Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item Understanding Women’s Labor Force Participation in Sub-Saharan Africa Through Migration, Kin Support and Relationship Dynamics(2024) Kim, Seung Wan; Madhavan, Sangeetha; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Family sociologists and demographers have long maintained a profound interest in understanding the determinants and consequences of female labor force participation. Much of this research has predominantly concentrated on the Western contexts, albeit with a handful of remarkable works shedding light on the Global South, where is also witnessing a growing focus. However, our comprehension of the intricate interplay between gender, work, and family in sub-Saharan Africa remains insufficient and restricted. Over the years, there has been a steady increase in women's education and labor force participation in this region. Yet, many women continue to grapple with sociocultural barriers that hinder them from fully harnessing their employment opportunities.Particularly noteworthy is the mounting tension between conforming to traditional gender roles and meeting household needs through women's paid employment, especially in the face of increasingly challenging economic circumstances. This challenge is particularly pronounced among marginalized populations, such as rural and low-income urban population. My doctoral dissertation seeks to address three hitherto understudied issues: 1) examining the relationship between an individual's employment status and that of other household members in South Africa, and how it influences that individual's likelihood of future migration, 2) investigating the role of employment among kin members and the support provided by family members in facilitating women's employment in Nairobi, Kenya, and 3) exploring the dynamics of women's work concerning union formalization, motherhood, and livelihood in Nairobi. The dissertation comprises two quantitative analyses and one qualitative methods study, resulting in three papers that draw from two datasets collected in South Africa and Kenya.Item Autochthonous and Introduced Stores of Biomass Value: Measuring Resilience Outcomes of Enset and Eucalyptus as Green Assets in Three Representative Smallholder Farm Systems of Ethiopia(2020) Morrow, Nathan; Hansen, Matthew C; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fundamental shifts in the ability to observe our world with synoptic satellite remote sensing and the profusion of trend tracking longitudinal data sources not only better inform us of the mounting trouble our planet is in but also provide completely new perspectives on basic shared understandings, such as how many trees grow on Earth and where they take root. Observing the dispersed pattern of increasing tree cover across a multidecadal satellite mosaic, developed by Matt Hansen and colleagues at University of Maryland at College Park, sparked an interest in the ramifications of this unanticipated change, marked clearly upon the landscape in Ethiopia. The following chapters explore the relation of changing amounts of autochthonous treelike perrenial enset and introduced eucylyptus trees, commonly found on Ethiopian farms, to smallholder resilience, food security, and well-being. Spatially informed longitudinal models for three representative subnational data sets are used to investigate the central thesis of this dissertation—trees and treelike perennials on farms in rural Ethiopia indicate a fundamental store of value in living biomass, building a household’s assets over time through improved biomass management, for resilient small farm livelihoods that ensure food security and related well-being. Green assets acting as biomass stores indicate natural “value,” representing transformed and stored energy of the sun, that Blaikie and Brookfield (1987) considered inadequately captured as a no-cost contribution to the “use value” concept in development economics, economic geography production, and income-focused research, as well as in Marx’s (1887/2013) labor-focused value constructs that only briefly acknowledge workers are helped by the transformative “natural forces” at work on the land. Model results presented in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 reveal a lack of on-farm trees and treelike perennials often indicates biomass poverty and energy insecurity. Chronic biomass poverty, measured with spatially aware hierarchal models, is related to an inability to maintain a sufficient level of essential green assets, thereby contributing to poor resilience and well-being outcomes on small farms. On the other hand, medium and longer term asset accumulation supports improved well-being when livelihood strategies make use of farm forests, other on-farm trees, and treelike perennials.Item The Distribution of Care: A Modular Facility for the Treatment of Disease-Stricken Communities in Africa(2020) Winters, Kelsey; Gabrielli, Julie; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Africa experiences a disproportionate amount of the global disease burden, and existing health care centers struggle to meet everyday patient needs. During a disease epidemic, this inability to accommodate communities is exacerbated by a lack of resources to diagnose and treat infectious disease as well as a physical separation from the location of outbreaks. This thesis investigates how patients of disease outbreaks in Africa can be better accommodated through the exploration of a modular health facility capable of treating communities no matter when and where an outbreak occurs. Outbreaks unexpectedly affect vulnerable populations, and immediate action is crucial to contain the disease. The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is utilized as a case study in this thesis, considering its relevance as an ongoing epidemic. Due to the abrupt and destructive nature of disease, a modular and flexible health facility is needed to handle any outbreak in any location.Item ELECTORAL LOSS AND CONTENTION(2019) Patch, Allison Kathryn; Birnir, Johanna K; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an exploration of the consequences of elections for those kept out of power. I draw from both the winner-loser gap literature, which explores attitude differences between winners and losers following elections focusing on individual voters as they process electoral results, and the electoral contention literature, which examines the causes and consequences of protests, riots, and violence connected to electoral contests focusing on the elites. My dissertation works to bring these two literatures by examining the factors that create opportunities for attitude and behavioral change for those who are unable to access power in the aftermath of elections. The first two papers use surveys to focus on individuals—their personal identities and their attitudes towards democracy and political contention or violence. The third paper examines the motivations of individual leaders in making public accusations of fraud and the consequences these accusations have on the voters’ perception of the legitimacy of elections and the likelihood of electoral contention. Through the ideas explored in these papers, this dissertation provides further context for differences in attitudes between winners and losers towards democracy and contention, while also cautioning some of the more dire predictions of the consequences of the gap in perceptions and attitudes between winners and losers. Additionally, by examining the ramifications of fraud accusations in the wake of election loss, we can see a better picture of the kinds of motivations that can successfully mobilize those out of power to contention.Item Corruption, Reform, and Revolution in Africa's Third Wave of Protest(2019) Lewis, Jacob Scott; McCauley, John F; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What explains diverging calls for reform and revolution in Africa over the past ten years? African countries have made substantial strides toward actual democratic devel-opment, including a concerted effort to address corruption. As African democracies have strengthened, calls by citizens for anti-corruption reform have grown, highlighting the progress that is being made. Yet, in recent years, some anti-corruption movements have called instead for revolution - completely replacing the state or seceding altogether. What explains these calls for revolution? I argue that we need to understand how differ-ent types of corruption shape contentious goals. When corruption generates material benefits, citizens lose trust in politicians but do not lose trust in the system. In response, they call for reform, seeking to improve the system. When corruption generates system-ic benefits (distorting the system altogether), citizens lose trust in the institutions and instead call for revolution. I test this using individual-level data from survey experi-ments as well as large-n surveys, and group-level data using statistical analysis of pro-test events as well as case studies. I find strong support that types of corruption matter greatly in shaping contentious politics in Africa.Item AN ESSAY ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF INDUSTRIAL POLICY IN ETHIOPIA(2018) Tolina, Eyob Tekalign; Crocker, David A; Destler, Mac M; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I present a political economy analysis of the post-1991 industrial policy (IP) in Ethiopia. In Chapter one, I set the context for the study and present the research methodology. In the second chapter, I present a comprehensive overview of the literature. After introducing key concepts and reviewing old and new debates on IP, I justify why a political economy framework is a promising way to analyze industrial policy. In Chapter three, I present the historical and current political and economic profile of Ethiopia. I emphasize Khan’s (2005) notion of a “political settlement” as a way of understanding the political economy of a nation in relation to its industrial policy outcomes. I also employ as a main analytic lens Whitfield et al.’s (2015) framework for the politics of industrial policy in Africa. This lens offers three conditions – mutual interest, pockets of efficiency and learning for productivity – as necessary for successful implementation of industrial policy. The Whitefield framework argues that the emergence of these three conditions is shaped by the type of clientelist (donor/client) political organizations that exist in a nation. As such, the model places strong emphasis on material incentives and constraints. In Chapters four and five, I test the relevance of this model to explain and evaluate Ethiopia’s IP. The analysis therein is divided into three politically significant time periods. The focus is to investigate the relations between the dominant clientelist political organization in each time period and the existence or absence of the three Whitfield conditions. The study shows that the Whitfield model neither adequately explains IP results nor guides Ethiopia toward better results. In a bid to establish a more credible and complete version of political economy, the study builds on and supplements the Whitfield model by defending an additional condition necessary for IP success, namely, the political and moral power of concerned citizens. Such an alternative approach I develop in Chapter six, which highlights the importance of such notions as fairness and equity, citizen rights, participatory institutions and civil society in the theory and practice of moral economy.Item Violence and Belonging: The impact of citizenship law on violence in Sub-Saharan Africa(2016) Fruge, Anne Christine; Birnir, Johanna K; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Many countries in Africa are embroiled in heated debates over who belongs where. Sometimes insider/outsider debates lead to localized skirmishes, but other times they turn into minor conflict or even war. How do we explain this variation in violence intensity? Deviating from traditional explanations regarding democratization, political or economic inequality, or natural resources, I examine how nationality laws shape patterns in violence. Citizenship rules determine who is or is not a member of the national political community. Nationality laws formalize these rules, thus representing the legal bond between individuals and the state. Restrictive nationality laws increase marginalization, which fuels competition between citizenship regime winners and losers. This competition stokes contentious insider/outsider narratives that guide ethnic mobilization along the dual logics of threat and opportunity. Threats reduce resource levels and obstruct the exercise of rights. Opportunities provide the chance to reclaim lost resources or clarify nationality status. Other work explains conditions necessary for insider/outsider violence to break out or escalate from the local to the national level. I show that this violence intensifies as laws become more exclusive and escalates to war once an outsider group with contested foreign origins faces denationalization. Groups have contested foreign origins where the “outsider” label conflates internal and foreign migrants. Where outsiders are primarily in-migrants, it is harder to deny the group’s right to citizenship, so nationality laws do not come under threat and insider/outsider violence remains constrained to minor conflict. Using an original dataset of Africa’s nationality laws since 1989, I find that event frequency and fatality rates increase as laws become more restrictive. Through case studies, I explain when citizenship struggles should remain localized, or escalate to minor or major conflict. Next, I apply a nationality law lens to individual level conflict processes. With Afrobarometer survey data, I show that difficulty obtaining identity papers is positively correlated with the fear and use political violence. I also find that susceptibility to contentious narratives is positively associated with using violence to achieve political goals. Finally, I describe the lingering effects of a violent politics of belonging using original survey data from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana.Item Police Legitimacy in Sub-Saharan Africa(2016) Behlendorf, Brandon Paul; LaFree, Gary; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Is fairness in process and outcome a generalizable driver of police legitimacy? In many industrialized nations, studies have demonstrated that police legitimacy is largely a function of whether citizens perceive treatment as normatively fair and respectful. Questions remain whether this model holds in less-industrialized contexts, where corruption and security challenges favor instrumental preferences for effective crime control and prevention. Support for and against the normative model of legitimacy has been found in less-industrialized countries, yet few have simultaneously compared these models across multiple industrializing countries. Using a multilevel framework and data from respondents in 27 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (n~43,000), I find evidence for the presence of both instrumental and normative influences in shaping the perceptions of police legitimacy. More importantly, the internal consistency of legitimacy (defined as obligation to obey, moral alignment, and perceived legality of the police) varies considerably from country to country, suggesting that relationships between legality, morality, and obligation operate differently across contexts. Results are robust to a number of different modeling assumptions and alternative explanations. Overall, the results indicate that both fairness and effectiveness matter, not in all places, and in some cases contrary to theoretical expectations.Item Balancing Belligerents or Feeding the Beast: Transforming Conflict Traps(2016) Hayden, Nancy Kay; Orr, Robert; Steinbruner, John; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the end of the Cold War, recurring civil conflicts have been the dominant form of violent armed conflict in the world, accounting for 70% of conflicts active between 2000-2013. Duration and intensity of episodes within recurring conflicts in Africa exhibit four behaviors characteristic of archetypal dynamic system structures. The overarching questions asked in this study are whether these patterns are robustly correlated with fundamental concepts of resiliency in dynamic systems that scale from micro-to macro levels; are they consistent with theoretical risk factors and causal mechanisms; and what are the policy implications. Econometric analysis and dynamic systems modeling of 36 conflicts in Africa between 1989 -2014 are combined with process tracing in a case study of Somalia to evaluate correlations between state characteristics, peace operations and foreign aid on the likelihood of observed conflict patterns, test hypothesized causal mechanisms across scales, and develop policy recommendations for increasing human security while decreasing resiliency of belligerents. Findings are that observed conflict patterns scale from micro to macro levels; are strongly correlated with state characteristics that proxy a mix of cooperative (e.g., gender equality) and coercive (e.g., security forces) conflict-balancing mechanisms; and are weakly correlated with UN and regional peace operations and humanitarian aid. Interactions between peace operations and aid interventions that effect conflict persistence at micro levels are not seen in macro level analysis, due to interdependent, micro-level feedback mechanisms, sequencing, and lagged effects. This study finds that the dynamic system structures associated with observed conflict patterns contain tipping points between balancing mechanisms at the interface of micro-macro level interactions that are determined as much by factors related to how intervention policies are designed and implemented, as what they are. Policy implications are that reducing risk of conflict persistence requires that peace operations and aid interventions (1) simultaneously increase transparency, promote inclusivity (with emphasis on gender equality), and empower local civilian involvement in accountability measures at the local levels; (2) build bridges to horizontally and vertically integrate across levels; and (3) pave pathways towards conflict transformation mechanisms and justice that scale from the individual, to community, regional, and national levels.Item HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS: TWENTIETH CENTURY BLACK AMERICAN TRAVEL NARRATIVES ABOUT AFRICA(2015) Albeny, Kenyatta; Peterson, Carla; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that black American travel narratives about Africa reflect the authors' perception of their identity at particular moments in history. It suggests that these perceptions are informed by historical, political, economic, and social circumstances. Specifically, it demonstrates how associations with Africa--real and imagined--have evolved over time due to black Americans' shifting social and political status in the United States. Black American travel narratives about Africa written during the second half of the twentieth century are the focus of this study. This period is marked by drastic political and social changes taking place both in Africa and the United States including decolonization, independence, and the aftermath of apartheid and the Cold War in Africa as well as the Civil Rights movement, desegregation, and integration in the United States. Although Africa and the politics therein are the narratives' purported theme, I argue that their primary focus is black American identity. My dissertation demonstrates how black American travel writers have used their narratives about Africa to define black American identity and to clarify the relationship between black Americans and Africa. At the heart of this dissertation is an interest in these relationships and a concern about the "baggage" that black Americans bring to perceptions of their identity and relationship with Africa, particularly their historical experiences as Americans, their knowledge and understanding of Africa and its history and how that "baggage" colors their perceptions of their relationship to the continent and its people. This "baggage" includes many factors including class, gender, personal history, as well as notions of race and nationalism. Texts in this study include Richard Wright's Black Power (1954), Era Bell Thompson's Africa, Land of My Fathers (1954), Maya Angelou's The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), Marita Golden's Migrations of the Heart (1983), Eddy L. Harris's Native Stranger (1992), Keith Richburg's Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997) and Lynne Duke's Mandela, Mobutu, and Me (2003).