Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Autonomous Navigation In Cislunar Satellites, Heith Johnson

Space and Defense

Cislunar space—the region between Earth’s geosynchronous orbit (about 36,000 kilometers from Earth) and the Moon (roughly 384,000 kilometers away)—is becoming a critical frontier for future space exploration and commercialization.1 This zone includes the Moon’s orbit, transfer orbits, and the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. Additionally, as more nations and corporations launch lunar missions and establish long-term infrastructure, cislunar space is increasingly becoming a strategic focus for exploration, logistics, and transportation.

Planetary Defense As The Ethico-Legal Gateway For International Space Security, Evie Kendal

Space and Defense

Following the news in late 2024 that there was a city-killer asteroid on a possible collision course with Earth, many members of the public were shocked to learn there was no reliable global plan for managing such asteroidal and cometary impact hazards. While calculations of Asteroid 2024 YR4’s trajectory were further refined to exclude the previously reported 2-3% chance of collision in 2032, this event highlighted a major security threat: the lack of a globally coordinated, appropriately resourced, and politically supported planetary defense strategy (Gibney, 2025). In so doing, it also provided an opportunity for security experts to consider the …

Space-Based Missile Defense With Early Interceptor Launch Strategies, William Priedhorsky, James Wells

Space and Defense

There is renewed interest in space-based boost-phase intercept (SBPI) for missile defense against ICBMs of near-peer adversaries. We discuss SBPI in the context of other missile defense approaches, and address one of its challenges, which is the expense of fielding a large enough constellation of interceptors in space to counter even a small number of ICBMs. We develop an early-launch approach that could substantively reduce the required density of interceptors. Because every second matters in boost-phase defense, early launch of interceptors can significantly increase the reach of each interceptor. Early launch would require interceptors that have highly throttleable motors. Our …

Golden Dome: Seeking Space Security, Namrata Goswami

Space and Defense

The “Golden Dome” initiative [formerly Iron Dome] was announced by President Donald Trump on January 27, 2025, signifying a transformative shift in global space security policy. It fundamentally questions long-standing assumptions about deterrence, national vulnerability to missile attacks, and the role of space in strategic defense. More importantly, it emerges at a moment of acute strategic transition: the erosion of Cold War arms control frameworks, the rapid advancement of hypersonic and orbital delivery systems, and the growing integration of space into warfighting doctrines. Launched via a presidential memorandum in January 2025, Golden Dome calls for a layered missile defense system …

Space & Defense Vol. 17 No. 1 Editor's Note, Damon Coletta

Space and Defense

No abstract provided.

Space & Defense Vol. 17 No. 1 Table Of Contents, Space & Defense

Space and Defense

No abstract provided.

Space & Defense Vol. 17 No. 1 Front Matter, Space & Defense

Space and Defense

No abstract provided.

Space & Defense Volume 17 Issue 1 Summer 2026 (Whole Issue), Space & Defense

Space and Defense

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Childhood Experiential History On U.S. Vice President Jd Vance’S Personality, Amelia Brower, Aubrey Immelman

Psychology Faculty Publications

This paper presents the results of a developmental causal analysis of the adult personality of U.S. vice president JD Vance, from the conceptual perspective of personologist Theodore Millon.

Psychodiagnostically relevant data relating to Vance’s personality were collected from biographical sources and media reports and synthesized into a personality profile using the Millon Inventory of Diagnostic Criteria (MIDC), which yields 34 normal and maladaptive personality classifications congruent with DSM-III-R, DSM-IV, and DSM-5-TR.

The findings of the personality assessment were previously reported in a separate paper. Vance’s primary personality patterns were found to be Dominant/controlling and Ambitious/confident, supplemented by …

Scientific Uncertainty As Political Aggression: A Manifesto For Those Who Value Science And Want To Save It From State And Corporate Control, Stephen Demeo

Publications and Research

A manifesto is an opportunity to publicly express strongly held beliefs about a topic that is personally important to an author. It is analytical as it is creative. “Scientific Uncertainty as Political Aggression” is a manifesto that intersects science and politics. It urges those interested in science to examine two different but related topics: scientific uncertainty in measurement—what it is, how it is determined, why it’s important— and the magnification of uncertainty through legal and linguistic tactics used by right-wing politicians and politically supported corporations.

For some time now, the Republican Establishment has cast excessive doubt on scientific findings through …

When Protection Becomes Predation: Militarized Masculinity And Sexual Violence In Northeastern Nigeria, Tosin Osasona

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

The study investigates the structural and situational drivers of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) perpetrated by state security actors in the context of Nigeria’s counterinsurgency campaigns in Borno State. Drawing on militarized masculinity and strain and deprivation theories, and using a qualitative, interpretive research design, the study argues that CRSV is not an isolated or episodic form of deviance by individual soldiers and security personnel but is embedded in routine military–civilian interactions. Advancing an interactionist explanation of CRSV in Nigeria’s Islamist counterinsurgency operations, the study demonstrates that the likelihood of sexual violence increases through the interaction of gendered institutional norms, operational …

Authoritarianism, Hostility And Threat: An Analysis Of American Political Podcasts Surrounding The 2024 Presidential Election, Noah D. Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Political rhetoric surrounding key events has seen sharp increases in emotionally affective speech, intergroup sentiment, and rhetoric unbecoming of democratic societies in recent years. Similarly, semi-democratic and ideologically driven speech has become increasingly normalized within an era of political polarization and hardline beliefs in modern media. Within this economy of outrage, sensational and largely unmoderated media formats, particularly podcasts, have become a mainstay of political information and discourse. This raises an important question: how does rhetoric surrounding political events construct intergroup sentiment and authoritarian rhetoric within political media, particularly American political podcasts? Further, given political podcasts’ growing social influence in …

‘A Sense Of The Sea’: Grassroots Culture, Care, And Endurance In Swansea, Cymru, Katy Clark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis argues that under present conditions, everyday political-aesthetic life is not only about resistance or reproduction but about holding: the work of keeping people, practices, and attachment present and oriented as conditions change. Holding takes the form of care and maintenance; as practices of making, assembling, and imagining; and as the work that keeps open the possibility of renewed attachment to public things and to each other. In the field, this was named as ‘a sense of the sea’, an affective register characterized by wariness, attunement, attentiveness, orientation, and endurance. I am calling this a fragile infrastructure of …

Panopticism And Pan-Oticism: Sound-Power From Foucault To Deleuze, Eric Dillenberger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From Muzak to long range acoustic devices (LRADs), the contemporary proliferation of sonic technologies for governing moods, behaviors, and potentialities complicates the virtual absence of sound within Michel Foucault's primarily visual modality of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish, exemplified by his central conceptual model of the panopticon. This thesis develops the corollary concept of pan-oticism to theorize the transformation of sound-power and its political function within administered sonic ecologies from Foucault's disciplinary societies to Gilles Deleuze's societies of control. Within the enclosed spaces constitutive of disciplinary societies, sound-power remains subordinated to Foucault's visual logic of panopticism, extending …

Nihilistic Violence Aesthetics In Public Online Communication, Heath Nicholas Landress

Journal of Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

Public online communication has increasingly included violence-related content that is meme-based, ironic, visually stylized, multimodal, and only partially ideological. This comprehensive literature review synthesized research on online extremism, extremist memes, toxic multimodal content, dehumanizing digital communication, nihilistic violent extremism, warning behaviors, platform affordances, and youth-facing online environments. The purpose was to clarify what the literature had established; identify where the scholarship remained fragmented; and map research domains relevant to social, behavioral, public safety, and human services scholarship. The review used a structured, comprehensive literature review strategy supported by integrative synthesis procedures. The final corpus contained 34 scholarly sources, including 32 …

How Do Governments Combat Jihad Online?, Noah Cook

Honors College Theses

Since the September 11th, 2001 attacks, jihadist groups like ISIS, al-Qaeda, and al-Shabaab have used the internet as a tool for recruitment, radicalization, and propaganda dissemination. Since then, governments, non-governmental organizations, and private companies have developed strategies to combat jihadism on the internet. This paper examines how these actors have worked to mitigate the digital jihadist footprint and its effects by analyzing three main approaches to countering violent Islamist extremism on the internet: counter narrative initiatives, awareness-raising programs, and content removals. This paper finds that each of these methods has its own strengths and weaknesses. Counter narrative campaigns show the …

Parameters Autumn 2026, Usawc Press

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Recursive Artificial Intelligence Training And The Homogenization Of Discourse, Sam Hemesath

Political Science Honors Projects

As Large Language Models (LLMs) begin to produce text on the internet, the same repository from which training data for LLMs are scraped, LLMs will start to train on data they produced. What will happen to future models when LLMs are trained on their own text? Scholars have raised concerns about the possibility that LLMs homogenize language and discourse. These concerns are further exaggerated as LLMs begin to infect their own repositories, marking a turn from human-produced training data sets. In this paper I simulate a recursive training loop by prompting a popular open-source LLM with 1000 prompts and using …

Cosmetic Nationalism: Fashion And Feminine Performance In Trump-Aligned America, Nicola Rountree-Williams

Undergraduate Theses, Capstones, and Recitals

This paper examines how fashion, beauty, and feminine presentation operate as political tools within Trump-aligned American culture. Drawing on historical examples from fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, and European aristocratic fashion, it argues that aesthetics have long been used to reinforce nationalism, gender hierarchy, and political authority. The paper analyzes contemporary trends such as “Republican makeup” and “Mar-a-Lago face,” arguing that these hyper-feminine and highly racialized beauty standards function as performances of loyalty, wealth, and traditional femininity within Trump-aligned politics. Through figures such as Kristi Noem, the paper demonstrates how women’s appearances can visually legitimize masculine authority while limiting women’s autonomy …

Replication Stata File For The Article "Charlie Kirk's Assassination And Cross-Partisan Dialogue", Andrew Scott Bledsoe, Susan Turner Haynes

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

How Do U.S. Advisors Interpret Successes, Failures, And Strategic Adaptations During Joint Operations In The Philippines, And What Do These Interpretations Reveal About The Processes Shaping Advisory Outcomes Applicable To Future Strategy In The Pacific?, Steven C. Miller

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines was a 14-year mission that entailed a 21st-century, long-term special operation conducted by the United States with a partnered nation in the Pacific. This qualitative study explored how U.S. advisors interpret successes, failures, and strategic adaptations during joint operations in the Philippines, and what these interpretations reveal about the processes shaping advisory outcomes applicable to future strategy in the Pacific. The research evaluated the successes, challenges, and adaptations the U.S. soldiers experienced while deploying as advisors for counterterrorism operations. Data was collected by surveying participants who served as members of the U.S. task force in the southern …

Admiration Without Worship: The Fallibilization Of The Hero And The Moral Logic Of Modernity, Mohsen Askari

Heroism Science

This article develops the concept of the fallibilization of the hero, defined as the cultural process through which admired figures become visible as flawed, historically situated, morally complex human beings. It argues that modernity does not abolish heroism but changes the conditions under which it can be believed. In hagiographic systems, heroes are protected from contradiction and presented as pure or destined; in modern‑critical systems, greatness can coexist with error, weakness, and compromise. The article situates fallibilization within debates on heroism science, hagiography, charismatic authority, collective memory, and modern biography, proposing a four‑part typology of heroic forms: hagiographic, developmental, fallibilized, …

Shade Tree Democracy: Maintaining Peace In Post-Conflict Societies, Jaafar M. Sh Jama

Dissertations and Theses

Under what conditions does customary law contribute to maintaining peace in post-conflict societies? I study this question in the context of Somalia, a country that has lacked an effective central government since the outbreak of civil war in 1991. I argue that in the wake of civil war, traditional systems of government are capable of facilitating peace whereas governance by the modern state apparatus is often an impediment to peace. The underlying mechanisms that I argue explain the effectiveness of a traditional system of governance are that it is 1) in tune with broadly-held societal values, 2) intuitive for citizens …

We Don't See Race, We See Blue: A Case Study Of Police Unions As Racialized Organizations, Sarahfina Aubrey Peterson

Dissertations and Theses

In the late 1960s, police began to unionize. Today, they are the most well-organized labor force in the United States, with 70% to 80% of sworn officers now represented by a union. Though it has been decades, little scholarship has developed about how police unions affect policing. Much of the research that does exist uses race-neutral frames to address an organization steeped in racial history. This study aims to address this gap in scholarship, in part, by introducing race as a motivation for and explanation of organizational output.

This research applies Victor Ray's racialized organizations theory to police unions. I …

Political Linguistics And Epistemic Agency: Universal Write Publications And The Defense Of Global Black Knowledge, Ayo Sekai

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

As linguistic erasure intensifies across the African world, the preservation of African-centered knowledge systems has become both a scholarly and political imperative. This article examines the relationship between linguistic imperialism, epistemic agency, and scholarly sovereignty through the intellectual trajectory of Dr. Ayo Sekai, political linguist and founder of Universal Write Publications (UWP), a Black woman–owned academic press dedicated to culturally grounded scholarship. Expanding traditional understandings of linguistic imperialism, Dr. Sekai advances political linguistics beyond structural language dominance to examine who holds linguistic power and how that power operates through dog whistle politics, signaling terms, and policy language code—discursive patterns embedded …

Winnie's Feminism: A Tribute To Mama Dr. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela As A Radical Feminist From 1986-2018, Anna Lefatshe Moagi

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Growing up in South Africa and having read several “tell-all” biographies by influential women have made this researcher aware of the struggles of women to be recognised and valued within their social environments. The many names that come to mind, when speaking of women’s voices that challenged their position in our society, belong to those of struggle veterans such as Adelaide Tambo, Ruth First, Lilian Ngoyi, Albertina Sisulu, Thandi Modise, Baleka Mbethe, Leymah Gbowee, Ruth Mompati, Charlotte Maxeke, Joice Majuru, Thuli Madontsela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Their as women leaders roles remain undervalued (Shekhawat 2015). These phenomenal influential women and many …

Trump's Rise: Will China Disrupt The Current Order Or Maintain It?, Ahmad Nurcholis, Wasisto Raharjo Jati

Global: Jurnal Politik Internasional

This paper examines the long-term likelihood of a US-China war, particularly in light of Donald Trump's US presidential win. The two nations have consistently experienced strained relations and intense rivalry, especially throughout the Trump and Biden presidencies. Both leaders are worried about China's growing assertiveness. While these nations are still battling over trade, this situation could easily escalate into an armed conflict later on. Due to China's increasing economic power and America's reduced influence in specific areas, there are predictions of a change in how the world is governed. This paper examines the question of whether China will become a …

Elite Mobilisation And Norm Contestation In A Pluralistic Legal System: A Case Study Of The Gambia, Oumie Njie, Abdou Barrow

Global: Jurnal Politik Internasional

This paper examines elite mobilisation and norm contestation within The Gambia's pluralistic legal framework, encompassing common, customary, and Sharia law, in the context of implementing the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Despite ratification and domestic legislation, implementation has been significantly challenged by religious leaders and traditional authorities who mobilised resistance against key CRC provisions, including prohibitions on child marriage, child labour, and female genital mutilation (FGM), citing incompatibility with local customs and beliefs. This resistance manifested both implicitly through neglect and explicitly through direct contestation. The paper highlights the tension between civil society organisations and international human …

A Phenomenological Study Of The Experiences Of Black Students In Criminal Justice Programs And Its Implications On Social Justice, Demetrius C. Dacres

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This study examined the experiences of Black students who graduated with degrees in criminal justice within the last five years, as well as professors serving criminal justice programs. In this study, Black students are defined as those who identify as Black or African American, and the research focused on a criminal justice higher education institution’s educational program in the Northeast. This qualitative phenomenological study drew on Lent’s Social Cognitive Career Theory and Tinto’s Student Integration Model to investigate how Black students experienced criminal justice programs and the resources and strategies they utilized to navigate and adapt. The study addressed a …

Review Essay: Human Security And Civilian Protection During Violent Conflict, Lauren Spink

The Journal of Social Encounters

No abstract provided.