Digital Commons Network^™

Effects Of Witnessing Terrorist Attacks On Perceived Causes Of Terrorism And Support For Security Measures, Austin Trevor Sullivan

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The following research aims to understand how individuals who were aware of, and affected by, terrorist attacks at the time they took place perceive the causes of terrorism and support security measures. It is hypothesized that the extent to which one â??witnessedâ?? attacks characterized by more traditional forms of terrorism, such as bombings and religiously motivated and affiliated perpetrators (Wave four), versus new forms of terrorism, such as shootings and lone wolves (Wave five), would be affected by the age of the witness. This research proposes an indirect pathway from age to "witnessing" terrorist attacks to attributions for the attacks …

Authoritarian Propaganda Campaigns On Foreign Affairs: Four Birds With One Stone, Andrew Chubb, Frances Yaping Wang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Why do authoritarian states sometimes play up dangerous internationalcrises and embarrassing diplomatic incidents in domestic propaganda? Isit to mobilize, threaten, divert or pacify? Recent studies in comparativepolitics have focused on regime legitimacy and stability as key drivers ofauthoritarian propaganda practices, overlooking other possiblemotivations such as mobilization of the regime’s domestic allies orstrategic signaling aimed at foreign audiences. Foreign policy analysts,meanwhile, have emphasized international dimensions of thepropaganda behavior of China — the contemporary world’s mostpowerful and technologically sophisticated authoritarian state — but haveoften mistakenly framed complementary theories as competingalternative explanations. Paying attention to the multiple domestic andinternational audiences for authoritarian propaganda, …

Attitudes Of Ethnic Minorities Towards National Defense And Security In The Triadic Nexus: The Case Of Russian-Speakers In Estonia, Nikita Lumijoe

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The contested loyalty of ethnic minorities between the host nation and ethnocultural homeland can play a significant role in the formation of geopolitical tensions as well as civil and ethnic-based conflicts. When the ethnocultural homeland of an ethnic minority increases the scale of intervention into the inner affairs of the host countries using hybrid, cognitive and even military wise, the attitudes of ethnic minorities towards national security and defense policy become a strategic asset for both sides.

In 2014, pro-Russian separatism in Ukraine focused the attention of the international community to the political attitudes of Russian-speaking ethnic minorities in Eastern …

Caron's Japan: Tokugawa State And Society Through A European Lens, Cegan Hinson

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Dutch East India Company (VOC) merchant François Caron describes Tokugawa Japan as a rigid political hierarchy controlled by the Shogun, similar to the governments established by absolute monarchs in Europe. Caron understands and insightfully describes Tokugawa society by emphasizing perceived and real similarities between Tokugawa Japan and Early Modern Europe. He struggles to understand religious differences between these societies, but his description of Japanese religious practices still reflects how the Shogunate utilized Buddhism and anti-Christian policies to uphold their rule. Caron also depicts Tokugawa Japan as a land of plentiful resources prime for lucrative trade. He includes the writings of …

The Rise In Anti-Asian Racism And Xenophobia In The Time Of Covid-19, Mitchell Alan Kaplan

Journal of Hate Studies

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a detrimental impact on the health of the American people and those abroad, the social consequences stemming from the spread of the virus have become an international crisis whose effects reach far beyond the medical issues associated with the disease. Racial and xenophobic propaganda about the illness promoted on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and at campaign rallies by former President Trump has spurred a dramatic increase in anti-immigrant sentiments toward Asian Americans. The polarizing effects of the Administration’s anti-Asian rhetoric have become a battle cry that has given renewed …

China’S Future Military Capabilities, Roger Cliff

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

The 2022 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America identifies China as the “pacing challenge” for the US military. This monograph examines the process by which China’s military capabilities are developed, the capabilities China’s military is seeking to acquire in the future, and the resulting implications for the US military. To date, all the extant studies have merely described the capabilities the People’s Liberation Army is currently acquiring. This monograph goes further by drawing on the Chinese military’s publications to identify and discuss the capabilities the People’s Liberation Army seeks to acquire in the future. The monograph finds …

Nuclear Threat As Race Hatred, John Streamas

Journal of Hate Studies

Nuclear weapons, since their advent in the 1940s, have been regarded as so massively destructive and lethal that few have questioned whether particular groups might be targeted. Deaths across their geographical sweep seem to be total and indiscriminate. I argue, however, that it is no accident or coincidence that the Bomb was first used on a non-White nation; people of color in the United States such as Langston Hughes believed it would never be used against a White enemy. On the other hand, even if it is a race weapon, it is also still a species weapon, so that even …

Mirroring Jesus’S Prayerful Approach To Interactions With Dissatisfied Followers Through The Lens Of The Modern Worship Pastor, Bryant Timothy William West

Masters Theses

This study shows the life and mission of Jesus through His interactions with conflict and will show how worship pastors can apply these lessons to the church. Detailing Jesus's prayer life and His approach to interacting with others, examining the approach worship leaders should have when interacting with similar people. The report will concentrate on three areas of study, including Jesus's prayer life, his ministry, and how the worship pastor can create a church that parallels Christ. Jesus' ministry and discussions with the Pharisees show worship pastors how they should approach church members. This discussion is due to the struggles …

Apartheid’S Leviathan : Electricity And The Power Of Technological Ambivalence, Faeeza Ballim

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

A fascinating study that shows how the intersection of technology and politics has shaped South African history since the 1960s.

This book details the development of an interconnected technological system of a coal mine and of the Matimba and Medupi power stations in the Waterberg, a rural region of South Africa near the country’s border with Botswana. South Africa’s state steel manufacturing corporation, Iscor, which has since been privatized, developed a coal mine in the region in the 1970s. This set the stage for the national electricity provider, Eskom, to build coal-fueled power stations in the Waterberg.

Faeeza Ballim follows …

The Artist's Arsenal: Hiv+ Women Artists, The ‘War On Aids’, And Reclaiming Illness Narratives, Mekha Varghese

Art and Art History Honors Papers

This work uses the methodologies of both art history and medical sociology through the ‘syndemic’ framework to engage in close readings of two selected artworks, Exit (1997) by Nancer LeMoins and Violation of Africa (1984) by Affrekka Jefferson. An interdisciplinary approach to these works enables consideration of how multiple marginalized identities—i.e., living with a stigmatized illness, being a woman, being LGBTQIA+, being a person of color—appear in visual art and shape illness experience; these ideas are investigated through a formal and iconographic reading of the selected artworks. Placing art as the foundation of this analysis reveals its astounding impact and …

The Weaponization Of Rape: Conflict-Related Rape And The International Criminal Court, Claire Velte

International Relations Honors Papers

Conflict-related rape—once thought to be an inevitable symptom of war—has been legally recognized as both a distinct weapon of war and a crime against humanity, yet it continues to be utilized with impunity. To understand why combatants rape, this paper examines the aspects of military culture that create environments in which raping is not only permissible, but encouraged; additionally, this paper considers cases of genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda in which rape was used systematically to achieve political goals, and how these conflicts contributed to new conceptions of rape in international criminal law. These new conceptions of conflict-related rape created …

A Fake Future: The Threat Of Foreign Disinformation On The U.S. And Its Allies, Brandon M. Rubsamen

Global Tides

This paper attempts to explain the threat that foreign disinformation poses for the United States Intelligence Community and its allies. The paper examines Russian disinformation from both a historical and contemporary context and how its effect on Western democracies may only be exacerbated in light of Chinese involvement and evolving technologies. Fortunately, the paper also studies practices and strategies that the United States Intelligence Community and its allied foreign counterparts may use to respond. It is hoped that this study will help shed further light on Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns and explain how the Intelligence Community can efficiently react.

Contradiction And Juche, Philosophical Deviations From Traditional Dialectical Materialism By Kim Il Sung And Mao Zedong Necessitated By Socio-Political Conditions, Thomas Bidewell

Global Tides

This work will attempt to attribute the deviations from the traditional Marxist dialectic in the cases of Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung to their necessitated governing philosophies, and thus their geopolitical conditions. In the case of Mao, this governing philosophy is ‘State-Building Socialism’, a hyper-materialist reappropriation of Marxist materialism crafted to raze internal cultural and economic hierarchy through isolating Contradictions, a rebranding of dialectics. In the case of Kim, a framework of ‘Ethnic Anti-Colonialism’ is adopted through the creation of Juche, an anti-materialist philosophy with references to Hegelianism to wrestle back the agency of ethnic Koreans against Imperialism.

Understanding The Effectiveness Of Russian Influence Operations On The United States As Compared To Other Regimes, Giselle Weiss

National Security Affairs and International Relations Theses

For years, the Russian Federation has effectively used influence operations to advance their global position and interfere with democratic processes like elections throughout the world. This project addresses the question: is the United States more susceptible to Russian influence operations compared to other nations with varied protections for freedom of speech? The Western world may be more vulnerable to disinformation and propaganda because people are unaccustomed to state narratives and vulnerable to targeted operations. The more research is done on this topic, the more people can become aware of the problem and protect themselves from vulnerability. By comparing data about …

Book Review: Clear, Hold, And Destroy: Pacification In Phú Yên And The American War In Vietnam, Samantha A. Taylor

Parameters Bookshelf – Online Book Reviews

Author: Robert J. Thompson III

Reviewed by Dr. Samantha A. Taylor, assistant professor of military and security studies, Air Command and Staff College

Published on April 20, 2023. There is no shortage of books that explore the Vietnam War and why it ended the way it did. This book does not focus on strategy or events but on the middle-level US and South Vietnamese pacification policy in the Phú Yên province and the communist strategy to counter it.

A Cross-National Investigation Of Human Trafficking Exploitation, Aniyah D. Richardson

Honors College Theses

Human trafficking is a prevalent business, generating up to an estimated annual profit of $150 billion dollars globally (International Labour Organization [ILO], 2014). Although human trafficking is a global phenomenon, an element that has not received considerable empirical attention has been nuances between trafficking that occurs within a singular country (i.e., domestic trafficking) and that which occurs between multiple countries (i.e., international trafficking). The current study utilized cross-national data from the Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative’s (CTDC) Global Synthetic Dataset (GSD) to compare demographic profiles of victims trafficked domestically and internationally. Incorporating measures of gender, age, country of citizenship, country of …

Understand Interactive Relationship Between S&T Security And Economic Security, Establish S&T Security Monitoring And Early Warning System, Qiuyi Guo, Guangrong You

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

The overall concept of national security is an open strategic thought system, which is constantly developing with the practice of national security. Science and technology (S&T) security and economic security are both important areas of national security. They are important components of national security to support and safeguard overall national security. This study analyzes the interactive relationship between S&T security and economic security, and puts forward some suggestions to accelerate the development of S&T security monitoring and early warning system in view of the risks and challenges to ensure S&T security in the process of realizing high-quality development.

Content-Based Unsupervised Fake News Detection On Ukraine-Russia War, Yucheol Shin, Yvan Sojdehei, Limin Zheng, Brad Blanchard

SMU Data Science Review

The Ukrainian-Russian war has garnered significant attention worldwide, with fake news obstructing the formation of public opinion and disseminating false information. This scholarly paper explores the use of unsupervised learning methods and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to detect fake news in news articles from various sources. BERT topic modeling is applied to cluster news articles by their respective topics, followed by summarization to measure the similarity scores. The hypothesis posits that topics with larger variances are more likely to contain fake news. The proposed method was evaluated using a dataset of approximately 1000 labeled news articles related …

Information Scoping Skills And The Research Output Of Academic Librarians In Universities In South-South Geopolitical Zone Of Nigeria, Godson Ehimiyein Ilevbare Phd, Uduak Ubong Enang Phd, Mercy Etukudo Ukpanah Phd

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study investigated the relationship between information scoping skills and the research output of academic librarians in universities in South-South Geopolitical Zone of Nigeria with corresponding specific objective, research question, and research hypothesis. To effectively drive the study two theories were adopted. The theory of social cultural learning for the independent variable (information scoping skill), and the theory of self-efficacy for the dependent variable (research output of academic librarians). More so, conceptual review of literature on information scoping skills and research out were carried, and specific empirical review of literature with extrinsic similarity and dissimilarity to the study was also …

A War Of Many Victims: The Cartel Crises In Mexico, Seth Sexton

Liberty University Research Week

Undergraduate

Textual or Investigative

Introduction To Theme 4: Scientific Essentials And Sustainable Environments, Alison R. Holmes

csuglobaljournal

No abstract provided.

A Qualitative Analysis Of The Relationship Between Cyberthreats And Democratic Backsliding, Amy I. Browning

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Interstate conflict has developed beyond conventional tactics to include the cyber realm, making cybersecurity a key component of international relations and an integral part of state defense plans. Research in international security has included the analyses of the relative success or failures of particular cyberattacks. However, the instigators behind these attacks receive comparatively little attention, leaving a gap in knowledge for when, why, and where cyberthreats are likely to emerge. Recent analysis has found that democratic institutions are likely to hinder state-sponsored cyberattack initiation. A consideration that the latest wave of global democratic backsliding could be fueling cyberthreats must be …

Playing Jokes, Or Funny Games And The Falklands War, Michael J. Hughes

Library Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Old & New Battlespaces: Society, Military Power, And War, Robert J. Bunker

Parameters Bookshelf – Online Book Reviews

Authors: Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha

Reviewed by Dr. Robert J. Bunker, director of research and analysis and managing partner, C/O Futures, LLC

Published on April 7, 2023. In Old & New Battlespaces: Society, Military Power, and War, Drs. Jahara Matisek and Buddhika Jayamaha, examine the nature of battlespace and how one can make sense of it across space, through well-known and emergent domains, and along the various levels of war, asking where one should look, how one should look, and for what one should look. Reviewer Dr. Robert J. Bunker shows how the book executes well in its modernist …

Cultural Conflict For Veterans Transitioning To Civilian Life, Adam Francis

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

United States military veterans face many challenges while transitioning from the military to civilian life that require a new civilian perspective to navigate the differences between these experiences. Previous research is focused on psychosocial, behavioral, and psychological issues veterans face (Ainspan et al., 2018; Coulthard & Lee, 2022; Romaniuk et al., 2020). The military and the Veterans Administration (VA) have primarily focused on veterans achieving employment and education after leaving the military. Being in the military is highly stressful and requires working closely with others (Krishnakumar et al., 2019), and reflects a collectivist nature (Bongioanni, 2022; Verkamp, 2021). Civilian culture …

Book Review: Useful Captives: The Role Of Pows In American Military Conflicts, Michael E. Lynch

Parameters Bookshelf – Online Book Reviews

Editors: Daniel Krebs and Lorien Foote

Reviewed by Dr. Michael E. Lynch, senior historian, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College

Published on April 7, 2023. A book of useful and thought-provoking essays, Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military History explores 300 years of wars and the role POWs have played in them. Reviewer Dr. Michael Lynch walks readers through more than half of the groups featured in the book.

Exemplary Senior Navy Female Leadership: A Study Of How Navy Female Leaders Use The Grit Characteristics Courage, Conscientiousness, Long-Term Goals, Resilience, And Excellence Versus Perfection To Create Extraordinary Results Within Their Organizations, Cache' Hapner

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to identify and describe how exemplary senior Navy female leaders used five principles associated with grit (courage, conscientiousness, long-term goals, resilience, and excellence versus perfection) to accomplish extraordinary results in their organizations.

Methodology: This qualitative study used a phenomenological method to describe how eight senior Navy female leaders use five characteristics of grit to accomplish extraordinary results in their organizations. Respondents were purposively chosen. The researcher collected data through interviews, transcripts, and artifacts that were triangulated and coded for themes using NVivo software.

Findings: Exemplary senior Navy female leaders use …

Ua12/2/2 Talisman: Surreal Issue No. 14, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Spring 2023 Talisman:

• Broekema, Gabi. Surrealism
• Hunter, Leah. Surreal
• Cox, Samantha. Surrealism
• Plescia, Audrey. Horoscopes
• Booth, Pandora. Dreamscapes
• Ousley, Rachael. Body & Soul – Yoga, Susan Tutino
• Coles, Jack. Tool for the Future – Artificial Intelligence
• Sandlin, Ellie. Altered Minds – Drug Experimentation
• Neidlinger, Heather. Little Dipper
• White, Peyton. Pure Adrenaline – Rodeo, Skateboarding, Boxing, Rock Climbing
• Plescia, Audrey. The Hill is Haunted
• Richer, Cailyn. Threads of Expression – Fashion
• Jefferson, Reginald. Momentum
• Bruck, Lasikka. At Death’s Door – Yenni Gonzalez, Zoe Avery, Hannah Smith
• Meyers, Jeffrey. Voice in Movement – Theatre & Dance, National Dance Education Association
• Surreal Playlist

Panther Press, Spring 2023, University Of Northern Iowa. Department Of Military Science.

Panther Press

In this issue:

--- Semester in Review
--- From LTC Dean Ray
--- Panther Battalion / New Cadre & Farewell
--- Pawprint Campaign
--- Panther Pantry Award
--- Military Ball
--- Congratulations to our new 2nd Lieutenants
--- ROTC Senior Staff Ride
--- Cadet Q&A

Explaining Guatemalan Vigilantism, Bryant Mcconkie

Sigma: Journal of Political and International Studies

Ripped from his home in Concepción, Guatemala, the evening of October 13, 2015, Mayor Bacilio Juracán was brutally beaten, doused with gasoline, and burned to death by attackers convinced he had orchestrated the murder of a political rival they supported. In just this one isolated incident, the town hall, various cars, and at least six additional buildings were burned along with the mayor (“Linchan y Queman” 2015). A growing number of similar lynchings—vigilante attacks in which victims of the mob are severely injured or killed—across Guatemala have thrust Guatemalan vigilantism into the public consciousness, perplexing governments and political theorists alike …