Political History Commons^™

Thoughts Of Becoming: Negotiating Modernity And Identity In Bangladesh, Humayun Kabir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a history and conducts an analysis of Bangladeshi political thought with the aim to better understand the thought-world and political subjectivities in Bangladesh. The dissertation argues that political thought in Bangladesh has been profoundly structured by colonial and other encounters with modernity and by concerns about constructing a national identity. Negotiations between the incomplete and continuous projects of modernization and identity formation have produced certain anxieties about becoming that permeates political consciousness and ideas in the country. Though such anxieties of becoming are also shared by other postcolonial countries, the specific, though not necessarily exclusive, character of …

Shock And Awe, Sectarianism, And Violence In Iraq Post-2003, Sarim Al-Rawi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The violence systematically deployed upon the prosperous nation of Iraq in 2003 was directly influenced by the Shock and Awe doctrine set forth by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade in their 1996 book Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. The experimental methods of warfare and violence outlined in the text describe methods for the systematic destruction of every major aspect of a nation and society, militarily, economically, and socially. In the wake of the US Invasion of Iraq, we saw the direct implementation of these methods by the occupation forces, setting off a brutal cycle of violence that …

A Historiography Of Nationalism: And The Case For Scandinavia, Alexander L. Jacobson

Summer Research

This project surveys the historiography of nationalism and its theoretical shortcomings. It builds upon the work of emerging theorists and revisionists across a wide variety of disciplines and this project then contextualizes nationalism and its related theories in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. After establishing a firm history, the project ends with a quick survey of Medieval Scandinavian History and suggest that this region developed a proto-nationalism during the period. Moreover, this project looks to insert the developments of the Middle Ages into the scholarly discourse surrounding nationalism. In opposition to modernist theories of nationalism—who point to the …

‘Playing Hapsburg:’ The Hapsburg Monarchy And The Post-Yugoslav Croatian Society, Fran Leskovar

Summer Research

One of the more interesting forms of memory of the Hapsburg past, one can find in Croatia. This small European state, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s words, started to “reimagine” itself in the 1990s and reclaim its “Western” European heritage lost following admissions, first, into the South Slav Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and then authoritarian socialist state in the aftermath of World War II. Not surprising, given that many of Eastern European nations, formerly part of the Soviet sphere of influence, started to fabricate their own past and utilize nationalism as a tool of not only awakening national consciousness necessary to delegitimize …

Trickle Down Nationalism: Interactions Between Liberal Nationalism And Colonialism In The Raj And Nigeria, Aaryaman Sheoran

CMC Senior Theses

The combination of nationalism and colonialism has remained understudied in academia, despite the important interaction between the two phenomena. European ideas bled over into their colonial empires and began to fill the power vacuum created by colonial enterprises. This study analyzes the impact of British colonialism on the development of national identity in British India and Nigeria.

British influences included large scale economic disruption, cultural reform through ‘westernizing’ the population and abolishing local customs, and creating a new set of institutions to replace traditional power centers. Inevitably, these factors created a nationalist surge across both the Raj and Nigeria, as …