Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

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

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Winter Soldiers and Moonlight Rebels
    (2024) Cowan, Michael; Reed, William; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    How do rebel groups cultivate devotion? Civil conflict scholars have found that when rebel groups fill their ranks with ideologically committed soldiers they are able to operate more effectively in several ways. However, the mechanisms by which rebel groups attain such devoted followers remains unexplained. I propose that insurgencies are able to cultivate devotion when they successfully deploy an ideology that balances between explanatory power and complexity. An ideology that manages to make sense of a political environment with minimal complexity provides adherents with certainty, which is a source of substantial utility. Groups that deploy maximally potent ideologies foster the emergence of a "hard core" of soldiers who depend upon the certainty afforded by the ideology and will therefore go to great lengths to act on its behalf. I articulate a theory of ideological potency and propose an associated function that expresses how much utility an individual will derive from that ideology via its certainty mechanism. I then analyze and compare the PIRA, the Viet Minh and Renamo insurgencies to demonstrate how variation in the extent to which they effectively balanced between explanatory power and complexity in their ideologies can explain variation in their capacity to attract, generate, control, and sustain devoted soldiers.
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    The Extreme Far-Right, Ideology, And Violence: An Exploration Into The Role Of Multiple Ideological Affiliation On Violent Mobilization
    (2020) Pendergast, Bailey J.; LaFree, Gary; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Despite anecdotal instances of far-right extremists exhibiting multiple ideological affiliations, the relationship between extremists who adhere to multiple sub-ideologies and their propensity for violence is unknown. The present study contributes to the understanding of how multiple sub-ideologies impact the likelihood of violence by using differential association theory to test the hypothesis that far-right extremists in the US who adhere to multiple sub-ideologies have a greater propensity for extremist violence than single sub-ideology peers. Using data from 922 individuals who radicalized in the US, logistic regression tests the hypothesis that extremists with multiple ideological affiliations will have a greater propensity for violence and finds no significant positive relationship. Differences in the amount of differential associations may not affect violent outcomes. Moving forward, researchers should expand on and refine these findings to address an emerging issue in extremism and contribute to novel research.
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    NATIONALISM DURING ARMED CONFLICT: A STUDY OF IDEOLOGY AND IDENTITY IN THE BOSNIAN WAR, 1992-1995
    (2017) Zic, Borjan; Lichbach, Mark; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation asks when and why leaders and members of ethno-religious groups choose to express one type of nationalist ideology and ethnic identity during armed conflict instead of another. It argues that patterns of wartime violence and external actors play direct and indirect roles in making certain forms of nationalism and ethnic identity more useful for dealing with wartime circumstances. The dissertation advances this argument by joining together four independent empirical chapters. Each empirical chapter has its own research question, its own dependent variable, and its own theoretical argument. All four chapters focus on one ethno-religious group in conflict: the Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s war in Bosnia. Methodologically, I apply statistical analysis to an original dataset of over 3,700 speech acts by Bosnian Muslim leaders of the wartime Bosnian government in order to explain why the frequency and form of their wartime nationalist rhetoric varied. I also employ historical evidence and qualitative text analysis to reveal the mechanisms underlying the statistical relationships. In addition, one of the empirical chapters analyzes survey data to explain why, following the war, some Bosnian Muslims supported politicians that made religious appeals. Using this approach, the dissertation finds the following results. First, intense violence against the predominantly Bosnian Muslim population of wartime Sarajevo prompted the Bosnian Muslim leaders of the Bosnian government to use nationalist ideological claims more frequently in domestic media. Second, contingent wartime events spurred these leaders to shift their rhetoric in domestic media from civic to ethnic nationalism in the second year of the war. Specifically, internal power struggles and external peace proposals increased the usefulness of making ethnic nationalist claims to domestic audiences. Third, Bosnian leaders’ need for external aid combined with their uncertain likelihood of receiving Western military support led them to use both civic and religious nationalist rhetoric in foreign media. Fourth, Bosnian Muslims who experienced internal displacement during the war became more religious as a means of coping with the trauma of displacement, which in turn made them more likely to vote for religiously oriented politicians after the conflict.
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    OBAMA IN TIME AND LULA IN VEJA: A CASE STUDY OF PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN COVERAGE IN NEWS MAGAZINES OF THE UNITED STATES AND BRAZIL
    (2011) Pereira, Sonia Cristina Pedrosa; BEASLEY, MAURINE H.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Journalism and its links with nationhood and the ideologies that have built the nations (race, gender, and class, according to the historians) are the subjects of this study. They are researched through the analysis of the news coverage of two presidential elections which were remarkable in the both countries studied, the United States and Brazil. The elections of the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama, and of the first worker president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, are comparable for their symbolism and historical relevance. Textual and historical analyses are combined in this dissertation to investigate, in the narratives of each nation and its ideologies, the meanings that the news magazines analyzed produced during the coverage of those elections. A total of 24 cover stories published in Veja (Brazil) and Time magazine (United States) within a period of approximately eight months in the years of 2008 (Time) and 2002 (Veja) are analyzed. In this close textual reading, visual grammar is also taken in account, since journalism is a language that communicates with its readership by means of layouts (especially in the case of magazines). In this study of interpretive character, the critical discourse analysis approach is used to investigate meaning ranging from the layout of the news magazines (with pictures and so on) to the lexical choices in the written text. This is a study mainly of language and its relationship with the world, in which ideology occupies a special place. It is an international research, a cross-cultural examination of the news coverage of two important elections. In this comparative study, made possible due to the knowledge of the two native languages of the publications (English and Portuguese) by the researcher, the target language is in fact international journalistic language. The study found journalism both working for social change and at same time reproducing racist ideologies in the United States. In Brazil, the examination showed that journalism does not always nurture nationalistic sentiments, but that it can be used to keep the hegemony of one region over the rest of the country.