Browsing by Subject "War"

Iraqi academics have had a pivotal role in shaping and building Iraqi society, identity, and national structures, since the country’s independence from British colonial rule. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a significant number of academics were assassinated and forced into exile and internal displacement. Since this population has always been intertwined with the state and different regimes of power, they are uniquely-situated to provide critical and multifaceted analyses on politics, the intertwined relationship between academics and power, and the complexity of exile. Through what I call a “genealogy of loss,” this ethnography traces the academic, political, and social lives of academics in contemporary Iraq to uncover the losses this population-and the Iraqi people- have incurred in contemporary Iraq. Beginning with the period from the ascendancy of the Ba‘ath Party in 1968, to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and up to the present, I examine the lives of Iraq’s exiled academics in three sites: the UK, Jordan, and Iraqi Kurdistan. I first examine their experience during the Ba‘ath era to explore their work, struggles, and hardships, as they made significant contributions to building their society and nation. I attempt to provide a nuanced anthropological account of life under the Ba‘ath regime and its ideals and complex realities. The second part examines these academics’ post-US occupation experiences both inside Iraq and in exile. I argue that the reconfiguration of the Iraqi state, and the shift from a secular, unified, one-party system into a divided space ruled by the occupying forces and their appointed sectarian and ethno-nationalist leaders and militia groups, has reconfigured the role of the academic and of higher education. The occupation and the subsequent Iraqi governments used death threats and assassinations, sectarianism, and “de-Ba‘athification” as forms of governance to restructure society. Many academics and professionals were either assassinated or forced into exile by sending them bullets and threat notes in envelopes. I explore how academics’ relatively stable jobs in pre-invasion Iraq are now “contracted lives” with devastating effects on their personal lives, intellectual projects, and the future of Iraq. Such lives entail living in spaces under precarious and temporary contracts and with residency cards subject to annual renewal or termination. These academics now live in constant fear and what I call a “plan B mode of existence.” While an extreme and violent case, this ethnography argues that the conditions of Iraqi academics in exile are connected to neoliberal global trends marked by the commercialization and corporatization of higher education, adversely affecting academic, social, and political freedoms of writing, thinking, and being in this world.

Research on the military has historically focused on the potentially de-stratifying effects of service, including reductions of racial inequality and social mobility. Taking a life course approach, this prior research tends to claim that the military is a positive turning point in the lives of disadvantaged men. Scholars point to the educational benefits of the GI Bill, racial integration, and health care to claim that military service, especially during peacetime, is largely beneficial to service members. While it is certainly the case that the military has provided some historical benefits to marginalized groups, recent research has given us strong reasons to question how beneficial military service is to stigmatized groups. Significant racial and gender inequalities remain, and in some cases, are deepening. Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews with veterans this dissertation examines how the organizational habitus of the military, despite organizational proclamations of meritocracy, may contribute to inequality. Focusing on the unintended consequences of military polices surrounding mental health problems, discrimination, and family relations, I create a synthesis of organizational and critical race theories to show how military policies may compound problems for soldiers and veterans. Focusing on the contradictions between stated organizational policies and actual practice, I show how the organizational arrangements of the military normalize overt expressions of racial and gender based discrimination, creating a sometimes-hostile environment for women and minorities and leaving them little recourse for recrimination. When policies protecting the stigmatized undermine the power and prerogatives of commanders or conflict with the militaries mission, it is not the powerful that suffer. Further, I show how military policies promoting family, such as extra pay for married soldiers, are at odds with the multiple deployments and high mental health incidences of this generations wars. Although the military relies on women on the "home front," as a basis of support, the exigencies of service undermine relationship stability.

I argue that traditional findings on the de-stratifying effects of service are partially a product of an analytical frame that neglects internal organizational dynamics.

Critiquing dyads as the unit of analysis in statistical work has become increasingly prominent; a number of scholars have demonstrated that ignoring the interdependencies and selection effects among dyads can bias our inference. My dissertation argues that the problem is even more serious. The bargaining model relies on the assumption that bargaining occurs between two states in isolation. When we relax this assumption one of the most crucial findings of these bargaining models vanishes: it is no longer irrational, even with complete information and an absence of commitment issues, for states to go to war. By accounting for the non-dyadic nature of interstate relations, we are better able to explain a number of empirical realities, and better able to predict when states will go to war.

In the first chapter of my dissertation I model a bargaining episode between three players and demonstrate its marked divergence from canonical bargaining models. In traditional two player bargaining models, it is irrational for states to go to war. I find this irrationality of war to be in part an artifact of limiting the focus to two players. In the model in chapter one, three states are bargaining over policy, and each state has a preference in relation to this policy. When these preferences diverge enough, it can become impossible for players to resolve their disputes peacefully. One implication of this model is that differences between two and three player bargaining is not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. The model in this chapter forms the core of the writing sample enclosed. Chapter two tests whether my own model is just an artifact of a particular set of assumptions. I extend the bargaining model to allow for N-players and modify the types of policies being bargained over, and I find that not only do the results hold, in many cases they are strengthened. The second chapter also changes chapter one's model so states are bargaining over resources rather than policy which results in a surprising finding: while we might expect states to be more willing to fight in defense of the homeland than over a policy, if more than two states are involved, it is in fact the disputes over territory that are significantly more peaceful.

In the final chapter of my dissertation, I attempt to apply the insights from the theoretical chapters to the study of interstate conflict and war. In particular, I compare a purely dyadic model of interstate crises to a model that accounts for non-dyadic interdependencies. The non-dyadic model that I present is an Additive and Multiplicative Effects Network model, and it substantially outperforms the traditional dyadic model, both in explaining the variance of the data and in predicting out of sample. By combining the theoretical work in the earlier chapters with the empirical work in the final chapter I can show that not only do dyadic models limit our ability to model the causes of conflict, but that by moving beyond the dyad we actually get notable gains in our ability to understand the world and make predictions.

This dissertation examines whether war has reputational consequences by analyzing the conditions under which third party actors are more or less likely to challenge combatants after the war is over. I develop a theory of reputational effects that emphasizes how information generated during wartime interacts with expectations and the characteristics of third party states to determine when war outcomes influence the decision making of potential challengers. I test this theory against competing explanations using three methodological approaches. First, I analyze the effect that the outcomes of conventional wars have on the initiation of militarized disputes using cross-national time series data from 1816-2004. Second, I use process tracing to assess whether the decision making by Japan and Germany after the Winter War and the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Cuba after Vietnam is consistent with the causal logic of my theory. Finally, I combine qualitative historiography with time series intervention analysis to assess whether the Vietnam War increased or decreased the number of challenges initiated against the United States. I find that the reputational effects of revealed effectiveness are quite broad, but are most pronounced when the fighting environment is similar. Combatants that perform poorly on the battlefield are more likely to be challenged by their potential adversaries, especially when those adversaries expect to fight them in an environment that is similar to the past war. On the other hand, the reputational effects of revealed cost tolerance are much more limited. The statistical analysis found that information about the combatant's willingness to suffer costs only influenced very weak challengers, while the case studies found that it only influenced the behavior of states that were concerned about issues that were similar to those over which the past was fought. When the issues at stake were similar, weak challengers were more emboldened than strong challengers but weak challengers with different issues at stake did not alter their behavior.

This project focuses on the visual culture that emerged from Japan's relationship with Manchuria during the Manchukuo period (1932-1945). It was during this time that Japanese official and popular interest in the region reached its peak. Fueling the Japanese attraction and investment in this region were numerous romanticized images of Manchuria's bounty and space, issued to bolster enthusiasm for Japanese occupation and development of the region. I examine the Japanese visual production of a utopian Manchuria during the 1930s and early 1940s through a variety of interrelated media and spatial constructions: graphic magazines, photography, exhibition spaces, and urban planning. Through this analysis, I address how Japanese political, military, and economic state institutions cultivated the image of Manchukuo as an ideal, multiethnic state and a "paradise" (rakudo) for settlement in order to generate domestic support and to legitimize occupation on the world stage. As there were many different colonial offices with different goals, there was no homogenous vision of the Manchurian ideal. In fact, tensions often emerged between offices as each attempted to garner support for its own respective mission on the continent. I examine these tensions and critique the strategic intersection of propaganda campaigns, artistic goals and personal fantasies of a distant, exotic frontier. In the process, this project explores how the idea of Manchuria became a panacea for a variety of economic and social problems plaguing Japan at both a national and individual level.

In keeping with the recent paradigm shift, this dissertation approaches the indigenization of Christianity in China from a different perspective. Rather than conceiving indigenization as the devolution of missionary power to indigenous leaders, the study focuses on the emergence of Chinese Protestant intellectuals and their ability to engage the public space—how they have historically engaged their religious tradition to address the broader public during crises. It does so by examining the lives and works of several Chinese Christian intellectuals as they negotiated with the most transformative events in twentieth-century Chinese history: modernizing reforms in the 1910s and 1920s, prolonged resistance against the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, and ideological domestication after 1950. With transnational and indigenous resources, these people created a captivating vision of national salvation for their country.

The first three chapters of this work reconstruct the intellectual development among mainstream Chinese Protestants in Republican China by tracing the rise and unraveling of the liberal consensus that integrated three spheres of emphasis in Christianity to lead China in progress. Such endeavor offered an inspiring message of national salvation by individual moral improvement, social implementation of reformist ministries, and transcendence of national boundaries for world solidarity. However, starting in the 1930s, a group of Christian intellectuals’ continued exploration led to increasing ideological affinity to socialism and organizational closeness to the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, another group turned to conservative theology and began to advocate for a national as well as spiritual deliverance that could not be reduced to morality and social service.

The last three chapters document these Christian intellectuals’ response to an unprecedented challenge: a centralized and ideologically charged state. During the Civil War, the Christian socialists saw the Communist triumph as an eschatological victory of “light” over “darkness,” while the conservative group struggled to create Christianity’s continuing relevance in China. Despite their adaptability and courage in the early 1950s, the totalitarian regime soon engulfed public space, and these intellectuals found themselves marginalized through either bureaucratization or exile, thwarting their nation-saving longings. Failing to achieve the public intellectual mission haunted them in their last years. It also prompted many to return to the Christian faith as they tried to reorient themselves to China’s unfinished quest for modernization, which seemed yet to reveal its hidden directions.

Overall, English monographs on Chinese Protestant intellectuals are few. This dissertation aims to narrate a story of the intellectual odyssey of Chinese Protestantism in the twentieth century, from the birth of Republican China in 1911 through the height of ideological fanaticism in the Cultural Revolution. Using case studies, the dissertation shows that the evolving perspectives of these Christian intellectuals have never escaped the gravitational pull of the grand narrative of national salvation, for which they infused highly transnational influences into active public engagement. Eventually, despite seemingly within the seekers’ grasp, the vision of deliverance proved fleeting as it became co-opted by the power of the state, yet without failing to throw subsequent followers into new cycles of hope and violence propelled by the ever-present pressures for change.

This dissertation approaches the problem of war in Christian ethics through the lens of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Drawing upon memoirs, letters, sermons, and fieldwork, it shifts the focus of moral inquiry from theoretical positions on war (e.g., just war theory and pacifism) to the domain of everyday life and the ways that local Christians theologically frame and practically reason through conflict. I explore the 1996-1997 Rwandan refugee crisis through the voice of a Catholic survivor, Marie Béatrice Umutesi, and consider how her narrative challenges both just war interpretations of this violence and "bare life" readings of refugee experience. I then examine how the Catholic Church endured rebel occupation in the eastern city of Bukavu from 1998-2000, looking specifically at how Archbishop Emmanuel Kataliko's Christological reading of the situation transformed the experience of suffering into a form of agency and galvanized the Church into collective action. I go on to explore how residents of the town of Nyankunde in northeastern Congo are constructing alternatives to the war economy and re-weaving ordinary life out of the ruins of their former lives. In showing how local narratives help us reframe the problem of war in Christian ethics, I argue that description is not a preliminary stage to moral judgment; description is moral judgment.