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Vladimir Putin’S Leadership Traits Over 11 Years: A Longitudinal Study Of Putin’S Third Term In Office Using Leadership Trait Analysis, Payton J. Casteel
Vladimir Putin’S Leadership Traits Over 11 Years: A Longitudinal Study Of Putin’S Third Term In Office Using Leadership Trait Analysis, Payton J. Casteel
Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals
While an abundance of literature has studied the actions and behaviors of Vladimir Putin, the most extensive area involves leadership analysis (Semenova and Winter 2020). Various methods within political psychology have used analyses to study Putin throughout his time in office. However, no published research has studied Putin using leadership trait analysis, nor have any published works studied his changes in leadership leading up to the invasion of Ukraine. Using a mixed methods longitudinal study design on Vladimir Putin from 2012 to 2023, five periods in his third term were identified, with speeches taken and coded using the seven LTA …
The Olympic Truce: Symbolic Gesture Or Effective Tool In Preventing And Ending International Conflicts?, Vincent Pandey
The Olympic Truce: Symbolic Gesture Or Effective Tool In Preventing And Ending International Conflicts?, Vincent Pandey
Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals
A modern model for peace is the “Olympic Truce,” a United Nations General Assembly resolution that calls for the pausing and prevention of new conflicts from one week before the Olympic Games through one week after the Paralympic Games. Olympic Truce scholars have focused on identifying cases that demonstrate effective implementation of the Olympic Truce and have come up with mixed results. Some argue that the symbolic nature of the Truce allows it to create moments of peace in conflicts, while others argue that it is nothing more than a gesture of goodwill that has not actually been used for …
The Treasury Of Stories: Policy Narratives Of Anti-Illicit Finance, Paul Christopher Kemp
The Treasury Of Stories: Policy Narratives Of Anti-Illicit Finance, Paul Christopher Kemp
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation explores how the US government identifies and responds to the problem of illicit finance, specifically, why the US Treasury utilizes certain approaches over others. I employ a comparative case study of three relatively recent, non-traditional approaches in the Treasury’s anti-illicit finance repertoire: targeted financial sanctions (a case of strong policy action), anti-money laundering in real estate (a case of tentative policy action), and the proposed demonetization of high denomination notes (a case of policy inaction). While considering a wide range of plausible explanations for this variation in policy action, I argue that the Treasury’s decision to either …
Choosing Sides: Military Behavior In Severely Polarized Democracies, Timothy W. Ford
Choosing Sides: Military Behavior In Severely Polarized Democracies, Timothy W. Ford
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Why does severe polarization result in military intervention in some cases but not others? I argue that the organizational culture unique to a particular military plays a critical role in influencing behavioral outcomes in severely polarized democracies. When faced with sovereign power disputes that arise as a result of severe polarization, military organizations are most likely to develop new strategies of action from the dominant practices, norms, and ideas of military leaders. Severe polarization presents a unique threat to civil-military relations and provides the type of unsettled social periods in which cultural ideologies express an observable influence on military behavior. …
Why Democracies And Autocracies Go To War: Comparing The Cases Of Iraq And Ukraine, Ketevan Chincharadze
Why Democracies And Autocracies Go To War: Comparing The Cases Of Iraq And Ukraine, Ketevan Chincharadze
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
History shows that both democratic and nondemocratic countries wage wars to advance their strategic interests. This study has comparatively analyzed two conflicts – the 2003-2011 U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine – to identify the trends that motivate both democratic and autocratic leaders to behave similarly by launching an invasion. The interpretive research of various memoirs, books, interviews, academic articles, news reports, and speeches, has uncovered that personal biases, particularly confirmation biases, play a significant role in motivating leaders to start a war. Leaders’ confirmation biases are often shaped by three prominent factors – historical memory, …
Gender And Disability: An Exploration Of Reflective Practice For Protection And Access Amid Complex Emergencies, Lindsey A. Mandolini
Gender And Disability: An Exploration Of Reflective Practice For Protection And Access Amid Complex Emergencies, Lindsey A. Mandolini
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Gender and Disability: An Exploration of Reflective Practice for Protection and Access Amid Complex Emergencies is a qualitative research project exploring under what conditions and in what ways disabled persons’ organizations (DPOs) effectively protect and provide access to women and girls with disabilities amid complex emergencies. The study upheld a participatory approach and rights-based framework, emphasizing that authentic inclusion requires centering disabled voices in research. Drawing on extant research, grey literature, and data collected from online practitioner questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, the study conducted a multi-phased reflexive thematic analysis. The research findings culminate in a composite narrative that brings to …
Legitimacy In Conflict Contexts: Shifting Rebel Engagement In Sierra Leone And The Presence Of Private Contractors, Anne Lauder
Legitimacy In Conflict Contexts: Shifting Rebel Engagement In Sierra Leone And The Presence Of Private Contractors, Anne Lauder
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The growth of non-state actors has significantly changed the nature of conflict. Rebel groups increasingly challenge state rule while private military and security companies (PMSCs) increasingly enter conflict spaces on behalf of a variety of actors, including states seeking to suppress insurgencies. This case study of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) during Sierra Leone’s civil war between 1991-2002 contributes to emerging work on rebel behavior by examining how rebel’s legitimacy-seeking behavior might evolve when PMSCs enter a conflict context. I explore the ways that PMSCs can shift perceived incentive structures surrounding insurgents’ interpretations of and engagements with legitimacy during conflict, …
3 Essays On Protests, Repression, And Signaling, Dogus Aktan
3 Essays On Protests, Repression, And Signaling, Dogus Aktan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation focuses on conceptual development across multiple questions of political contention, with a focus on informational processes. In the first paper, I examine the interaction of informational and disruptive effects of protests with a formal model. The model shows that repression can have a screening purpose. Governments use coercion to set the terms of contention so that they only have to accommodate sufficiently aggrieved and salient groups, while filtering out the rest. The model also demonstrates that decreased cost of mobilization makes repression indirectly cheaper for governments, leading to more repression. In the second paper, I examine why governments …
The Institutional Design Of Arms Control: To What Extent Does Institutional Design Increase The Longevity Of Arms Control Agreements?, Jessica Budlong
The Institutional Design Of Arms Control: To What Extent Does Institutional Design Increase The Longevity Of Arms Control Agreements?, Jessica Budlong
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The technical institutional design of arms control agreements remains a rather unexplored area of arms control. But the increasing uncertainty of future arms control efficacy requires a re-examination of the agreements’ institutional design to determine which components contribute positively to their longevity. This research examines the role of dispute settlement bodies as specific outside consultative bodies, verification regimes, membership as at least one nuclear-armed state party to the agreement, and technology transfer mechanisms in arms control agreements. It found that membership and a lack of technology transfer mechanisms are necessary to positively impact the longevity of an arms control agreement, …
Coming Together Over Table: The Role Of Food In Georgian Conflict Resolution Practices, Raisa Wells
Coming Together Over Table: The Role Of Food In Georgian Conflict Resolution Practices, Raisa Wells
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Conflict resolution efforts seek to de-escalate conflict dynamics to bring conciliation and/or reconciliation to a conflict. One strategy to de-escalate a conflict is to use food during conflict resolution efforts. So, what specifically does consuming food and beverage do to break down conflict escalation cycles? Food-sharing brings several aspects to conflict that the literature suggests address how and why conflict escalates. This paper focuses on three prevalent aspects: how food-sharing signals vulnerability and trust building, perceived commonality, and a change in the conflict from competition to cooperation by providing new norms, changing the tone, and shifting frames. Because of the …
When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, And Combatant Repertoires Of Behavior During Civil War, Pauline Luz Moore
When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, And Combatant Repertoires Of Behavior During Civil War, Pauline Luz Moore
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
How does the extent to which rebel organizations are embedded into local conflict contexts - i.e. the extent to which they "fit in" or "stand out" from local populations - affect their behavior on and off the battlefield during civil war? This dissertation examines why rebel group propensities to engage in governance and violence during war vary at the macro and microlevels of analysis and uses as its point of departure the presence of foreign fighters in the ranks of rebel groups engaged in civil war. I employ a cross-national analysis of insurgencies from 1989-2011, and also conduct a theory-testing …
Defections And Democracy: Explaining Military Loyalty Shifts And Their Impacts On Post-Protest Political Change, Kara Leigh Kingma Neu
Defections And Democracy: Explaining Military Loyalty Shifts And Their Impacts On Post-Protest Political Change, Kara Leigh Kingma Neu
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Why do militaries shift their loyalty from authoritarian regimes in some instances of anti-regime protests and not others, and why do these shifts sometimes lead to democratic change? These questions are crucial for understanding the role of the military in democratization, given competing expectations in the literatures on civil-military relations, pacted transitions, and civil resistance. They are also important for understanding the outcomes of protests and other nonviolent campaigns for regime change, a topic of increased attention in recent years. To answer them, I propose an argument rooted in the bases of military authority. Militaries are delegated authority by regimes …
National Interests And Security Policies In The Arctic Region Among Arctic States, Hilde-Gunn Bye
National Interests And Security Policies In The Arctic Region Among Arctic States, Hilde-Gunn Bye
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The United States, Canada, Russia, and Norway are all Arctic states; however, they prioritize the region to different degrees in terms of investments of security assets and military presence. What explains why some Arctic countries prioritize the Arctic more than others? This thesis explores this question through using an issue-based approach, which looks at the salience of issues as having implications for foreign policy tools and measures. This thesis finds that having interests and stakes in the region of high overall salience contribute to an explanation of why some countries prioritize the region more, while low overall salience is linked …
The Strategic Challenges Of Urban Warfare, Christian Aditya Niksch
The Strategic Challenges Of Urban Warfare, Christian Aditya Niksch
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
With urbanization on the rise, policymakers cannot ignore urban conflicts. In the aftermath of the Cold War, several scholars were of the opinion that primitive modes of fighting, such as close combat, would cease to be used. However, as urban spaces have increasingly become battlefields in the 21st century, there has been a retrogression to a brutal and bloody mode of fighting. This return of primitivism affects the tactics that the military can use in urban warfare, which makes it a daunting strategic challenge. A combined focus on policy, strategy, and operations is necessary to improve thinking about how exactly …
Aid Effectiveness In Afghanistan: The Role Of Local Human Capacity In Explaining The Health Sector's Success, Ahmad Najim Dost
Aid Effectiveness In Afghanistan: The Role Of Local Human Capacity In Explaining The Health Sector's Success, Ahmad Najim Dost
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The effectiveness of development assistance is one of the most contested debates in international development studies. While some of its most ardent supporters consider aid as the key to solving the plight of the developing world (e.g. Sachs 2006), its opponents consider it as part of the problem rather than the solution (e.g. Moyo 2009). By investigating the case of Afghanistan as one of the world's largest aid recipients from 2002 to 2014, I show that one reason for arriving at such diametrically opposed conclusions lies in the narrow definition of aid effectiveness as income growth rates. When this definition …
Ethnic Violence On Kenya's Periphery: Informal Institutions And Local Resilience In Conflict-Affected Communities, Fletcher D. Cox
Ethnic Violence On Kenya's Periphery: Informal Institutions And Local Resilience In Conflict-Affected Communities, Fletcher D. Cox
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Deadly, inter-ethnic group conflict remains a threat to international security in a world where the majority of armed violence occurs not only within states but in the most ungoverned areas within states. Conflicts that occur between groups living in largely ungoverned areas often become deeply protracted and are difficult to resolve when the state is weak and harsh environmental conditions place human security increasingly under threat. However, even under these conditions, why do some local conflicts between ethnic groups escalate, whereas others do not? To analyze this puzzle, the dissertation employs comparative methods to investigate the conditions under which violence …
Everyday Indivisibility: How Exclusive Religious Practices Explain Variation In Subnational Violence Outcomes, Joel Kieth Day
Everyday Indivisibility: How Exclusive Religious Practices Explain Variation In Subnational Violence Outcomes, Joel Kieth Day
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This project explores the puzzle of religious violence variation. Religious actors initiate conflict at a higher rate than their secular counterparts, last longer, are more deadly, and are less prone to negotiated termination. Yet the legacy of religious peacemakers on the reduction of violence is undeniable. Under what conditions does religion contribute to escalated violence and under what conditions does it contribute to peace?
I argue that more intense everyday practices of group members, or high levels of orthopraxy, create dispositional indivisibilities that make violence a natural alternative to bargaining. Subnational armed groups with members whose practices are exclusive and …
Invisible Suffering: Practitioner Reflections On Peacebuilding Programs With Youth Exposed To Traumatic Stressors In Intergroup Conflict, Liza Hester
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
For decades, the international community has recognized that youth are some of the most vulnerable to mental and emotional distress within the intractable and cyclical nature of identity-based violent conflict. Exposure to traumatic stressors within these intergroup conflicts poses unique risks not only to the neurological and social development of youth, but also to the capacities of youth to fully participate in peacebuilding interventions. The peacebuilding field has yet to strongly consider how traumatic stress affects dynamics within programs for youth and how these programs may need to modify expectations of youth’s cognitive, social, and emotional functioning to account for …
Winning Well: Civil Resistance Mechanisms Of Success, Democracy, And Civil Peace, Jonathan C. Pinckney
Winning Well: Civil Resistance Mechanisms Of Success, Democracy, And Civil Peace, Jonathan C. Pinckney
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Several recent studies indicate that revolutions of non-violent civil resistance lead to more democratic and peaceful political transitions than either violent revolutions or elite-led political transitions. However, this general trend has not been disaggregated to explain the many prominent cases where nonviolent revolutions are followed by authoritarianism or civil war. Understanding these divergent cases is critical, particularly in light of the problematic transitions following the "Arab Spring" revolutions of 2011. In this paper I explain why nonviolent revolutions sometimes lead to these negative outcomes. I show, through quantitative analysis of a dataset of all successful non-violent revolutions from 1900-2006 and …
Global Human Rights In An Age Of Consumerism, Joel Richard Pruce
Global Human Rights In An Age Of Consumerism, Joel Richard Pruce
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation traces the emergence of the global human rights movement, investigates the role of popular culture as a vehicle for mobilization, and critically examines why the movement has failed to adequately politicize its supporters in the process. Beginning in the mid-1970s, a broad shift began to take place in which ordinary people were routinely confronted with human suffering, as conflict and crisis assumed a role as ritualized news events. The public response to these phenomena demonstrated a capacity for solidarity and engagement based on cosmopolitan premises. The inception of a collective ethos of compassion, an awareness of the other …
Negotiating With Separatist Terrorists, Dottie Bond
Negotiating With Separatist Terrorists, Dottie Bond
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
It is in the interest of this thesis to investigate why governments negotiate with separatist terrorists, and why those negotiations succeed or fail. The four cases analyzed in this thesis include: Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, (1983-2009); Russia and the Chechen Republic, (1994-2009); Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, (1993-1994); and Great Britain and the Irish Republican Army, (1985-2009). In this study, four basic questions are addressed: When and why do governments agree to negotiate with separatist terrorists? Is negotiation a viable solution to ending historic ethnic conflicts? Are certain peace agreements and negotiation strategies more …
Chinese Eyes On The Prize: Strategic Partnerships And Changing Priorities, Elizabeth O'Grady
Chinese Eyes On The Prize: Strategic Partnerships And Changing Priorities, Elizabeth O'Grady
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The overall theme of this paper is increasing knowledge of the evolution of Chinese priorities and strategy since the Korean War, and how the evolution of China's relationships reveals changes in priorities. Why were these partnerships entered into on the part of China? What was China's strategic thinking? How do strengths and weaknesses in these partnerships reflect China's changing priorities? To attempt to answer these questions, three case studies are used to reveal and analyze changes: Sino- North Korean relations since the Korean War, Sino-Russian relations after the end of the Cold War, and Chinese participation (relations with member states) …