In 1655 and again in 1686-1689, the Waldensians of Piedmont were massacred by the Duke of Savoy after he issued edicts forbidding the practice of their religion. The Waldensians were later followers of the medieval religious movement of the Poor of Lyons, declared heretical in 1215. The Waldensians associated with the Reformation in 1532, and thus formed a link with diverse groups of Protestants across Europe. In the periods immediately surrounding both massacres, an outpouring of publications dedicated to their plight, their history, and their religious identity appeared, a large number of which emerged in London. On both occasions, the propaganda gave rise to international sympathy and encouraged international intervention, eventually provoking the Duke to rescind the edicts that had instigated the massacres. While most contemporary scholars consider the Waldensians to have been fully absorbed into Protestantism after 1532, it is clear from the writings of both the Waldensians and their sympathizers that they considered themselves a separate entity: the inheritors of a long tradition of dissent from the Catholic Church based on their own belief in the purity of the Gospel. The Waldensian identity was based on a history of exclusion and persecution, and also on a belief that they had transmitted the true embodiment of Christianity through the centuries. The documents that were published surrounding the massacres address the legitimacy of the Waldensian identity based on centuries of practice. English and continental Protestants identified with the Waldensians, who provided ancient ties and legitimacy to their ‘new’ religion, and the Waldensians adopted that identity proudly, all the while claiming continuity. Protestants also used the Waldensians in propagandist documents, most often to justify political or religious actions and ideologies. The continuity of Waldensianism through the Reformation became crucially important for the wider umbrella of Protestantism as a legitimizing factor for the movement. This thesis investigates the claims of continuity and finds that while the Waldensians underwent a dramatic change in religious doctrine to conform to the Reformation, their belief in the continuity of their religious identity can be validated by examining religion from a socio-cultural perspective that takes aspects other than theology into consideration.

This report outlines the conceptual, procedural and formal descriptions of the artistic development I have acquired over the course of the past three years. The current violent events caused by the War on Drugs in México –my home country- led me to this research. Beginning with the idea of erasure as language, I concentrated on the use of processes that are reductive in nature to create the bodies of work mentioned in this report. Thousands of people die in drug-related violence every year in México; by using metaphors and visual metonymies to tie together process and subject matter I explore the idea of perception, memory and transformation. I believe my work is derived from a need to find meaning in these brutal events that repositions the corpse in our field of vision, reminding us that our physical existence is finite. / text

Among the most important choices made by groups fighting a civil war -- governments and rebels alike -- is how to allocate available military and pecuniary resources across the contested areas of a conflict-ridden territory. Combatants use military force to coerce and money to persuade and co-opt. A vast body of literature in political science and security studies examines how and where combatants in civil wars apply violence. Scholars, however, have devoted less attention to combatants' use of material inducements to attain their objectives. This dissertation proposes a logic that guides combatants' use of material benefits alongside military force in pursuit of valuable support from communities in the midst of civil war. Focused on the interaction between the military and the local population, the theory envisions a bargaining process between a commander and a community whose support he seeks. The outcome of the bargaining process is a fiscal strategy defined by the extent to which material benefits are distributed diffusely or targeted narrowly. That outcome follows from key characteristics of the community in question that include its sociopolitical solidarity (or fragmentation) and its economic resilience (or vulnerability). I evaluate the theory of fiscal strategies through a series of case studies from the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. As a further test of external validity, I consider the theory's applicability to key events from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. / Government

This dissertation examines why military decision makers struggle to evaluate their policies and why they often stick to unsuccessful strategies for so long. The core argument is that strategic assessment involves genuine analytic challenges which contemporary scholarship typically does not take into account. Prominent theoretical frameworks predict that the longer decision makers go without achieving their objectives, the more pessimistic they should become about their ability to do so, and the more likely they should be to change course. This dissertation challenges those ideas and explains why we should often expect the very opposite. The theoretical crux of this argument is that standard models of learning and adaptation (along with many people’s basic intuitions) revolve around the assumption that decision makers are observing repeated processes, similar to the dynamics of slot machines and roulette wheels – but in war and other contexts, decision makers often confront cumulative processes that have very different dynamics, along with a different logic for how rational actors should form and revise their expectations. Empirically, this dissertation examines U.S. decision making in Iraq, Vietnam, and the American Indian Wars. These cases demonstrate how cumulative dynamics affect strategic assessment and how understanding these dynamics can shed light on prominent theoretical frameworks, ongoing policy debates, and salient historical experience.

This thesis seeks to examine the Kurdish novel, The Flower of Shoran (1998) by Iranian Kurdish author, ‘Atā Nahāyi in the context of Kurdish identity search and nationalism and struggle to build a nation state. Considering that the setting of the novel is between the two World Wars which is arguably the most critical phase of Kurdish nationalism, the present study tries to give a brief overview of the historical events that shaped and oriented Kurdish nationalism. Subsequently, Nahāyi’s perspective on the question of Kurdish identity and nationalism in Iran which are the underlying themes of the novel is discussed. Also a detailed summary has been provided along with the translation of the first two chapters of the novel to illustrate how a fairly successful Kurdish novel such as The Flower of Shoran has dealt with the Kurdish question of identity and nationalism in the context of Kurds' struggle for autonomy and recognition as a distinct nation. / text

No description available.

Many studies have been performed on the short- and long-run abnormal returns to acquirers in acquisition attempts, but the topic of bidding wars is relatively unexplored. This piece performs an in-depth analysis of daily returns to both the public winners and losers in bidding war situations. It provides a counterargument to earlier findings that found that winners in bidding wars performed poorly compared to losers. I also fill in the gap in the analysis of short-term returns to paired winners and losers during and surrounding the bidding war. I find that winners perform significantly better than losers during certain critical periods in the bidding war, and this appears to signal the increased likelihood of the winner’s success. However, in the short-term, the market consistently misjudges the direction of the long-run benefits of the acquisition to the winner.

Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / On title page: M.Phil in Ancient Cultures. Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Based on author's thesis (doctoral)-- West Virginia University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-288) and index.

Au carrefour de l’histoire et de la littérature, cette étude biographique consiste d’abord en un questionnement de la place de l’individu dans l’Histoire. À l’aide d’un corpus interdisciplinaire et d’une approche expérimentale de la génétique des textes, elle doit déterminer l’empreinte de la guerre sur la genèse et l’originalité de la position intellectuelle et philosophique de Georges Duhamel à l’égard de la « crise de civilisation », mise au jour par une réflexion sur les conséquences de la guerre. La démonstration vise à établir la corrélation entre sa philosophie morale, son engagement intellectuel et son expérience dans l’ « envers » de la guerre en tant que médecin. Après un état des lieux de la pensée de l’humaniste à la veille de la guerre, la reconstitution des multiples « colloques singuliers » développés par Georges Duhamel avec les soldats blessés livre la matrice des fondements de la « civilisation morale », progressivement élaborée au fil des récits de guerre. Reflet d’une âme individuelle et parcelle de la conscience collective, c’est selon cette double perspective que l’itinéraire de la « civilisation morale » est ensuite reconstitué de 1919 à 1939, du temps des mirages à l’épreuve des périls. Par des jeux d’échelle, l’évolution culturelle de la société et des consciences françaises de la Première à la Seconde Guerre mondiale se dévoile, ainsi que la permanence des enjeux éthiques et métaphysiques soulevés par la violence et la mort de masse du début de siècle. Enfin, le développement s’achève sur les significations et les implications de la Seconde Guerre mondiale sur la « civilisation morale » envisagée dans sa double dimension, métaphysique et culturelle. / In the crossroads of history and literature, this biographical study consists at first of a questioning of the place of the individual in History. By means of an interdisciplinary collection and of an experimental approach of the genetics of texts, we have to determine the mark of the war on the genesis of Georges Duhamel's intellectual and philosophic position towards the “crisis of civilization”, brought to light by a reflection on the consequences of war. The demonstration aims to establish the correlation between his moral philosophy, his intellectual commitment and his wartime experience. After a state of the thought of the humanist on the eve of the war, the reconstruction of multiple “singular colloquium” which Georges Duhamel develops with the wounded soldiers of the Great War delivers the matrix of the foundations of the "moral civilization", gradually achieved over war stories. Window to an individual soul and part of the collective consciousness, this double perspective reconstitutes the path of the “moral civilization” from 1919 to 1939, from time for illusions to test of dangers. By games of scale, the cultural evolution of society and French consciousnesses from the First to the Second World War comes to light, as well as the durability of the ethical and metaphysical issues raised by the violence and the mass die-off at the turn of the century. Finally, the development ends on the meanings and the implications of the Second Conflict on the “moral civilization” envisaged in its double dimension, metaphysics and cultural.