2001 Service Provision Assessment; and experience of conflict, measured as the percentage of the 1994 commune populations that resided in refugee camps in 1995. Communes were considered `high migration' if 10 percent or more of their populations migrated to camps and `low migration' if less than 10 percent of their populations migrated to camps. Women who lived in high migration communes were considered to have relatively high experience of conflict and those who lived in low migration communes were consider dot have relatively low experience of conflict. Analysis showed that residents of high migration communes were significantly less likely to want a or another child as compared to residents of low migration communes (OR = .74); it appeared that the social environment of high migration had a dampening effect on desire for children. The analysis also showed that residents of high migration communes were significantly less likely to use a modern contraceptive method than were those of low migration communes (OR = .57), even though they were less likely to want a or another child and even when family planning services were reasonably available. The reasons for these results are unclear, and many factors may contribute. The generalized trauma experienced by the population may have had a numbing effect, in which taking action in any domain was difficult. Women may have felt pressured by society to have children as the society emerged from war, despite their own preferences. The population may also have distrusted government health facilities - the only source of services for most - in light of the interactions with officials during and after the genocide. However, another set of reasons specific to women and women's health may also have influenced the findings. There is a pervasive social stigma around reproductive health; these services have generally lagged behind other primary health care components. Moreover, rape was used as a weapon of war in the genocide; these experiences may have reduced women's willingness to seek reproductive health services specifically. Finally, the Rwandan genocide and its preparation were decidedly misogynistic; this pervasive dehumanization may have made it particularly difficult for women to seek care for their sexual and reproductive health needs and desires. This complex personal, social, physical and political context may explain why Rwandan women who may not have wanted a child or additional children nonetheless did not consistently act on their desires in the years following the 1994 genocide. The dissertation includes a series of essays providing the author's personal perspective on working in Rwanda in the 1980s and 1990s and being present in the country at the start of the genocide in April 1994.

A partir de la comparaison de micro-circuits de tourisme alternatif mis en place par deux communautés rurales au Guatemala, ce travail interroge la place des visiteurs étrangers dans le processus de construction du discours touristique ainsi que la place du circuit et de ses acteurs au regard des enjeux politiques locaux. L’histoire des groupes étudiés est directement liée à celle du conflit armé interne qu’a connu le pays : ils sont ex-guérilleros ou veuves du conflit. Pour eux, le tourisme est une ressource économique complémentaire, mais aussi un espace de représentation identitaire et mémorielle. Les circuits dont il est question ne sont pas encadrés par des organisations extérieures, ils relèvent du « bricolage » des acteurs locaux, qui s’appuient sur des réseaux d’aide et d’interconnaissance et des contacts internationaux – au premier rang desquels les touristes eux-mêmes. L’analyse des enjeux attachés au circuit touristique éclaire l’importance de la maîtrise de la (re)présentation identitaire du groupe, à la fois dans le contexte de l’inscription dans des réseaux de solidarités transnationaux et dans celui des jeux de pouvoir locaux. / This thesis, based on the study of small-scale alternative tourism in two rural communities in Guatemala, examines the role of foreign visitors in the making of the touristic discourse, as well as the manner in which the tour and its actors relate to local politics. The history of the studied groups is rooted in the internal armed conflict: they are ex-guerillas or Ixil widows. Tourism is not their main occupation but an additional economic resource, as well as a stage for the performance of their identity and memory. These tours where not set up by foreign organizations; they fall within what can be called “bricolage”, their progressive making and adapting by local actors who rely on the help of acquaintanceship networks and international contacts –with the tourists themselves in the forefront. An analysis of the issues at stake concerning the touristic project emphasizes the importance of control over public (re)presentation of the identity of the group, both in the context of its insertion in transnational solidarity networks and in that of local power dynamics.

<p>The objective of the study was to conduct an internal validation on miniSTR systems and apply it to cases received from the South African Missing Persons Task Team (SAMPTT). This was prompted by the fact that miniSTR systems have been shown to out perform some of the commercial kits available in the time of the study and provide an alternative to mtDNA when analysing degraded DNA from skeletal remains and that the DNA extracted from skeletal remains received from the SAMPTT would be degraded due to the remains generally being fragmented or charred and buried for many years. The miniSTR loci chosen for validation comprised the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) thirteen core loci and were arranged into four triplexes and one uniplex.</p>

<p>This thesis falls within the category of historical studies that is concerned with a difficult legacy of South Africa̕s liberation struggle, namely the practice of necklacing that accompanied it. My interest in the practice is limited to its emergence and politicising as it relates to the ANC, the UDF and the apartheid state. The ANC and the UDF overwhelmingly understood the practice as resistance, yet ambivalently so. The question guiding this thesis therefore asks: how is necklacing written into the narrative of struggle history? Here I refer to its (re)representation, its (re)characterisation, its (re)articulation in a wider discursive war of propaganda strategies that was waged through the interplay of an apartheid state discourse and what I consider to be an official non-state discourse, that of the ANC and the UDF.</p>

Abstract The event that the Second People¡¦s Power Revolution (EDSA II) forced President Estrada to resign from his presidency in January, 2001, was the first political violence after 1946, the year of the Independence of the Philippines. EDSA II, however, was neither a social revolution nor a military coup, but the combination of the two. The connotation of the event was actually a wrestle among a group of so-called pursuing democracy elite. The event, although, was probably considered as one of the domestic riots in the Philippines, it still became a controversial one which was specifically related to the issue of ¡§the re-emergence of oligarchy¡¨. The study aimed to find out whether oligarchy re-emerged in the Philippine or not in terms of the context of oligarchy history, the oligarchy style of democracy transition, the source of EDSA II and the argument of EDSA II. The research, firstly, reanalyzed the history of the Philippines in order to trace back oligarchy in the Philippines, and then discussed the phenomena of ¡§church involvement¡¨, ¡§military coup¡¨, ¡§constitutional conflict¡¨ and ¡§people movement¡¨, to show the fragile democracy in post-Marcos era. More than that, this study tried to clarify the myth of EDSA II, in terms of ¡§ the cause and effect of the revolution¡¨, ¡§the argument and examination of the revolution¡¨ and ¡§the myth and discussion of the revolution¡¨. Finally, the issue of ¡§the re-emergence of oligarchy¡¨ was discussed and concluded. To sum up, the oligarchy did appear in the Philippines. With respect to EDSA II, it was by all means a competition game played by elite. Oligarchy, therefore, was still the main stream in this country.