Literary Field and Literature in Early Post-war Period Táiwān (1945-1949) Abstract The aim of this thesis is to analyze the literature and literary field of early post-war Táiwān (1945-49). This period, when Táiwān was politically reintegrated into China after 50 years as a Japanese colony, exerted a crucial influence on later historical events and developments. During these years, measures for the sinicization of Táiwānese society were implemented, but intellectuals also articulated views of distinctively Táiwānese as opposed to Mainland Chinese cultural features that were revivified by proponents of the Táiwānization (běntŭhuà) move- ment in the 1980s. As laid out in chapter 1, the methodology of the thesis is based on the theory of the literary field formulated by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The literary scene is understood as a structure created by relationships between various agents who aim to attain the dominant position in the field by accumulating the largest amount of symbolic capital. This is defined as prestige by Bourdieu but should be understood as a combination of prestige and political clout in the Táiwānese context, as this dissertation will argue. To occupy the do- minant position enables agents to define Táiwānese identity, culture, and literature (especially vis-à-vis China)....

Current approaches to post-war state reconstruction are primarily dominated by the liberal peace thesis. These approaches tend to ignore the indigenous institutions, societal resources and cultural agencies of post-conflict societies, although such entities are rooted in the sociological, historical, political and environmental realities of these societies. Such universalised and 'best practice' approaches, more often than not, tend to reproduce artificial states. The Poro and Sande are the largest indigenous sodality institutions in the 'hinterlands' - a pejorative term attributed to rural Liberia and Sierra Leone. Both the Poro and Sande exercise spiritual, political, economic and social authority. In this thesis, I use critical realism and the case study approach to investigate: a) the extent to which the liberal peace practitioners who are leading state reconstruction in Liberia and Sierra Leone recognised the role and potential utility of the Poro and Sande institutions; b) the extent to which the Poro and Sande were engaged; and c) the implications for the quality and viability of the reconstructed states. This evidence-based research suggests that the liberal peace project sidelined indigenous institutions, including the Poro and Sande, in the post-war recovery and rebuilding exercises. The disregard for indigenous and emerging resources in the context of state reconstruction in Liberia and Sierra Leone has contributed to the resurgence of 19th century counter-hegemonic resistance from the sodality-governed interior of both countries. At the same time, the reconstructed states are drifting back towards their pre-war status quo. Authority structures remain fragmented, kleptocracy is being restored, webs of militarised patronage networks are being emboldened, and spaces for constructive dialogues are shrinking. This thesis underscores the need for indigenisation as a complementary strategy to help reverse the deterioration, and to maximise gains from massive investments in peacebuilding.

Modernism has been called “a reaction to the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War and a search for a new mode of art that would rescue civilization from its state of crisis after the war” (Lewis, 109) Hemingway attempts this rescue by re-thinking aspects of the novel that were taken for granted in earlier periods, just as the conventions of modern life were taken for granted pre-WWI. Furthermore, his work tries to rectify the dissonance between a pre and post-war self through the exploration of social conventions relating to violence, trauma and masculinity.

Post-war countries are among the most difficult policy arenas for international and domestic actors. The challenge is not only to stop violence and prevent violence from rekindling, but moreover to help countries reset their internal relations on a peaceful path. The indirect, long-term effects of wars further exaggerate this challenge. Many of these relate to political and social aspects of post-war countries. Lasting impressions of human rights abuses committed during wars continue to shape the relations among members of societies for decades to come. Both, socio-economic impacts and political impacts challenge the stability of post-war countries for many years. The challenges to public health have been found to be especially severe and affect disproportionately the civilian population of post-war countries. Environmental and climate change exposes post-war populations further to new risks, exaggerating the human costs of war long after active combat has ceased. These challenges are not new. The problem, however, is that in practice all these elements are simultaneously happening in today’s peacebuilding interventions. Yet, practitioners as well as researchers remain settled in a silo mentality, focusing only on one aspect at a time. As such they are unaware of the unintended consequences that their focus has on other important processes. The four essays that lie at the heart of this dissertation provide new insight into the linkages between the social, political and ecological processes in post-war societies and how the interactions of different groups of actors are shaping the prospects for peace. The argument drawn out in this dissertation is that to build peace we need to acknowledge and understand this long-term interplay of social, political, and ecological processes in post-war countries. It will be crucial to understand the potential and dynamics of natural resources and environmental issues in this context. As the essays in this dissertation show, the interactions of these processes divisively shape the post-war landscape. It is therefore essential to build a peace that is ecologically sensitive, while equally socially and politically relevant and desirable. I call this sustainable peace.

This thesis is a history of humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Britain, between 1942 and 1985. Specifically, it is focused upon the group of leading agencies linked to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella body for joint emergency fundraising established in the 1960s. The thesis explores the role of these NGOs in building up an expansive and technocratic disaster relief industry in Britain, in which they were embedded as instruments for the delivery of humanitarian aid. This was problematic, as many principal aid agencies also wished to move away from short-term disaster relief, to focus upon political advocacy connected to international development instead. It is argued that, despite this increasing political focus, humanitarian NGOs were consistently brought back to emergency relief by the power of television, the lack of public support for development, and the interventions of the British government. Aid agencies also actively contributed to this process, as they used apolitical disaster relief to generate public support and drive institutional growth in a crowded marketplace. This analysis complicates linear narratives of a transition from emergency relief to development aid in post-war British humanitarianism, instead presenting the period as characterised by competing and contradictory trajectories. This challenges conceptions of NGOs as bottom-up agents of civil society, by highlighting their competitive tendencies and complex interconnections with the mass media and the state. The rise of NGO humanitarianism also sheds light on broader trends in contemporary British history, such as changing patterns of political engagement, the character of modern activism, and the legacies of empire in the post-imperial period.

The thesis investigates the role of the Greek junta in the Cyprus Crisis of 1974 and analyses the invisible and complex components, including the foreign factors, which determined its outcome. Initially it examines the backstage of the intra-Greek collision between Brigadier-General Ioannides in Athens and Archbishop Makarios in Nicosia, as well as the subversive planning, including the possibility of US implication, and the military operations of the Greek coup that dethroned the Cypriot president on 15 July. It analyses the critical preinvasion days (15-19 July), which offered a clear operational forewarning over Turkish strategic intentions, and the Athenian strategic miscalculations, for the timely mobilization of the Greek-Cypriot forces, against the imminent invasion on 20 July. Then it focuses on the analysis of the offensive and defensive operations during the two phases of the Turkish invasion, and examines the difficulties encountered by the Turkish forces as well as the causes that pre-determined the Greek-Cypriot defensive failure. The thesis concludes with the implicating responsibility of foreign powers, which silently acquiesced to the deterioration of a crisis that ended with the military partition of the island Republic: the surprising Soviet silence, the fluctuating behaviour of Whitehall, and the ambiguous role of Washington which, under the dominance of Kissinger, played a critical role in encouraging, rather than deterring, Turkish strategic objectives.

This is a study of the development of post-war Iraq after the downfall of former President Saddam Hussein in 2003. The thesis examines the actions and consequences of the coalition led by the United States to facilitate the re-construction of Iraq as a democratic nation-state. The thesis examines the geo-political, economic and ideological motivations behind the US actions in Iraq in order to explain why the coalition plans to reconstruct the country along the lines of a democratic nation-state have failed so profoundly. The thesis develops a typology of policies that lead to successful nation-state building in post-authoritarian and post-conflict scenarios and applies this typology to the actual policies implemented by the US-led coalition after the fall of Saddam in 2003. The thesis illustrates that many of the policies implemented by the coalition undermined successful nation-state building. These policies failed to ensure the security and stability of Iraq after the invasion and thereby hampered economic development. Rather than re-defining Iraqi nationhood in democratic terms, the implemented policies enshrined ethno-sectarian divisions in the political landscape and in the social fabric of Iraq. The new Iraqi state lacked a stable constitutional and legal foundation and a functioning judiciary to ensure the rule of law. Finally, the political order established by the US-led coalition is marred by partisan conflicts and Kurdish independence tendencies which weaken the central government and the operation of its various departments and further threaten the territorial integrity of the Iraqi state. The thesis argues - based on evidence gathered through a nation-wide survey, in-depth interviews with influential stakeholders in the public sectors and other material - that Iraq after 2003 has become a failed state.

The thesis is dedicated to the history of the Czechoslovak Red Cross (CSRC) organization, especially to the period 1945 - 1952. The CSRC carried out valuable activities between 1945 and 1948 not only in the medical field, but also in social services. Training of caregivers and voluntary nurses, establishing and operating medical facilities or searching for missing individuals due to WWII can be listed among others. A particular phase of CSRC history started after February 1948 Coup, when it slowly transformed into voluntary organization of the National Front. The thesis is mainly based on archives of CSRC stored in the National archive. Key words Czechoslovak Red Cross - social services - modern history - Czechoslovakia after war - National Front

At the close of 1946, a year marked by domestic white-on-black violence, Harry S. Truman, in a dramatic move, established the President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). Five years before, his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt had formed the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC), under pressure from civil rights groups mobilized against racial discrimination in the defense industry. The FEPC was the first major federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. However, when race riots later erupted in cities across the country in 1943, Roosevelt ignored his staff's recommendation to appoint a national race relations committee. Instead, he agreed to a “maypole” committee, which was, in actuality, a decentralized network of individuals, including Philleo Nash, whose purpose was to anticipate and diffuse urban racial tensions in order to avert further race riots. Superficially, Truman's PCCR seemed to resemble Roosevelt's rather conservative race relations strategy of appointing a committee rather than taking direct action under the authority of the federal government. But, as this project will argue, Truman's PCCR represented a major, historical change in the approach to civil rights that would have a profound effect on activists, such as Dorothy Tilly and Frank Porter Graham, and the movement itself. Where FDR's committees were created to avoid further racial confrontations, Truman’s committee invited and ignited controversy. Its groundbreaking report, To Secure These Rights (TSTR), unequivocally declared the federal government as the guardian of all Americans’ civil rights. In essence, Truman’s PCCR elevated the civil rights dialogue to a national level by recasting the civil rights issue as an American problem rather than just a black-American problem. Moreover, TSTR attacked segregation directly, and challenged the federal government to take the lead by immediately desegregating the armed services. These radical recommendations came only six years after a reluctant FDR formed the FEPC and six and one-half years before the Unites States’ Supreme Court’s landmark ruling, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and the ensuing backlash. Thus, Truman’s PCCR and TSTR, in 1947, forged a new “civil rights frontier.”

This thesis explores the representation of prostitution in German Weimar films between 1919 and 1933. It theorizes that prostitutes are illustrated through characters who are public women. The women who step out of their homes to enter public, or who are somehow introduced to strangers without leaving their homes are public women. The public women in these films, as public women living in Germany, were in danger of being identified as prostitutes and becoming prostitutes. A woman’s public position made her vulnerable to the male sexualized gaze. The male sexualized gaze ultimately led to a woman’s prostitution. The thesis analyzes 4 films to demonstrate woman’s depiction as a prostitute. The first film, Nosferatu, depicts a seemingly virtuous woman whose husband begins to prostitute her, but ultimately she prostitutes herself in exchange for the service of a supernatural law. The film symbolically discusses social issues regarding prostitution, family life, and venereal disease. The second film, Metropolis, protects its public female character from the sexualized gaze with religion and motherhood at the beginning of the film. However, as the film progresses the main character, Maria, is unwillingly prostituted by the head of the society in exchange for a robot that looks like her. The robot employs the male sexualized gaze and her position as a prostitute to overturn society as a vagina dentata. The third and fourth films are The Blue Angel and Variety respectively. Both of these films depict women in public positions who use their sexuality for gain. These women prostitute themselves. They are not victims as Maria and Ellen are in the two previous films. The women in this chapter use their sexuality and prostitution as a way to attain agency. The women in these films I label as vagina dentata because they purposefully destroy men for their own gain. These women use public sexuality to find and engage their male prey as patrons before they emasculate them. The thesis views the women of Weimar films differently than other scholars have by making her the focus of the film and interpreting her public exposure as her gateway to prostitution.