Does political power sharing foster or inhibit democratisation in post-civil war states? Previous research dedicated to the study of power sharing and democratisation has been limited to the early post-conflict period and used minimalistic definitions of democracy. This thesis uses a wider definition of democracy and hypothesise that the empowerment of elite actors from relevant communities would strengthen democratisation in the short-term, as these groups would gain a patron that could protect their democratic liberties. Meanwhile, a digression was expected in the longer term as power sharing would equip these elite patrons to avoid accountability and suppress opposition. Democracy score changes were analysed using an OLS regression on 127 cases of civil war settlement between 1945-2006. Findings suggest that political power sharing promotes democratisation in the short term. Moreover, no negative long-term effects were found. Practitioners should therefore host no hesitations against introducing political power sharing when resolving conflicts. The absence of negative long-term effects could be attributed to criticisms not recognising the different setups that power-sharing institutions can take which promote accountability. Possibly, there are also other mechanisms which facilitates interaction between elite actors and their communities at play, counterbalancing the negative effects that power sharing would otherwise entail.

A Guerra Civil Espanhola não foi somente um confronto bélico, mas também, uma guerra marcada pelas questões sociais, políticas e ideológicas que estavam em ebulição no país, envolvendo operários, camponeses, personalidades políticas e artísticas, bem como intelectuais, que combatiam e defendiam seus ideais por meio de manifestações artísticas. Porém, mesmo com a imposição do exílio para estes escritores, poetas e pensadores, a resistência prosseguia por meio de autobiografias, antologias ou romances com a proposta de refletir os acontecimentos daqueles dias com um olhar distinto daquele imposto por Francisco Franco durante sua Ditadura. Um dos cenários recriados para a reflexão dos resultados desta guerra de confrontos já citados é Juego limpio, escrito durante o exílio de María Teresa León. No romance, Camilo rememora as experiências vividas durante sua atuação no grupo Guerrillas del Teatro del Ejército del Centro durante o conflito civil e sua relação amorosa com Angelines, atriz da companhia. De dentro de sua cela, Camilo refugia-se em suas memórias de modo a refletir seu presente mediante seu passado, estabelecendo a tensão entre o vivido (passado) e o narrado (presente), porém não o faz só, ele evoca os participantes do grupo de cômicos, para que junto com ele, a história das Guerrilhas seja contada. A estrutura polifônica das memórias de Camilo proporciona ao leitor construir a história por diversos ângulos, revelando tal qual uma caixa chinesa os acontecimentos explorados no romance, em que cada caixa é a representação da voz de uma personagem. María Teresa León encontra nessa estrutura polifônica o espaço para opor o discurso daqueles que vivenciaram a guerra ao discurso monocórdio da autoridade e, assim, o modo como se constrói a narrativa justifica a argumentação da obra em que há uma clara defesa da arte pluralizada defendida pelos republicanos espanhóis. / The Spanish Civil War was not only a war in martial terms, but was also marked by social, political and ideological disputes that were urgent in the country at the time. Such issues moved workers, peasants, politicians and artists, as well as intellectuals who fought for their ideals through art. Even though writers, poets and thinkers were punished with exile, the resistance held strong in memoirs, anthologies or novels that brought up new considerations about its contemporary events, with different visions from that of Francisco Franco\'s regime. One of the works that proposed a vigorous discussion about this war was Juego limpio, written by María Teresa León during exile. In the novel, Camilo remembers his experiences while working with the group Guerrillas del Teatro del Ejército del Centro, during the civil war, and his love affair with Angelines, one of its actresses. In his prison cell, Camilo takes shelter in his memories to make conclusions about his present. There is a conflict between what he lived (past) e what he reports (present). He doesn\'t do it alone, though, but invites comic actors from the group to tell the story of the Guerrillas with him. This polyphonic structure of Camilo\'s memoir enables the reader to know the story from different points of view, such as a Chinese box in which each box represents the voice of one character. María Teresa León finds in this polyphonic structure a way to confront the voice of those who lived the war with that of the authorities, which is monophonic. The way she chooses to tell the story reinforces her defense of the plural art in which the Spanish republicans believed.

Thesis advisor: Stephen J. Pope / Transitional justice responds to injustices and violations of human rights following a period of repressive rule or civil war. This dissertation argues that the needs of post-conflict societies are best served by local, participatory approaches to transitional justice. In the case of Guatemala, it was essential for the nation to embrace its common religious narrative as a resource for rebuilding the republic. The Guatemalan Catholic Church worked to build peace out of the ashes of state sponsored terror. It demonstrated the prophetic role of the Church by offering a collective voice condemning those in positions of authority for their neglect of the basic human rights of the majority of Guatemalans. The CEG also highlighted the reconciliatory function of the Church by promoting forgiveness and reconciliation within the public square. This experience calls for theological ethical reflection on how the Catholic Church could best serve the needs of civil society in the wake of nearly forty years of political violence. Responding to the need for critical theological reflection, this dissertation proposes a transformationalist understanding of the relation of love to justice for transitional justice. It draws its inspiration from a selective reading of Augustine and Augustinian scholarship. An Augustinian approach to transitional justice brings together the high moral ideas of love, justice, forgiveness, and peace while at the same time acknowledging the ever-present reality of sin and human weakness. It attempts to transform a post-conflict society into a moral community whose citizens are on a journey toward the destination of temporal peace. It realizes that we may never reach our destination of temporal peace, but we can glimpse it from afar. This dissertation offers the following ten Augustinian insights as a framework for a theological approach to transitional justice. 1) Charity is the motivating force for transitional justice and the pursuit of socio-political reconciliation; 2) Charity transforms our understanding of justice from noninterference and retribution to rehabilitating and reconciling; 3) Transitional justice ought to be contextual, paying attention to the unique concerns of a given post-conflict society; 4) Distinguishing, without bifurcating, the ends of the temporal and celestial commonwealths offers a positive, but not naïve, evaluation of the Church’s potential to be an instrument of social transformation; 5) Post-conflict societies need to foster conditions that allow for pluralism and social cohesion through civic friendship; 6) Post-conflict societies must develop social practices to train citizens in the civic virtues of love, justice, and friendship; 7) Transitional justice requires an ethical retrieval of the truth through the healing of memory; 8) Transitional justice upholds the moral obligation to admonish and correct sinful social behavior; 9) Transitional justice ought to foster the just and prudential protection of society through the use of coercive force on behalf of society’s most vulnerable citizens; and 10) Post-conflict societies need to cultivate and sustain an ethos of active hope that, far from inducing political passivity, promotes civic engagement. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Thesis advisor: James Cronin / This paper examines the esoteric and essentially negativist character of international reaction to the Spanish Civil War. While the mass of the foreign public, (specifically in the United States, Britain, and Ireland), remained apathetic, several interest groups became deeply involved in the conflict. Analysis of the reasons why each group became interested, the methods they used to win supporters, and the effectiveness of those methods in shaping the historical legacy of the war constitutes the bulk of the paper. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party in Britain and the United States. The inquiry concludes with an analysis of the historical trends which have erased the Spanish Civil War from the popular consciousness even while it remains vital to specific political constituencies. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2004. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Thesis advisor: Seth Jacobs / The most decisive campaign of the American Civil War was waged in neither Virginia, nor Pennsylvania, nor along the Mississippi River, but rather in Great Britain. Northern military advantages in the prosecution of the war effort could have been completely negated by a serious diplomatic setback in Great Britain. In order to win the Civil War, the North had to prevent Great Britain from entering the conflict. British intervention (which would have also included France), whether in the form of actually entering the war on the side of the South, official recognition of the Confederacy, foreign mediation, or a call for an armistice followed by peace negotiations, would have been a diplomatic disaster for the North and a fatal blow in its attempt to re-unify the nation. Military setbacks on the battlefield were not nearly as threatening as diplomatic setbacks abroad. The North had greater manpower, a stronger and more balanced economy, an industrial infrastructure, and a better equipped army; yet, in order for these advantages to translate into military victory at home, the North first needed to ensure that the domestic conflict did not spread to an international war. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2003. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Esta tese volta-se para o exame de como a guerra civil angolana (1975-2002), já implicada durante a guerra de libertação contra o colonialismo português, imprimiu os termos a partir dos quais a construção de um estado nacional unívoco pôde ser concebido. Em diálogo com trabalhos que abordam a questão das formações nacionais como agenciamento entre diferenças, colocam-se como foco de análise as diversas narrativas sobre o conflito. A oposição entre MPLA e UNITA em Angola produziu duas formas opostas de universalização e de agenciamento de diferenças, formas estas, no entanto, igualmente direcionadas à representação de uma identidade nacional coesa. Diferentes categorias de diferenciação como etnia, oposição campo-cidade, raça e reivindicações ideológicas foram mobilizadas por cada lado de formas distintas em diferentes momentos do conflito, tanto na forma de autorrepresentações quanto na forma de contraposições via acusações. Categorias de diferenciação foram sendo produzidas no transcurso do conflito à medida que as estratégias dos atores iam informando suas agendas políticas. Nesse processo, os oponentes moldaram suas irreconciliações um em relação ao outro. Essa rede de narrativas conflitantes é mapeada de modo a compreender, ao mesmo tempo, sua transformação no que diz respeito ao modo de configurar as diferenças e sua contribuição para a formação da imaginação nacional angolana. A análise atenta para as inflexões operadas nos regimes discursivos em torno das principais questões que compuseram os diferentes momentos do conflito. / This dissertation analyzes how the Angolan civil war (1975-2002), already implied during the liberation war against Portuguese colonialism, set the terms based on which the construction of a univocal nation state could be conceived. In dialogue with the literature that approaches the issue of national formation as the handling of differences, this work assesses the different narratives on the conflict. The opposition between the MPLA and UNITA in Angola produced two different, opposed forms of universalizing and handling differences, which were nonetheless equally directed towards the representation of a cohesive national identity. At different moments during the conflict, each side resorted to different categories of differentiation such as ethnicity, the rural-urban divide, race, and ideological claims, in the form of both self-representation and contraposition through accusation. Categories of differentiation were produced throughout the conflict as the actors strategies informed their political agendas. In this process, the rivals molded their irreconciliations in relation to one another. This network of conflicting narratives is mapped out in order to understand both its transformation regarding how differences were configured and its contribution to the formation of an Angolan national imagination. The analysis focuses on the turning points of the discursive regimes concerning the main issues that made up the different moments of the conflict.

This thesis consists of a close reading of the representation of the Spanish Civil War in selected novels of Juan Marse (1933-) and Claude Simon (1913-). It explores how this representation, ultimately, reveals the traces of their different intellectual contexts. The initial comparison questions whether Marse's representation of the Spanish revolution in Barcelona implies, like Simon's account, a negative representation of the concept of political engagement and a similar historical pessimism. It goes on to discuss how this negative view is shaped by the writers' respective historical contexts and aesthetics. Secondly, since, to varying degrees, the novels studied make the reader critically aware of processes of narrativisation and representation, and of issues of narrative reliability and authority, the thesis explores the extent to which their representations of the Civil War are 'anti-realist'. In order to do so, it initially locates the question of 'realism' or 'anti-realism' in the texts within a wider theoretical framework: that of the critique of realism within poststructuralist French theory after Barthes. The latter debate over referentiality in literary realism also underpins ongoing critical debates over the status of history as a text. This thesis, thirdly, considers whether both writers' representations of the Civil War and of historical processes suggest a particular attitude towards the writing of history, namely whether and to what extent Simon's and Marse's representations of the war problematize the relationship between their historical referent - the events of the war and/or its aftermath - and its narration and interpretation. In particular, it asks whether Marse's texts involve the kind of rejection of progressive historical 'meta-narratives' which is implicit and explicit in Simon's representation of the Civil War, but also whether Simon's texts do, in fact, not simply undermine this model of historical causality but posit an alternative, anti-progressive historical telos.

This thesis places the Democratic party at the centre of the Reconstruction narrative and investigates the transformation of the antebellum Democracy into its postbellum form. In doing so, it addresses the relative scarcity of scholarship on the postwar Democrats, and provides an original contribution to knowledge by (a) explaining how the party survived the Civil War and (b) providing a comprehensive analysis of an extended process of internal conflict over the Democracy's future. This research concludes that while the Civil War caused a crisis in partisanship that lasted until the mid-1870s, it was Democrats' underlying devotion to their party, and flexibility over party principle that allowed the Democracy to survive and reestablish itself as a strong national party. Rather than extensively investigating state-level or grassroots politics, this thesis focuses on the party's national leadership. It finds that public memories of the party's wartime course constituted the most significant barrier to rebuilding the Democratic national coalition. Following an overview of the fractures exposed by civil war, the extent of these splits is assessed through an investigation of sectional reconciliation during Presidential and Radical Reconstruction. The analysis then shifts to explore competing visions of the party's future during the late 1860s and early 1870s when public confidence in the Democracy hit its lowest point. While the early years of Reconstruction opened the party to the possibility of disintegration, by the mid-1870s Democrats had begun to adopt a stronger national party organisation. Through a coherent national strategy that turned national politics away from issues of race and loyalty and towards those of economic development and political reform, while simultaneously appealing to the party's history, national Democratic leaders restored public confidence in the Democracy, silenced advocates of the creation of a new national party, and propelled the party back to power in 1884.

This dissertation shows that during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) diverse Cubans organized to support the Spanish Second Republic, overcoming differences to coalesce around a movement they defined as antifascism. Hundreds of Cuban volunteers--more than from any other Latin American country--traveled to Spain to fight for the Republic in both the International Brigades and the regular Republican forces, to provide medical care, and to serve in other support roles; children, women, and men back home worked together to raise substantial monetary and material aid for Spanish children during the war; and longstanding groups on the island including black associations, Freemasons, anarchists, and the Communist Party leveraged organizational and publishing resources to raise awareness, garner support, fund, and otherwise assist the cause. The dissertation studies Cuban antifascist individuals, campaigns, organizations, and networks operating transnationally to help the Spanish Republic, contextualizing these efforts in Cuba's internal struggles of the 1930s. It argues that both transnational solidarity and domestic concerns defined Cuban antifascism. First, Cubans confronting crises of democracy at home and in Spain believed fascism threatened them directly. Citing examples in Ethiopia, China, Europe, and Latin America, Cuban antifascists--like many others--feared a worldwide menace posed by fascism's spread. Second, despite their recent anticolonial struggle against Spain, Cubans cared deeply about its fate for reasons of personal, familial, and cultural affinity. They interpreted the Republic as a "new" Spain representative of liberation and the Nationalists as seeking return to the "old" Spain of colonial oppression. Third, pro-Republican Cubans defined antifascism in Cuban terms. People of many different backgrounds and views united around a definition of antifascism closely related to their shared domestic political goals: freedom from strongman governance, independence from neocolonial control, and attainment of economic and social justice. Radical, moderate, and even largely nonpolitical individuals and groups in Cuba found in antifascism and support for the Spanish Republic a rallying cry with broad appeal that allowed them to strengthen solidarity at home and abroad. Cubans defined antifascism in both negative and positive terms, as a movement against fascism but also toward unity, democracy, sovereignty, and justice.

This dissertation brings together the history of law in postcolonial Nigeria with the history of the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970), analyzing how wartime violence shaped crime and the ethics surrounding it. Using legal records from the Republic of Biafra’s courts, I examine how the secessionist state was governed, and how armed robbery and other criminal activities became means of survival there in the context of the fighting. These cases reveal how Biafrans and their government negotiated what kinds of survival tactics, many of them “criminal,” were permissible or ethical in the context of the war and the humanitarian crisis attending it. Biafra’s courts also became a space where individuals could assert themselves as moral actors in the face of political ataxia and enormous humanitarian strain. The war shaped Nigeria’s postcolonial experience profoundly. As in many conflicts, acts of violence and deception became ordinary – in some cases honorable – when surviving and winning the war trumped all other considerations. When the fighting ended in January 1970, the practices that Biafrans had used to endure the war did not end with it. In the years that followed, fraud and armed violence would become major features of life in reunified Nigeria. Biafra had declared independence in the name of preserving law and order, but the result of the war was to create conditions in which forms of illegality that would later become endemic – forgery, armed robbery, and the body of fraudulent activities known as “419” – could take root. For this reason, the Biafra War is an important episode in both the history of Nigeria after independence, and for the larger study of the dialectics of law and disorder in contemporary Africa.