This study examines the severe conditions under which local media workers produce reports for global media outlets in conditions of war and the ways in which they cope with and respond to these challenges. I take as my case study, the diminution of the Pashtun journalist into a “fixer” for global media in the U.S.-led, so-called War on Terror (WoT). Based on my experience as a journalist as well as interviews with local Pashtun journalists, I disclose a situation in which the local journalist is compelled to risk his very life to gather news; news, which further exposes him to threats to life from the two warring sides. Precarity, in this scenario, is a fact of life, which carried serious consequences, not just for the journalist and his community, but also for what is passed off as news in global media.

Thesis advisor: Timothy Crawford / This thesis focuses on United States civil-military relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century. It examines interactions between principal-level civilian and top-tier military leadership during three strategic decision-making moments. Each case involves examples of subjective civilian control. The author's goal is to investigate and then categorize the processes that were used, assessing how variables influenced the nature of subjective control. Qualitative process tracing is the primary methodology. The author focuses on available sources from myriad avenues including but not limited to journalism, memoirs, primary documents, and social science literature. Case study analysis identifies numerous variables. Presidential leadership and process organization were found to be the most influential, spanning from engaged to "delegatory" and orderly to ad-hoc, respectively. Correlations are identified between the variables. Then, theories from established literature are reviewed and applied when possible. Research finds that subjective civil-military relations became increasingly moderate and theoretically "pure" over each case, chronologically. The author uses his analysis to create new typologies of subjective civil-military control, focusing on the relationships between presidential leadership and process organization. The resulting typologies are intended to assist political scientists' identification and categorization of varying civil-military relationships on the subjective end of Huntington's spectrum. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

Thesis advisor: Shep Melnick / Most of the literature on the separation of powers in the war on terror vastly overstates the power of the presidency and pays little attention to the respective roles of Congress, the courts, and the bureaucracy in prosecuting that conflict. Scholars – especially those in the legal academy – have consistently failed to appreciate the ways in which the president has been, and continues to be, checked and constrained by a variety of forces. In my dissertation, I engage in highly detailed case studies of U.S. law and policy with respect to detention and military commissions in the war on terror. I pay special attention to the complex interactions that occurred within and between our governing institutions in these policy areas. There are two central arguments that come out of my research and run through my case studies. First, the political scientist Robert Kagan’s work on “adversarial legalism” is no longer simply applicable to the domestic policy realm. The proliferation of legal rules and extensive litigation has increasingly come to characterize foreign affairs as well, with important consequences for how the U.S. implements its national security policies and fights its armed conflicts. In short, adversarial legalism has gone to war. Second, loose talk about the “unitary” nature of the executive branch is misleading. The executive branch is a sprawling bureaucracy made up of diverse actors with different perspectives, preferences, and norms, and that bureaucracy has interacted with Congress and the courts in surprising ways to constrain the presidency in the war on terror. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the performances of gender that permeated the justifications for Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan, focusing on the representational practices that dominated the Bush administration's narratives of rescue and circumscribed our understanding of the actors involved. In particular, I will argue that the image of Afghan women as the helpless victim of Taliban oppression not only allowed the United States and its coalition allies to cast themselves as heroic masculine warriors but also helped to reinforce the idea that Afghan women were little more than mere symbols of helplessness, placing them in a position of absolute inferiority and dependency. Crucially, I will claim that this image of Afghan women as the passive prisoners of the Taliban was contingent upon the suppression of a series of alternative perspectives that could not be accommodated within the parameters established by the prevailing frames of war. On the one hand, I argue that the dominant representations of Afghan women tended to show them in decidedly monolithic and one-dimensional terms, with the Bush administration and its coalition allies defining them almost entirely by the suffering they experienced. Absent from these accounts, however, was any mention of women's resistance to Taliban rule or their criticisms of the military intervention. On the other hand, I will show how the international community relied upon a particular historical narrative that allowed them to present Afghanistan as a barbaric aberration in the modern world whilst allowing them to dismiss the period of Taliban rule as a terrifying oddity in the country's history, destroying many of the freedoms that were said to exist under previous regimes. As well as ignoring the myriad of interactions between Afghanistan and the outside world and the complex social, economic and political forces that helped to precipitate the rise of the Taliban, I will argue that this historical narrative reinforced the idea that the lives of Afghan women were in a state of suspense during this period, their very existence as human beings held in abeyance until coalition troops could intervene to redeem them. What distinguishes my argument from the work of other feminists is my attention to the way in which these representational practices are contingent upon an uneasy process of repetition and reiteration, leaving them vulnerable to the possibility for subversion and resignification. Drawing on Judith Butler's work on performativity, normative violence and the politics of intelligibility along with Gayatri C. Spivak's work on the subaltern subject, I show how the activities of organisations such as the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and the voices of individuals such as Malalai Joya help to expose the limits of the dominant norms of intelligibility, opening up the possibility for a less violent and less exclusionary re-imagining.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation explores the inextricable relationship of the ordinary and extraordinary which characterizes the lives of U.S. soldiers severely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan and rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. in 2007-2008. Living among their fellows and families at Walter Reed, the precariousness which marks injured soldiers’ bodies and lives takes on a feeling of ordinariness. And though these injured soldiers and their families do not quite coalesce into a community, their shared experience of being in common with each other—of sharing Walter Reed’s particular and precarious ordinary—helps make life there bearable. Through a poetics of the extra/ordinary I explore how injured soldiers’ ordinariness bristles against inescapable invocations of patriotic sacrifice; the ways soldiers’ everyday movements are marked by being post-traumatic; and the reconfigurations of intimate social relations and masculinity such experiences occasion and out of which the possibilities and limits of a future life emerge. I show that in this moment of life—one which unfolds in a space saturated with narratives of heroic patriotic sacrifice and histories of war and the remaking of men—ordinariness becomes central to injured soldiers’ current experiences and also to the future selves and social configurations they are oriented towards. I demonstrate how injured soldiers’ lives are also always attached to something that exceeds the ordinary; that they are extra/ordinary. But I argue that such extra/ordinariness is an amplification of life’s less notable uncertainties; that all lives are extra/ordinary. Against the over-determining frames of heroism and trauma within which U.S. soldiers are figured, especially in post-9/11 America, I argue that injured U.S. soldiers’ experiences are neither simply knowable, nor unimaginable but recognizable as specifically tethered to, commensurable with, and distinguished from, more ‘ordinary’ others.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation explores the inextricable relationship of the ordinary and extraordinary which characterizes the lives of U.S. soldiers severely injured in Iraq and Afghanistan and rehabilitating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. in 2007-2008. Living among their fellows and families at Walter Reed, the precariousness which marks injured soldiers’ bodies and lives takes on a feeling of ordinariness. And though these injured soldiers and their families do not quite coalesce into a community, their shared experience of being in common with each other—of sharing Walter Reed’s particular and precarious ordinary—helps make life there bearable. Through a poetics of the extra/ordinary I explore how injured soldiers’ ordinariness bristles against inescapable invocations of patriotic sacrifice; the ways soldiers’ everyday movements are marked by being post-traumatic; and the reconfigurations of intimate social relations and masculinity such experiences occasion and out of which the possibilities and limits of a future life emerge. I show that in this moment of life—one which unfolds in a space saturated with narratives of heroic patriotic sacrifice and histories of war and the remaking of men—ordinariness becomes central to injured soldiers’ current experiences and also to the future selves and social configurations they are oriented towards. I demonstrate how injured soldiers’ lives are also always attached to something that exceeds the ordinary; that they are extra/ordinary. But I argue that such extra/ordinariness is an amplification of life’s less notable uncertainties; that all lives are extra/ordinary. Against the over-determining frames of heroism and trauma within which U.S. soldiers are figured, especially in post-9/11 America, I argue that injured U.S. soldiers’ experiences are neither simply knowable, nor unimaginable but recognizable as specifically tethered to, commensurable with, and distinguished from, more ‘ordinary’ others.

What I dub the “worst-result” principle is a criterion that identifies civil war and tyranny as the worst evils that could befall a state, and prescribes their prevention. In this thesis, I attempt to define the worst-result principle’s concrete prescriptions and institutional arrangements to meet these. To do so, I explore different understandings of the worst-result principle, that each contributes to the general argument. Montesquieu’s crucial insight concerns the separation of powers to prevent the state from collapsing into despotism. Judith Shklar shows that ‘damage control’ needs to be constantly performed so as to minimize chances of governmental brutality. Roberto Unger points at the importance of encouraging citizens’ involvement in the political process to safeguard freedom. I finally argue, in the light of historical evidence, that it would be unreasonable to think that the task of preventing tyranny can be effectively performed in the absence of courts entrusted with checking powers.

<p>The purpose of this study is twofold: First, to inquire how the George W. Bush administration plans to keep America safe from external threats and second – based on the assumption that neoconservatives have influenced the Bush administration – examine how neoconservative ideas have influenced this strategy to protect America. The research questions are as follows:</p><p>What is the content of the Bush administration’s security strategy?</p><p>How are neoconservative ideas reflected in this security strategy?</p><p>To answer the first question, the main points of two studied documents were summarized. The summarized documents were the two versions of the National Security Strategy of the United States of America that the George W Bush administration has released during its tenure. These documents state the official security strategy of the United States and give a general view over the threats against America and how the administration plans to deal with these threats. To answer the second question the author studied literature about neoconservatism and gained valuable knowledge about the neoconservatives, which resulted in the creation of an analyzing instrument. This analyzing instrument was later applied on the empirical material that was gathered by answering the first question and in turn answered the second question.</p><p>The result of the study is that the Bush administration believes that by spreading freedom and fighting tyranny around the world, America will become safer. To accomplish this, the administration will employ the full array of political, economic, diplomatic and other tools at their disposal. Neoconservative influences on the strategy were found repeatedly – one of the most obvious influences being the administration’s adoption of the principle of preemptive strikes against enemies.</p>

The interlocked social struggles waged by overlapping and diverse Britons of color for racial and social equality and everyday survival is the dynamic corollary of the contradictions engendered by the ruling relations of racial differentiation and racism in Britain. Grassroots struggles against routine racist violence and state violence, conceptualized as politically interlinked, are the critical sites that contribute to the recursive racial domination experienced by Britons of color in contemporary Britain, and forms the key ethnographic research focus of this study. Prior studies have already critiqued the dominant state framework of viewing racist violence as random, de-racialized and nonpolitical events – as individual incidents, neighborhood disputes, inter-personal conflict, and robberies gone wrong. These studies have alternately identified the social dehumanizing functions of racist violence, the possessive local white territorialism that they materially support and their relationship with macro-level socio-economic crises and changing racial exclusion ideologies of the liberal democratic nation. What I add to these studies is the argument that the racial subordination and ruling relations inherent in the social processes of racist violence and, by formal extension, state violence are not only derivative of broader ideological forces or local social relations but are in fact constitutive of white racial state formation in Britain’s postcolonial era. I argue that the processes of racist violence and state violence are productive of the domination and hierarchy that is secured for whites, through unevenly empowered and routinized contestations within the re-configurations of white racial state formation and an emergent neoliberal-multicultural national security state. It is within this framework of analysis that the politics of black mobilization by Britons of color and their allies, in the context of contemporary multiculturalism’s contradictions, and against the many-sided form of racial subordination is made legible -- not as an anachronism -- but as socially meaningful, interlocked and politically urgent. / text

In this study, I use visual and material culture that addresses the contemporary war in Afghanistan to critically assess the ways in which national conflict history is envisioned. I focus in particular on cultural production related to the involvement of Australia and Canada in the conflict. I do so to question the ways in which Australia’s and Canada’s engagements with this particular conflict are visualized in relation to their official narratives, which posit their military activities in Afghanistan as undertaken in the name of security, peacekeeping, and rebuilding. Such a query is important, because it allows me to investigate which visualizations contribute to the history and narrative of national engagements with conflict, and which are ignored. Moreover, it allows me to ask how visual and material culture not only constitutes, but also legitimates national conflict narratives. And finally, it allows me to locate examples within this field of cultural production that renegotiate, contest, subvert, and resist state representations. These lines of inquiry help to situate my study of visual and material culture by suggesting that such objects can act as lenses through which to address what Jon Stratton and Ien Ang describe as the “unstable, provisional and often jeopardous status of the national” (1996, 381). Following Stratton and Ang, I approach the concept of the “nation” as “a contested terrain between historically specific ‘cultures’ structured in relations of dominance and subordination to each other” (367). Using exhibitions and cultural objects produced post-9/11 in Australia and Canada (that is, after 11 September 2001), I analyze the visual and material culture of conflict within the “contested terrain” of national/ist narratives. The particular process of culture-making exemplified in exhibitions and cultural objects is crucial when it comes to advancing national/ist narratives, since as I argue throughout this study, it represents part of the larger historical transition from the state enlistment of cultural production in support of nation-building to the neoliberal mobilization of visual culture for the global marketplace. / Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-12-22 00:54:55.819