Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-241).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, 1971. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 372-380).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 387-403).

What triggers political unrest under International Monetary Fund (IMF) programmes? Why do we see unrest - protests, strikes, and riots - in some countries under IMF programmes and not in others? This thesis argues that IMF labour conditionality in an immobile labour market compounded by intrusive fiscal conditionality and blocked democratic channels result in unrest. Where labour is immobile in the borrowing country, IMF labour conditionality decentralising the market creates large-scale grievances among the labour groups. Immobile labour groups substantially lose income and benefits under those measures due to high wage differentials and varied labour protection measures across sectors. Moreover, uncertainty and risks increase, while the opportunities to return back to employment or to maintain the existing income and benefits diminish. When the political authority is unable to address the rising grievances due to tight fiscal conditionality and blocked democratic channels, we observe political unrest under IMF programmes. Where labour is mobile, on the other hand, it is easier for workers to switch between sectors and jobs when the economic crisis hits their sector. The labour groups respond to the internal crisis and the external impact by increasing mobility and switching to the sectors that are still growing despite the crisis. Labour conditions do not give rise to a similar degree of uncertainty and risks compared to immobile markets. Hence, programmes are implemented without large-scale unrest. The study tests this theory in a global sample of 117 countries between 1970 and 2013 and investigates the impact of mobility and IMF conditionality on unrest with a data set originally compiled and coded for this study. It then delves into two extreme cases, Greece, 2010 and Turkey, 2001. While Greece had extreme immobility and received intrusive labour and fiscal conditionality in 2010, Turkey is located on the opposite end of the spectrum, with very high levels of mobility, the limited number of labour conditions, and greater fiscal space. We see that while Greece witnessed large-scale unrest in 2010, Turkey implemented the programme smoothly. Finally, the study applies the theory into three shadow cases, Ireland, 2010, Latvia, 2008, and Portugal, 2011 and demonstrates that the varied degrees of mobility and conditionality and fiscal conditionality result in different degrees of unrest.

British politics at the start of the 21st century provide a good setting for examining factors associated with mobilisation for extremist politics. This thesis is concerned with the relationship between individuals' preferences, their local setting and political behaviour. With focus on two outcomes - participation in urban rioting and support for a far right party - this thesis is divided into two parts and consists of five research papers addressing different aspects of mobilisation. In the first part we focus on urban disorder and examine police arrest records from the London riot of 2011. Much of the sociological literature has focused on variation in rioting across cities; here we examine variation within London by mapping the residential addresses of 1,620 rioters onto over 25,000 neighbourhoods. Our findings challenge the orthodoxy that rioting is not explained by deprivation or by disorganisation. Furthermore, we present evidence suggesting the importance of political grievances, in particular relations with the police, and examine the process of mobilisation to show that it was aided by spatial proximity and social similarity. In the second part we look at factors associated with engagement with far right politics. We use individual attitudinal data from the British Election Study to examine whether concerns over immigration are associated with the actual experience of immigration in one's place of residence. The results suggest that local setting does play some role, although individual factors seem to be more important. Secondly, we use leaked British National Party membership list to map 12,536 far right supporters onto over 200,000 neighbourhoods in Britain. Our findings underline the importance of a larger geographic context, where some spatial configurations present particularly fertile grounds for the far right; we also report the relative unimportance of cultural threat and significance of the social distance. Lastly, we question the recently advocated 'legacy effect' and suggest that white flight mechanism may possibly be an alternative way of thinking about organisational continuity.

abstract: Michael Apple's scholarship on curriculum, educational ideology, and official knowledge continues to be influential to the study of schooling. Drawing on the sociological insights of Pierre Bourdieu and the cultural studies approaches of Raymond Williams, Apple articulates a theory of schooling that pays particular attention to how official knowledge is incorporated into the processes of schooling, including textbooks. In an effort to contribute to Apple's scholarship on textbooks, this study analyzed high school American history textbooks from the 1960s through the 2000s with specific attention to the urban riots of the late-1960s, sixties counterculture, and the women's movement utilizing Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concept of abjection to augment Apple's theory of knowledge incorporation. This combination reveals not only how select knowledge is incorporated as official knowledge, but also how knowledge is treated as abject, as unfit for the curricular body of official knowledge and the selective tradition of American history. To bridge the theoretical frameworks of incorporation and abjection Raymond Williams' theory of structures of feeling and Slavoj iek's theory of ideological quilting are employed to show how feelings and emotional investments maintain ideologies. The theoretical framework developed and the interpretive analyses undertaken demonstrate how textbook depictions of these historical events structure students' present educational experiences with race, class, and gender. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2011

Urban riots have increased in the global-north in recent years. Previous research on riots identify causes and triggers, but also where they are more likely to happen. Rioters, residents and the police are commonly studied. Housing companies and related stakeholders with a long-term interest in the local environment are under-studied in relation to riots, but also the long-term effects. This thesis aims to contribute to an increased understanding of the long-term effects of riots. In doing so, literature on riots, neoliberalisation and Jacques Rancière’s understanding of politics synthesise the theoretical framework. The thesis is based on a case-study of the Stockholm 2013 riots including participatory observations and interviews of housing companies and other ‘long-term’ actors. Some established practices on ‘safety measures’ in public spaces have intensified, and to some degree extended, since the Stockholm riots. Simultaneously, safety as an overall objective frames most practices by the participants, and tend to be viewed as consensus. The participants, however, rarely recognise their own role in relation to the riots, in which it is concluded that urban riots are to be expected in the future unless they start recognising their own role in shaping the environment that they are trying to overcome.

This paper seeks to continue the research started by scholars such as W. Liebeschuetz and P. Bell in order to challenge the traditional argument put forth by Al. Cameron, namely that the circus factions did not have a political role in society. The objective of this study is to examine the political importance of the circus factions from the reign of Anastasius (491-518) to Heraclius (610-641). Furthermore, it explores the political motivations behind the factions’ violent behaviour, the evidence for their involvement in the military, and their role in accession ceremonies. The methodology includes establishing a typology for sixth century riots, an examination of the hippodrome and its role as a medium between people and emperor, tracing the shift in the focus of imperial ideology, and a re-evaluation of the primary sources, with a focus on the literary and epigraphic evidence, to determine if there was a political aspect to the factions. The study concludes that Cameron did undervalue the factions’ political importance and outlines the conditions that were influential in their rise in importance.

Recent decades have seen a shift in the focus of civil rights historiography. Building upon the exhaustive studies of national figures and events, and in search of new perspectives, many historians have concentrated on local movements often ignored or forgotten. Other than the work of a few local scholars, the civil rights movement as it occurred in St. Petersburg, Florida, has received little attention. Furthermore, the limited scholarship lacks the cohesion necessary to compare and contrast the movement with similar events throughout the state and across the nation. The story of St. Petersburg's active and significant struggle for social equality, placed within its proper context, adds another piece to a larger picture and continues to reveal the complex nature of the American Civil Rights Movement.

How do riots affect civil conflict? The effects of riots on escalation and civil conflict have largely been overlooked in the peace and conflict literature. I argue that this omission is of particular significance because riots could act as a potent escalatory proxy for a government authority and legitimacy crisis, a robustly supported cause of escalation and civil conflict. Drawing on civil conflict theories concerning motivation, feasibility, and contentious politics, the hypothesis as riots increase, the intensity of state-based organized violence increases was developed. To test this hypothesis, a zero-inflated negative binomial regression analysis was conducted on 14728 country-month observations from African countries between 1997 and 2020, using riot events and state-based organized violence fatality data and theoretically and empirically motivated controls. Notwithstanding certain research design limitations, the regression analysis and the complementary tests and investigation strategies yielded findings that support the hypothesis and the supposition that riots tend to affect civil conflict by increasing the intensity of state-based organized violence. The novelty of the findings opens up avenues for future research and sheds light on the value of studying lower-level societal violence and minor-scale escalatory dynamics to enhance our collective understanding of civil conflicts.