Wartime sexual violence is an issue that affects women and children worldwide. However, little is known about the long-term psychosocial effects of sexual violence when it occurs in the context of war. In order to learn more about these effects, I will draw data from a longitudinal study of youth affected by civil war in Sierra Leone. Psychosocial outcomes of those who experienced sexual violence in the context of war will be compared to those of participants who did not. Results are expected to show that participants that experienced wartime sexual violence demonstrated higher rates of PTSD symptomology, poorer outcomes in intimate partner relationships, and poorer educational and vocational outcomes than their non-affected peers. This effect is expected to be heavily mediated by beliefs about self-efficacy and personal agency. Such results will demonstrate the need for targeted assistance for individuals who have experienced wartime sexual violence.
Since early discussions of food safety in China started in the late 1980s, food safety has become an increasingly important issue throughout China. The contemporary Chinese government established its first official bureaucratic agency focusing on food safety and nutrition then and created dozens of agencies to oversee related fields in the thirty years since. It was not until the last decade, though, that the government started implementing strong food safety reform. Many western critics have falsely predicted that the Chinese government would attempt to cover up any public distrust that food scandals inspire, but this preliminary research demonstrates that the Chinese government actually encourages many of this seemingly muckraking media. In reaction to food safety scandals, the Chinese government has reacted aggressively, sometimes even executing scandal orchestrators (Xinhua 2007). This thesis seeks to engage in this puzzle: why would an authoritarian regime that could repress dissent instead respond by taking measures to ensure food safety? Through ethnographic and library research in Shanghai, China, and supplementary comparative analysis of food safety in other parts of the world, I seek to answer the following questions: What are consumer attitudes toward food safety in China and what determines them? How has Chinese food regulation changed over time, and what caused these changes? What determines if or when the government reacts to food safety scandals?
My thesis explores these questions by arguing that specific global influences, scandals, and activist approaches have caused the Chinese government to pursue more aggressive food safety legal reform.
Swiss Banking Secrecy wasn’t codified federally until 1934 in the Banking Law and remained largely in tact until 2012 and the advent of automatic information exchange and the US-Swiss FATCA agreement. During these almost eight decades, Swiss banking secrecy was continuously attacked by the international community, especially the United States, on issues such as identifying the post-World War II Nazi assets in Switzerland, organized crime, capital flight and tax evasion. Although various important changes happened in the international economic and political landscape in the last eight decades, I argue that international variables such as the relative economic size of Switzerland to the United States, international paradigm shifts on transparency, and technological advancements don’t fully explain why the US was successful in dismantling Swiss banking secrecy in 2012. Instead, I argue that domestic factors such as the fragmentation of the Swiss banking sector starting in the early 1980s and the Swiss export industry’s changing interests and clout were decisive in how and why Swiss banking secrecy was dismantled in 2012. My thesis builds on secondary sources, archival material, and interviews and focuses in-depth on three episodes in the history of the US-Swiss relationship: the post-World War II Washington Accord negotiations, the US-Swiss mutual legal assistance treaty on organized crime, and FATCA.
It would be very helpful for me to get input on relevant international moments, trends and movements that I may have missed or am not taking into account sufficiently. In addition, any help on how to better marshal my evidence in favor of my domestic-factors-are-important theory would also be very appreciated.
My thesis explores the role of communities in forging successful eco-cities. I compare two case studies, one in Yangzhou, China, and the other in Ivory Park, South Africa, to show how community participation has been deployed in eco-city development. The comparative nature of my project exposes the differences in meaning of "community" and the implications of participation in different political contexts. However, across political contexts, I show how community engagement serves a critical role in eco-city development by bridging the gap between society and technology. My methodology is primarily interview based from summer research done in both sites, analyzed through the lens of the Science and Technology Studies "sociotechnical imaginaries" discourse. I am hoping for feedback on how to strengthen the connection or dialogue between my two cases, and how to best work the imaginaries discourse into my analysis of both.
This thesis examines issues of the shifting nature of borders, politically, geologically, and socially, and of identity and community amongst local young latino men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) and staff of an HIV/STD testing clinics who provide services to them along the US-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. The young Latino MSM are at a higher risk for being infected with HIV/AIDS and there are many additional cultural and local issues that this marginalized population faces. This paper raises questions of how the local HIV/STD services reach out and address various local issues and how youth understand their health and risks in relations to their sexuality.
This thesis examines the discussions of pollution along the Korle Lagoon in Accra, Ghana. Much of the discourse centres on the Old Fadama slum (popularly called ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’) identifying it as the spatiotemporal point from which the lagoon becomes polluted. I examine these popular claims (from interviews, news paper articles etc.) against the record to see whether indeed the settlement is as harmful to the lagoon (and the environment of the city more broadly) as is widely believed. The archives show complaints about the deplorable condition of the lagoon (and plans to reverse it) as far back as the 1930s: six decades before the slum emerged; and more recent ecological surveys show that the lagoon and its main tributary the Odaw River are heavily polluted right from the source in the mountains – i.e. long before it meets the slum at the coast. Thus despite how widely held this view is, evidence from both the history and geography combine to disprove it. In addition, many of the claims about pollution and the slum extend beyond the ecological, as the slum is widely believed to be a hub of crime, sexual deviance and antisocial behaviour through which much of the city stands to be contaminated. I examine this concept of “people as pollution,” and attempt to draw a link between this view of its residents as a danger to the city with the earlier perception of the settlement as environmentally harmful to the lagoon, to see how the popularity of both claims might be a strategy to support recent attempts to demolish the slum and evict its residents (to make way for the mayor’s recreational resort project).
I’m just working on getting this written. I’ve spent two years on this project, so I have more information than I need and my ideas about what to use and how have changed continuously over the past semester. Having decided on this route, my main task will be to stick with it and write it out as clearly as I can.
This thesis project investigates how interactions between the Peruvian state and peasant auto-defense civil society groups have impacted the capacity of these organizations over time. The institutional legacy of the civil society organizations is also taken into account to analyze the role it has in shaping the response of civil society groups to state intervention. Therefore, I analyze how state intervention through cooperation, co-optation, or repression has affected the capacity and development of these civil society organizations in the short and long term. I hypothesize that in a cooperative environment with the state, civil society organizations will be strengthened in the short and long run regardless of the existence of an institutional legacy. Co-optation will be beneficial to an organization’s capacity in the short run regardless of institutional legacy, but in the long run co-optation will be detrimental. Lastly, repression in the short run is detrimental regardless of institutional legacy but in the long run it can be beneficial for civil society organizations that had a strong institutional legacy while continuing to be detrimental to those that didn’t. The methodology of this project consists of case studies of the three main types of peasant auto-defense civil society groups in Peru: peasant patrols, neighborhood watch groups, and auto defense committees. Overall this project hopes to shed some light on the mechanisms that hinder or promote capacity building of civil society groups as a result of different types of state intervention. I’m still working on placing the hypothesis within a larger theoretical framework of state-civil society relations and would welcome any feedback.
In 2009, El Salvador’s Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA)—by most measures the strongest conservative party to emerge from Latin America’s Third Wave of democratization—experienced the first major schism in its long history. The split marked a transformative moment that resulted in the formation of a new conservative party, reshaped the logic of electoral competition in El Salvador, and triggered an unprecedented period of programmatic realignment within ARENA. At the very core of these events are a series of unanswered questions in comparative politics: What explains variations in party cohesion across space and time? Why do parties experience sudden (and not so sudden) schisms? How can we build cohesive, long-lasting political parties? In response to these puzzles, my thesis presents an institutional theory of conservative party schisms. It argues that variations in party cohesion and schism can best be explained by what I call power-sharing institutions: the rules and procedures that structure intra-party competition for power and resources. While certain types of power-sharing institutions are conducive to high levels of cohesion in the short term, those same institutions are more likely to result in schisms in the long run. The theory may have a number of implications for the study party-building, intra-party politics, institutional design, and institutional change.
My thesis is the narrative of how "eco-villages" came to be practiced as a national development strategy in Senegal. In my work I am looking at how eco-villages began as a "counter" to many of the problems of modernity as viewed by activists in a number of northern countries: eco-villages being a response of positive politics to perceived ecological destruction, fragmented societies, and crises in cultural meaning. While at first these seem removed from the concerns of a Senegalese society without many of the pathologies of "modernity," eco-villages turn out to be doing the same work in Senegal as they are doing in the North--unlocking people's sense of ambivalence about the worlds that are passing away (past), one that is greeted both with potential and uncertainty (present), and that seeks integration with possibilities for a better life (future). Eco-villages are, thus, not best understood as things to build, but as structures used to dream in a new world and set of relationships between these temporal worlds. In Senegal, I explore this through people's engagements with modernity's understandings of development, time, and money.
My thesis examines the foundations of Florida’s fugitive slave community, beginning in the seventeenth century, and its subsequent role in creating the first, original Underground Railroad and the largest and deadliest black uprising in American history. In particular, I am tracking the leaders of the rebellion, such as Abraham, a runaway slave from Pensacola, and John Caesar, a fugitive slave living among the Seminole tribe in the Florida Everglades. My thesis also gives voice to the runaway slaves from Georgia and South Carolina who enabled Abraham and John Caesar to find sanctuary among the native peoples two hundred years earlier. African military leaders such as Francisco Menendez were instrumental in creating the first free black settlement in North America—Fort Mose—and establishing a cultural exchange with Seminoles in Middle Florida. The bulk of my primary research focuses on the plantation uprising that erupted along the east coast of Florida in Saint John’s Valley and the former Mosquitoe County in 1835-1836. I have collected primary documents that identify the participation of more than three hundred slaves and deaths of nearly four hundred white plantation owners. Validating such claims is particularly challenging because of the dearth of newspapers and proper governmental documentation in Florida at that time. Most of the sources I have located portray the conflict as an Indian war, owing to a contemporary fear of inspiring widespread unrest among the region’s slaves. By minimizing the participation of plantation slaves, and instead claiming that Indians had kidnapped runaways, white plantation owners could seek restitution from the U.S. government for war damages. I am examining county tax records from 1835 and 1836 to compare the number of slaves listed at each plantation. That will, I hope, corroborate some of the claims I have found in other archival sources. I will also continue to read both military correspondence and regional newspapers from Georgia and South Carolina in search of references to the uprising. I am employing all of those sources to construct a rich and meaningful narrative of the events that transpired, as well as the uprising’s political, social, and historical implications. As detailed in the following pages, I have accumulated more than one hundred primary and secondary sources on Florida’s maroon community. The vast majority of secondary sources provide background information on Spanish and Territorial Florida, rather than on the slave rebellion itself, which has been largely overlooked in the literature. As a result, I have focused my archival research on the letters of those living in the vicinity of Saint Augustine at that time. I have found references to twenty-one destroyed sugar plantations and suspect that there are still several more undiscovered in the records. I hope to understand whether the uprising was limited to the 1835-1836 period and whether plantations outside the already examined counties also experienced disturbances. I also hope to delineate the relationship between the Black Seminoles (a maroon community within the Seminole tribe) and the plantation slaves, as well as the economic ties between the Seminole tribe and the Spanish government in Cuba, which supplied the rebels with weapons and supplies. I am confident that my experience in two courses this year, Professor Alison Frank Johnson’s “Commodities in International History” and Professor Vincent Brown’s “The History of African Americans from the Slave Trade to the Civil War,” will prove especially helpful to me in identifying and deciphering evidence as I continue to accumulate sources. I have consulted several experts at archives across the nation, who have provided guidance to help advance my work.
In the year 2003, Zimbabwe decided to implement a "Look East" policy (LEP). This LEP shifted Zimbabwe's economic and political focus from Western Europe and the United States to China and the Far East. In the words of Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, "We have turned East, where the sun rises, and given our back to the West, where the sun sets." Most sources accredit this Look East shift to Western sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe in 2002. However, my thesis argues that this shift would have occurred in 2003 regardless of the Western sanctions. The alternative factors that are often overlooked are Zimbabwe's withdrawal from the Congo War in 2002, the rising inflation that had been occurring since the beginning of the century, and the disputed presidential elections in 2002. The simultaneous and harmonic convergence of these varying chaotic elements created a crisis of power for Robert Mugabe and his party ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front), to which they decided to Looking East would be the best solution to solve the crisis. While I am not arguing that the sanctions had no effect on the decision to implement a LEP, I do believe that there were other factors that would have caused a Look East shift regardless of the sanctions.
The aim of this thesis is to explain the evolution of US economic aid to Colombia between 1998 and 2002. At the outset of the economic assistance program, entitled Plan Colombia, aid was to be used exclusively by the Colombian government towards the amelioration of the narcotics trafficking problem; however, by 2002, the United States Congress approved the use of funds towards both counternarcotics and counterterrorism campaigns. I hypothesize that the securitization of narcotics in Congress impeded the Congressional acceptance of US involvement in a Colombian insurgency campaign because it focused US attention on decreasing the production and trafficking of narcotics. Moreover, this securitization led to the portrayal of the insurgents as narcotraffickers, which allowed for greater concerns over ensuring that the Colombian armed forces did not engage in human rights violations. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, resulted in a re-orientation of US foreign policy, whereby terrorism became the primary issue of concern. The increased Congressional desire to support counterterrorism operations worldwide and the new portrayal of the insurgents as terrorists decreased the saliency of human rights concerns and paved the way for the 2002 passage of the joint campaign law. The broader goal of this thesis is to advance the study of US-Latin America economic assistance programs, the use of social construction and framing by political agents to achieve aims, and the impact of domestic politics on foreign policy. I am still working on situating my hypothesis in a theoretical framework of constructivism and securitization, and would appreciate feedback on how to do this and also how to structure my thesis to make space for the negation of counterarguments.
In my ethnographic study, I examine the emergent phenomenon of “astronaut families” split between Mainland China and Canada. Hong Kong and Taiwanese astronaut families—transnational migrant families with one spouse and children settling overseas—in the 1980s gave rise to literature emphasizing the “flexible citizenship” of the Chinese family, a unit of capital accumulation adept at dispersing in pursuit of economic advancement and bound by Confucian patriarchal values. I call attention to the ways in which the lived experiences of Mainland Chinese astronaut families settling in Canada from the 1990s onwards both nuance and deviate from this instrumentalist model. I argue that Mainland China’s modernization project, epitomized by the family planning policy and the rigorous education system, impelled a reorganization of the Chinese family around the child, with parents investing in the astronaut arrangement in order to liberate their child from the demands of Chinese society and to maximize their child’s educational and professional competitive advantage in the neoliberal world system. In order to balance an objective of upward mobility with a desire for household harmony and social belonging, astronaut wives and especially husbands learn to be flexible not just in terms of their response to economic and political conditions but also in terms of their criteria for their children’s success, their negotiation of traditional Confucian, modern Chinese, and Canadian values, and their willingness to transform and to be transformed by the migration and settlement processes. In corroborating my argument, I draw from individual in-depth interviews, focus groups, participation observation, and secondary and archival sources.
I would especially appreciate feedback on whether the central argument of my thesis is clear and compelling, even as I am grappling with multiple subsidiary arguments about gender, class, race, family, migration, and citizenship. I would also particularly welcome feedback on the effectiveness of my narrative flow and my engagement with different bodies of literature.
This project is a comparison of the experiences with skin color of young black women in Khartoum, Sudan and Atlanta, Georgia. It was prompted by the rising trend of skin bleaching in Sudan, coupled with a gap in the literature surrounding skin color, as well as the lack of research into the experiences of today’s young African American women with colorism. These are issues that are often dismissed as trivial in the public discourse, and so this project aims to center the voices of the population most affected by colorism and understand their experiences. The methodology used is in-depth interviews, conducted with forty-five women over the summer of 2014. Their experiences are compared to see how colorism and the reactions to it vary based on the national and racial context. Analysis is ongoing, though a major trend is in the manifestation of colorism, whereby in America it is seen in the public discourse, particularly through competing stereotypes, while in Sudan it tends to be tied to strict beauty standards, which are adhered to through bleaching. There is also a consistent theme of women of all shades feeling constricted by this form of prejudice but reacting in varying ways. I am currently still working on analysis and write-up, so any input on that aspect would be more than welcome.
In my thesis, I examine military justice reform legislation in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. Specially, I seek to explain why the United States is alone among its major democratic allies, including the United Kingdom and Canada, in maintaining a command-centric military justice system amidst a global trend of military justice reform. I propose a two-tiered institutional model within which to contextualize US non-reform. First, the US Constitution delegates the power to regulate the military to Congress, leaving the Supreme Court unwilling to rule on the constitutionality of the military justice system. Without a judicial mandate for reform, civilian legislators are unlikely to take an interest in the obscure subject of military law. Second, the presidential structure of American democracy generates distrust between the military and legislators who may draft military justice reform bills. Without an institutional link that ensures communication between the two bodies–as would be found in a parliamentary democracy, in which the defense ministry drafts reform legislation– disagreements between the military and Congress may descend into public opposition and debate, complicating the passage of potential bills.
My research addresses two important topics within the scholarly literature. In the context of military law, it examines the political processes by which military justice reform is drafted and passed and adds to the current literature, which focuses solely on judicial rulings. More generally, it considers how civil-military relations in developed democracies may be shaped by the presidential or parliamentary nature of their governments.
