While the origin of the Arab Spring is well documented in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, the role of press photography in presenting these conflicts is not. Images taken during a conflict often follow a particular narrative that comes to define how we remember a conflict. Considering that Syria is composed of a heterogeneous, ethno-religious mix located at the center of intense regional and international rivalries, understanding the cause of the uprising and the trajectory of the conflict require a careful study of the socio-political history of Syria as well as her regional and international relations. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how photographs taken of the Syrian Civil War that earned critical acclaim from photographic institutions mythologize the war. Semiotics provides a template for the interpretation of images that may be related to the underlying cultural forces shaping the conflict. Myth provides the forms in the presentation of archetypes in the images that we are able to readily identify so rendering the images relevant and recognizable to the viewer. The mythologizing of images of war has been used since Frank Capa created an “aesthetic ideal” during the Spanish Civil War and been re-appropriated during subsequent conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries especially the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003. This study uses a semiotic and mythological approach to analyze the winning photographs as selected by the National Press Photographers Association, World Press Photographers Association and Pulitzer Prize awarded during the course of the Syrian conflict. The myths of the “victim” and “underdog” were the two most commonly applied myths to the civilians and the Syrian rebels, who were portrayed as the “lovable losers” in the conflict. These narratives differ from previous depictions of the two previous Gulf Wars in their empathetic depiction of the civilian population and of the rebels. If maintaining the status quo is one of the enduring functions of myth then the underdog myth perpetuates voyeuristic participation in the conflict without requiring the discomfort of the removal of the Assad regime.

The case of Syria presents an example of a regime performing authoritarian norms of peacebuilding that is indicative of new forms of geographical power implementing alternative models of post-conflict order. Bashar al-Assad utilises authoritarian conflict management to intensify its strategy of binary othering on which to exercise sectarian- infused practices of discrimination and violence to consolidate its power and subsequent legitimacy. The process of authoritarian upgrading left the Assad regime with vulnerabilities that were exploited during the uprising in 2011. Unable to control the protests, Assad intensified authoritarian and illiberal practices as a means to manage the civil war that emerged. Through discursive, spatial and economic practices, Assad was able to retain his seat of power. For example, drawing upon sectarianism as a tool of control, Assad put into place a process of binary othering that classifies citizens as loyal or disloyal. Citizens deemed disloyal are punished through a variety of measures. The authoritarian practices have led to dire conditions for the Syrian people, and are becoming entrenched into very structure of society through the process of reconstruction. However, liberal forms of peacebuilding lack the leverage to counter these practices. Keywords Syria;...

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Local Self-Defence Militias as Counterinsurgents The Possibility, Willingness and Rationality of Selective Violence against Insurgents Autor: Jakob J. Gilg Submitted: 31.07.2019 Abstract How do local self-defence militias (LSDMs) influence violence against civilians in civil conflicts? Compared to other types of pro-government militias (PGMs), LSDMs are active in their home area. This results in abundant local information that can be used to identify and target insurgents and their supporters selectively. Furthermore, LSDMs are part of the local community, resulting in strong social ties, making indiscriminate violence against the community less likely. Finally, since LSDMs are dependent on popular support and cannot move on to a new area after violent acts, they are incentivised to retain local support by abstaining from civilian targeting. Therefore, I hypothesise that LSDMs are more likely to employ selective violence, and that their deployment decreases civilian fatalities in civil conflicts. To empirically test this claim in a global sample, I use 1) a logistic regression to assess the likelihood of selective violence of PGMs (H1), and 2) a negative binomial regression to evaluate the expected number of civilians killed by the government (H2). The results for the first hypothesis suggest an increased...

My dissertation examines the families of Civil War African American soldiers in the nineteenth and twentieth-century. The project applies gender and sociological methodologies to case studies of Northern African American soldiers to explore how African American families used military service to reframe societal debates of gender. Using these methodologies, I have uncovered the contested debates of what gender meant, not only for Northern African Americans but also for whites. By supporting black military service, African American family members attempted to have their gender recognized equal to whites, instead of as inferior. Numerous advocates of enlistment championed military service as the vehicle to have white society recognize black humanity and citizenship claims. But enlistment idealism and the hardships of service ignored the material realities of working-class Northern black families. Military service caused financial instability to numerous working-class Northern black families as their male kin sacrificed their lives in the Civil war.

This thesis addresses the importance of the American Civil War to nineteenth-century European military education, and its influence on British staff officer training prior to World War I. It focuses on Garnet Wolseley, a Civil War observer who eventually became Commander in Chief of the Forces of the British Army. In that position, he continued to write about the war he had observed a quarter-century earlier, and was instrumental in according the Civil War a key role in officer training. Indeed, he placed Stonewall Jackson historian G.F.R. Henderson in a key military professorship. The thesis examines Wolseley’s career and writings, as well as the extent to which the Civil War was studied at the Senior Staff College, in Camberly, after Wolseley’s influence had waned. Analysis of the curriculum from the College archives demonstrates that study of the Civil War diminished rapidly in the ten years prior to World War I.

"Sisson's Kingdom" uses a community study paradigm to offer an interpretation of the Confederate homefront collapse of Floyd County, Virginia. The study focuses primarily on residents' conflicting loyalty choices during the war, and attempts to explain the myriad of ways that their discord operated to remove Floyd County as a positive portion of the Confederate homefront. The study separates the "active Confederate disloyalty" of Floyd County's Unionist inhabitants from the "passive Confederate disloyalty" of relatives or friends of local Confederate deserters. It then explores the conflicting loyalties of the county's pro-Confederates, Unionists, and passive disloyalists, seeking to understand better the wide variety of loyalty choices available to residents as well as the consequences of their choices. To determine some of the significant factors contributing to the Floyd County community's response to the Confederacy and Civil War, this thesis documents the various ways residents' reactions took shape. Chapter One examines the roots of these decisions, exploring briefly Floyd County's entrance into Virginia's market economy during the 1850s and its residents' conflicting choices during Virginia's secession crisis. In the aftermath of secession, many Floyd residents embraced their new Confederate government and enlisted by the hundreds in its military units. The decision by some county soldiers to desert their units and return to Floyd caused loyalty conflicts between their supporters and the county's pro-Confederates. This conflict, and the effects of deserters living in the Floyd community, are both explored in Chapter Two. Floyd's Unionist population and its loyal Confederate residents clashed violently throughout much of the war, hastening the disintegration of the Floyd homefront. Their discord is examined in Chapter Three. / Master of Arts

A FAREWELL TO ARMS: NON-MILITARISATION AND THE PARADOX OF MILITARY INSECURITY Nathan James Frank Williams Abstract A small number of scholars and political leaders have praised the economic and social benefits of 'non-militarisation' - the policy of possessing no national armed forces. While 26 states currently practice this policy, the security implications of non-militarisation have, until now, largely escaped critical assessment. However, it is this very question of security in the absence of a military which is perhaps the decisive issue for any state considering non- militarisation. Barbey's (2015b) study suggests that, since World War II, non-militarised states have been immune to interstate war. However, since World War II, intrastate war has proven to be both the more frequent and destructive form of warfare. Using a mixed-methods approach this dissertation seeks to quantify and explain the causal effect of non-militarisation on intrastate conflict. It begins by testing the hypothesis that non-militarised states suffer less years of intrastate war than states with a military, using cross-sectional logit analysis on all country-years between 1989-2008. It consistently finds a sizable negative relationship, suggesting that in a given year the probability of intrastate war occurring in a...

It is striking that many white southerners enthusiastically went to war in 1861, and that within four years a large number of them became apathetic or even openly hostile toward the Confederacy. By far, nonslaveholders composed the greatest portion of the disaffected. This work interprets the Confederate war experience within a republican framework in order to better understand how such a drastic shift in opinion could take place. Southern men fought for highly personal reasons--to protect their own liberty, independence, and to defend the rough equality between white men. They believed the Confederacy was the best guarantor of these ideals. Southerners' experiences differed widely from their expectations. White men perceived the war as an assault against their dominance and equality. The military was no protector of individual rights. The army expected recruits to conform to military discipline and standards. Officers oversaw their men's behavior and physically punished those who broke the rules. Southerners believed they were treated in a servile manner. Legislation from Richmond brought latent class tensions to the surface, making it clear to nonslaveholders that they were not the planters' equals. Wives, left alone to care for their families, found it difficult to live in straitened times. Increasingly, women challenged the patriarchal order by stepped outside of traditional gender roles to care for their families. Wartime changes left many men feeling confused and emasculated. Southerners, who willingly fought the Yankees to defend their freedoms, turned against the Confederacy when it encroached upon their independence. Many withdrew their support from the war. Some hid crops from impressment agents or refused to enlist, while others actually or symbolically attacked the planter elite or deserted. / Master of Arts

My dissertation examines the intersections of romance, religion, and politics in England between 1588 and 1688, reading across the divide between centuries to enable a fuller understanding of romance during the English Civil War and its aftermath. In the decades that witnessed Charles I's fall and his son's restoration, royalists and republicans alike found solace, and grounds for resistance, in romance's formal promise that suffering and disappointment would yield to the restoration of a story's true champions. Although historicist efforts to contextualize seventeenth-century romance have productively complicated the structuralist view of it as a basic archetype, such studies are fraught with their own simplifications: romance is often depicted as a continental trend briefly embraced by midcentury royalists, especially women. While a few scholars have noted the artificiality of some of these limits, we have yet to come to terms with seventeenth-century romance's long English tradition, its ability to penetrate other genres, and its hold over male and female writers and readers of diverse ideologies. To this end, my project traces two interwoven threads. First, I argue that the potent subjectivity offered by romance correlated with the widespread Protestant belief in divine election, inviting seventeenth-century subjects to locate themselves and their allies within a providentially protected community. Far from being a royalist fad, romance became a battleground between royalists and Puritan republicans: both sides denigrated their enemies' manipulation of the genre while tacitly or openly reclaiming it for themselves. Second, I consider how writers of romance contended with recurring problems of form, genre, and gender: due to the length of romantic plot and the related issue of multiple subjectivities, they found innovative ways to represent the friction between providential romance and national or personal tragedy, as well as the tension between gendered narrative perspectives. As England struggled to recuperate from its civil conflicts, writers also turned to romance not merely to represent elect community, but to reconstruct it, thinking critically about whether the genre might breach and repair the very perspectival divides in politics, religion, gender, and identity that it had been so instrumental in maintaining.