Government & Politics Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2775
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Item Raising Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Youth, Education, and Peacebuilding in the Post-war State(2018) Schneider, Mary Kate; Soltan, Karol; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1995, the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) ended the Bosnian War, a conflict fought along ethnic lines that claimed nearly 100,000 lives. The DPA created a new Bosnian government based on a power-sharing model that allocates political power according to the ethnic composition of the population. Although this arrangement has preserved an uneasy peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), it has also produced a political system in which ethnic politics prevail and social divisions are institutionally reinforced, particularly at the local level. Since 1995, institutions such as education have trended toward ‘separate but equal’ models. I argue that this poses a threat to the reconciliation process in BiH. Therefore, the question that this dissertation seeks to address is: what is the effect of ethnically divided education on the post-war generation of Bosnians? To answer this question, the dissertation traces the relationship between the extreme consociationalism first articulated at Dayton and the Bosnian education system, in which 14 education ministries—appointed through an entrenched local tradition of (ethnic) party patronage—have created the competing and often contradictory policies that currently govern Bosnian education. These policies include ethnically separating students into “two schools under one roof,” and adopting curricula and textbooks that favor one ethnic group over another. Because education is integral to identity formation, it stands to reason that education can therefore shape national identity as well as civic and social attitudes. Drawing from original survey data, focus groups, and interviews, I measure the attitudes of third- and fourth-year Bosnian high school students toward other ethnic groups, exploring whether or not there exists a pattern of intolerance that can be traced to school type. Although students across BiH reported largely tolerant attitudes toward other ethnic groups, patterns in the data also suggest that the notion of a codified Bosnian civic national identity is lacking. This lack of civic national identity is problematic because it means that not only is the post-war Bosnian state built upon a foundation of separateness rather than unity, but that little progress on national unity has been made in the twenty-two years since the DPA ended the war.Item Must Achievement Gaps Persist? The Struggle for Educational Reform in Prince George's County, Maryland(2011) Jones, Cheryl; Uslaner, Eric M; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project begins with the position that the persistence of the academic achievement gap suggests the need for a new way of thinking about the gap and the efforts to eliminate it. To be successful, reform efforts need to address both the school and community issues that impact academic achievement. Community stakeholders must come together as a community to build an education regime that has improving academic achievement as its agenda. This work presents a case study of a community in need of a new education regime, Prince George's County, Maryland. The county has a majority African American population and a large black middle class. For years the county's school system has produced disappointing results on state assessments. Additionally, the system has been hampered by the existence of a governing regime focused on its own preservation instead of academic achievement. In 2002, county residents interested in educational reform were handed an enormous opportunity to challenge the existing education regime when the elected school board was dissolved by the state legislature. This action came after years of subpar academic performance, after repeated allegations of fiscal mismanagement, and after months of feuding between the school board and superintendent. This work posits the ouster of the elected school board was a focusing event that disrupted the existing regime and provided an opportunity for regime change. An examination of county education politics after 2002 shows that regime change did not occur. The county was unable to move beyond the first stage of a three stage process of regime change. Regime change efforts were hindered by a number of obstacles. The most prominent was the near constant turnover of school system leadership since 2002. Other obstacles to coalition building and regime change include; a political environment hostile to cooperation, a disengaged citizenry, and a dearth of prominent reform advocates. For these and other reasons, the old regime still maintains control of the education arena and the system still struggles to improve academic achievement.Item MYTH, IDENTITY AND CONFLICT: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ROMANIAN AND SERBIAN TEXTBOOKS(2009) Dutceac Segesten, Anamaria Georgiana; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The study compares two cases of ethnically diverse societies sharing a substantial set of characteristics but where inter-group relations developed in two opposite directions. In Serbia the entire decade of the 1990s was witness to widespread violence, first in the wars of Yugoslav secession (1991-1996) and later in the conflict over the status of the Kosovo region (1998-1999). In Romania, despite one eruption of interethnic violence in March 1990, there have been no further clashes between Romanians and Hungarians, even if a latent suspicion continued to be verbally manifested between these two communities. By comparing these cases, the possibility opens to verify the impact of taught history on the representations of self and others and, from this premise, to examine its influence on the potential for peaceful or conflictual ethnic relations. The questions asked are: Is myth, as identified in secondary literature in other areas (literature, media, and political discourse) present in the history textbooks of Romania and Serbia? If myths are to be found in history schoolbooks, are there differences in the ways these myths define the in-group and the relationship with the Other between a country that experienced interethnic conflict and a country that did not? The working hypothesis based upon the existing literature is simple: in multiethnic societies, history textbooks reflect the elite's, especially state elite's, interpretation of the past and outline the acceptable/ desirable representations of the dominant ethnic group and of the diverse Others with whom this group interacts. If the history and the self image of the dominant group are presented in a manner that highlights the differences and the uneven distribution of power between the dominant and the minority ethnic group(s), the possibility of domestic tensions increases and, if other conditions are present, there is even a rise in violent civil war along ethnic lines. The study finds that myths are present in the post-communist history textbooks of Romania and Serbia, both in their visual content and in their text. Despite expectations to the contrary, however, the differences in the types of myth used in a conflict case (Serbia) and in a non-conflict case (Romania) are small, thus disputing the importance awarded to history education in preventing or alleviating conflicts.Item Cervantes' Don Quixote and the Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry(2006-05-07) Rodriguez, Arcelia Maria; Butterworth, Charles E; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)