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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Elusive Peace, Security, And Justice In Post-Conflict Guatemala: An Exploration Of Transitional Justice And The International Commission Against Impunity In Guatemala (Cicig), Daniel W. Schloss Aug 2015

Elusive Peace, Security, And Justice In Post-Conflict Guatemala: An Exploration Of Transitional Justice And The International Commission Against Impunity In Guatemala (Cicig), Daniel W. Schloss

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Guatemala has, until today, struggled to achieve security and justice following the end of nearly half a century of civil war in 1996. One specific institution, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), has been implemented to rectify many of the Guatemalan state’s difficulties in establishing and maintaining the rule of law. In this thesis, I look to better explain CICIG’s role in Guatemala relative to security and justice in a post-conflict setting: I define CICIG as an institution potentially capable of building societal trust, and I explain how the inclusion of procedural justice within transitional justice can help …


Mining, Resistance And Livelihood In Rural Bangladesh, Md Rashedul Alam Jul 2015

Mining, Resistance And Livelihood In Rural Bangladesh, Md Rashedul Alam

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 2006, over fifty thousand people in the Phulbari Sub-District of Bangladesh mobilized against an open-pit coal mining-project that posed serious environmental and social risks. The state authorities negotiated with the protesters intensively over four days to reach an agreement. However, the state failed to fulfill the agreement, and the protest movement continued. The agrarian communities successfully halted the mining project for the last nine years. My research aims to understand how the protesters resisted this project. My objectives have been to explore the practices of a grassroots movement, attendant transformations in the sociopolitical landscape and role of the state …


Agrarian Change And Peasant Prospects In Haiti, Marylynn Elizabeth Steckley May 2015

Agrarian Change And Peasant Prospects In Haiti, Marylynn Elizabeth Steckley

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Haiti is one of the poorest and most severely hunger-stricken countries in the world (GHI 2013). Its contradictions are jarring: although Haiti has the largest relative agrarian population in the Western Hemisphere and relatively less land inequality than the rest of the region (Smucker et al. 2000; Wiens and Sobrado 1998), it is extremely food insecure. Almost 90 percent of the rural population lives below the poverty line (FAO 2014; IFAD 2014), and Haiti relies on food imports for 60 percent of national consumption (OXFAM 2010). Some scholars argue that the spread of commodity relations, persistent rural class differentiation, and …


Enterprising Outsiders: Livelihood Strategies Of Cape Town’S Forced Migrants, Madeleine Ann Northcote Apr 2015

Enterprising Outsiders: Livelihood Strategies Of Cape Town’S Forced Migrants, Madeleine Ann Northcote

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although refugees and registered asylum-seekers have a legal right to work in South Africa, research shows that prevailing anti-immigrant attitudes and South African employers’ suspicion of these migrants’ documents makes employment extraordinarily difficult to acquire. This thesis investigates how, in the face of such challenges, forced migrants in Cape Town secure their day-to-day livelihoods. The research is based on semi-structured, open-ended interviews with thirty-two refugees and other forced migrants who live and operate in the Cape Town area, as well as five key informant interviews with employees of refugee service organizations. It also draws from literature on both South Africa’s …


Contentious Information: Accounts Of Knowledge Production, Circulation And Consumption In Transitional Egypt, Ahmad Kamal Apr 2015

Contentious Information: Accounts Of Knowledge Production, Circulation And Consumption In Transitional Egypt, Ahmad Kamal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While the 2011 Egyptian Uprising renewed attention to revolutionary news platforms such as Al-Jazeera and Facebook, citizens continued to be understudied as active consumers of information. Yet citizens’ perceptions of their informational milieu and how they responded in consuming, processing, and interpreting facts offer crucial insight into the turbulent transition that followed the initial uprising. This study analyzes Egyptian citizens’ accounts of their information environment and practices amid socio-political change. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 31 politically-engaged citizens from various political and professional backgrounds. Participants were asked to discuss the state of public discourse, the institutions responsible for the circulation …


Claims Of The City? Rights Of The Countryside? Politics Of Water Contestation In The Mumbai-Thane Region Of India, Bharat Khushal Punjabi Apr 2015

Claims Of The City? Rights Of The Countryside? Politics Of Water Contestation In The Mumbai-Thane Region Of India, Bharat Khushal Punjabi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation comprises three papers that focus on the interplay of formal and informal institutional processes in the sharing of water between the Mumbai Metropolitan region and an agricultural area to its north and east in Thane district. The first paper focuses on the interests and motivations that influence the everyday practices of the canal bureaucracy in the Surya project in Dahanu. This paper is largely a critique of the application of rational choice theory to analyzing bureaucratic corruption in a literature in development studies that was pioneered by Robert Wade. Using an ethnographic narrative style, the paper seeks to …


Constructing ‘Farmer’ And ‘State’ Identities In Moral Discourses About Semi-Subsistence Agriculture In North-East Brazil, Karen E. Pennesi Jan 2015

Constructing ‘Farmer’ And ‘State’ Identities In Moral Discourses About Semi-Subsistence Agriculture In North-East Brazil, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

Anthropological analysis elucidates how discourses about agriculture in one North-east Brazilian community reflect relational roles of citizens and the state, the position of farmers in society, and the relationship of individuals to their work. In these discourses, farmers are positioned as moral, hard-working, autonomous citizens, justifying their participation in low-paying activities. The declining numbers of agricultural workers is explained as a result of individual laziness or government irresponsibility. In using these discourses to take stances publicly on agricultural issues, speakers assign responsibilities and moral status to agents. In constructing rural identities, such moral discourses emphasise the symbolic value of subsistence …


Perspectivas Culturais Na Comunicação Climática (Cultural Perspectives On Climate Communication), Karen E. Pennesi Jan 2015

Perspectivas Culturais Na Comunicação Climática (Cultural Perspectives On Climate Communication), Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

Este artigo considera que a previsão climática deve ser interpretada dentro de contextos sociais, culturais e linguísticos. Dentro de uma perspectiva antropológica baseada em entrevistas, observações e um questionário, será investigado como mudanças no meio-ambiente são entendidas por diferentes indivíduos, e transformadas em previsões que são comunicadas a diversos públicos. A linguagem utilizada e a maneira como a previsão é comunicada depende da experiência e dos objetivos do previsor, enquanto que a interpretação e a avaliação da previsão por outros são influenciadas por seus diferentes objetivos, atitudes, conhecimento e práticas. Esta etnografia da comunicação enfatiza o processo da comunicação das …


Economic Survival And Borderland Rebellion: The Case Of The Allied Demoocratic Forces On The Uganda-Congo Border, Lindsay Scorgie-Porter Jan 2015

Economic Survival And Borderland Rebellion: The Case Of The Allied Demoocratic Forces On The Uganda-Congo Border, Lindsay Scorgie-Porter

Faculty Publications

One of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s oldest, most organized, and traditionally best-trained—but, arguably, least known—rebel groups is the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). Its resiliency and particularly its economic survival skills have largely been understood through the prism of Islamic extremism. Yet this narrative has proven to have serious inaccuracies and flaws. Explanations focused on terrorism, for example, do not take into consideration the ADF’s pivotal business ventures, such as cross-border trade, agriculture, and the taxing of timber forests. They not only ignore these activities but are unable to explain how the ADF was able to practice, and become successful …