Browsing by Subject "Crisis"

Development has been studied as a project pursued by imperialist nations to strengthen the social and economic order of empire and to curb communism. It was deployed just as frequently, however, in sovereign spaces. This project examines the efforts of the Italian intellectuals who led the Svimez thinktank to organize the economic development of southern Italy in the post-war era. I draw upon materials from Italy’s national archive and those published by Svimez between 1968 and 1988. Whereas imperial development sought to strengthen empire, Italian development sought to strengthen the nation. To understand the intellectual origins of post-war Italian development I turn to events that rocked the nation during the interwar period and appeared to many as a national crisis. That included labor uprisings in response to rising prices beginning in 1919 and the financial crisis of the 1930s. These events oriented technical intellectuals within Milan’s Catholic and socialist milieu to social issues and the wholeness of the nation. After the war, Svimez leaders continued to focus on such questions. They deployed statistical and economic techniques to show southern stagnation was also a crisis that threatened the nation’s integrity.

To address it, they turned to capital. Industrial capital would extend the nation’s economic fabric to the places where it was most irrational and produce the homogeneity believed to be a defining characteristic of a nation. Christian Democracy, experiencing its own electoral crisis, supported the calls for a regional development agency but reframed it as a project of social justice. This language derived from documents they drafted while organizing their party in 1942, which imagined catholic social doctrine as the foundation of the post-fascist state. Italian development became part of the post-fascist project to renew the state’s moral authority and its role as a mediator between capital and labor. I conclude Italian development was response to a national crisis that envisioned a restoration and expansion of the conditions of Italian capitalism.

This dissertation explains the influence of ethnic non-state actors on the management of International Crises. I begin by arguing that when actively engaged in a crisis, ethnic actors contribute to; crisis violence, indecisive outcomes, and the escalation of interstate tensions. They do so because their more robust sponsorship allows them to drive relatively hard bargains with the state they are in conflict with. The analysis contributes to the development of theory by filling a gap in the literature and helping to resolve an important debate. Here I consider the entire population of non-state actors as a topic for analysis. This is in contrast to the general trend, which is to treat non-state actors as part of the landscape in studies that are otherwise concerned with ethnic conflict, terrorism or nation-building. In addition, the analysis here helps resolve a debate between bargaining theorist and ethnic conflict scholars concerning the relevance of ethnicity for our understanding of (both interstate and intrastate) conflict. In particular it identifies mechanisms specifically associated with ethnic rebel groups and demonstrates that ethnicity has an influence on interstate conflict through the actions of violent non-state actors. In the analysis I build on the logic above to develop a series of testable hypotheses. I then collect a new data-set of crisis-dyad-years and identify each crisis with a participating non-state actor (NSA-Crises) as well as those with ethnic non-state actors. Next I conduct a series of quantitative test of the relationship between ethnic actor participation and crisis management. The results demonstrate that ethnically mobilized rebel groups influence crises in unique ways, causing higher levels of violence and a higher incidence of stalemate. These findings are robust to various model specifications and the relationship between ethnic actors and crisis management is not conditioned by state-based sponsorship. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis for both theory and policy-making.

"Representaciones temporales en la construcción del espacio y el sujeto atlántico en el

siglo XVII" is a study of the different representations of time, temporality and space in

literary and historical texts such as the chronicles that originated in Peru and Spain. This

project seeks to understand the new configuration of time and space that appeared at this

time and that was represented in literary texts during the Spanish Baroque period. What is

most important is that the Atlantic is not only an ocean that separated two realities but

also a new space that made possible the emergence of a new subject who combined pre-

Hispanic culture and the occidental episteme. This new subject is the product of a

translation failure of the concepts that were transported back and forth across the

Atlantic. During the XVIIth century, many literary and historical texts are produced in

order to understand this new subject. As an immediate consequence of the encounter

between American and European epistemes, thinkers and writers in all Europe begin to

hesitate between "the real" and "the images"; a crisis of the real begins. In the Americas,

writers such as Guaman Poma or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz who produce narratives which

seek to interpret the new realities brought about by the encounter with the Europeans,

whose writings do not follow to either indigenous or European conventions. These

writers mix pre-Hispanic and Western traditions to account for the new forms of

subjectivity that the conquest produced. Similarly, Spanish writers such as Cervantes or

Calderón re-work traditional European conventions in order to understand and interpret

this new historical moment/subjectivity.

Survival of a Perverse Nation traces the ways in which contemporary Armenian anxieties are congealing into the figure of the “homosexual.” As in other post-Soviet republics, homosexuality has increasingly become defined as the crisis of the times, and is understood by many as a destructive force linked to European encroachment. In Armenia, a growing right-wing nationalist movement since 2012 has been targeting LGBT and feminist activists. I suggest that this movement has arisen out of Armenia’s concerns regarding proper social and biological reproduction in the face of high rates of emigration of especially men in search of work. Many in the country blame this emigration on a post-Soviet oligarchy, with close ties to the government. This oligarchy, having quickly and massively privatized and liquidated industry and land during the war over the region of Nagorno-Karabagh (1990-1994) with Azerbaijan, created widespread un(der)employment. A national narrative attributing the nation’s survival of the 1915 Genocide and dispersion of its populations to strong morality preserved by institutions such as the Church and the family has now, in the post-Soviet era, ruptured into one of moral “perversion.” This dissertation is based on 15 months of ethnographic research, during which I participated in the work of two local non-governmental organizations: Public Information and Need for Knowledge, an LGBT rights organization and Women’s Resource Center, a feminist organization. I also conducted interviews with 150 households across Yerevan, the capital city, and did in-depth interviews with other activists, right-wing nationalists and journalists. Through psychoanalytic frameworks, as well as studies of kinship, I show how sovereignty – the longed for dream for Armenians over the last century – is felt to have failed because of the moral corruption of the illegitimate figures that fill Armenian seats of authority. I, thus, examine the ways in which a missing father of the household is discursively linked to the lack of strong leadership by a corrupt government, producing a prevalent feeling of moral disintegration that nationalists displace onto the “homosexual.”