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.
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item The Strategy of Civil Conflict: The Determinants of Conflict Intensity and Effect of Intensity on Duration(2019) Plettner, Theodore; Reed, William; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Conflict onset and duration have been studied extensively, however the dynamics of what happens within a conflict have received much less attention. At the center of the issue of conflict dynamics is conflict intensity. Some civil conflicts resemble interstate wars with armies using conventional tactics which kill thousands of people per year, while many others consist of small guerrilla conflicts that kill only dozens. The capabilities of the rebel groups in these conflicts determine the tactics they will adopt, which in turn determines how intensely the conflict will be fought. Foreign intervention into civil conflicts influences the tactical decisions of actors, further increasing conflict intensity. To add to the disastrous effects of high-intensity conflicts, when intensity increases, conflicts also last longer, increasing the period over which the damage from these conflicts is inflicted.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 Does Foreign Aid Lead to Armed Civil Conflict? Examining Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnic Exclusion(2014) Kishi, Roudabeh; Wilkenfeld, Jonathan; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The impact of aid flows and ethnic exclusion on civil conflict in Africa is explored. Ethno-politics and informal institutions dictate discriminatory spending allocations (in the form of political patronage flows) in most African states. The unequal allocation of these resources can foster grievances in excluded populations. When states gain access to non-tax revenues (i.e., foreign aid), it is often allocated in a similar fashion. When inequalities in access to resources lie along ethnic lines, the likelihood and intensity of conflict is higher as ethnicity can offer an important mobilizing source in organizing political action. Using newly-available disaggregated data to explore these relationships at the subnational-level, statistical results are found supporting this theory. Additionally, micro-level analysis of these mechanisms bolsters the statistical findings in a country-case study of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the locations of aid projects, ethnic group settlement patterns, and civil conflict sites are mapped using geographic information systems.Item Water Resources, Institutional Capacity and Civil Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa(2009) Haxton, Wanda Jeanne; Quester, George; Kim, Soo Yeon; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Case studies where both scarcity and conflict are present have dominated research on the nexus between environmental scarcity and conflict. This dissertation offers a quantitative analysis of the effect changes in water resources have on domestic conflict in 42 Sub-Saharan African nations which differ across the dependent variable, domestic conflict, and which vary across the explanatory environmental variables. This research advances the discussion of the causal effects of environmental scarcity and degradation on domestic conflict in four ways. It grounds the domestic conflict-environmental degradation discussion in the civil and social conflict literature; research on environmental security concludes that environmental change is most likely to play a role in domestic conflicts but research on domestic conflict typically does not include environmental variables. This quantitative study addresses a methodological shortcoming of earlier research, limited variation across the variable measuring water resource availability, by testing an alternative means of operationalizing water resources using annual precipitation data weighted by land area and population and weighted by land area and gross national product. This study introduces additional variation on the dependent variable and compares the results of a dichotomous variable with the results of a dependent variable with categorical coding based on the States in Armed Conflict Database. This research extends the scope of explanatory variables to include indicators for political institutions and their capacity to manage the water resources within their national boundaries. The findings support and extend previous conclusions that water resources contribute to civil conflict and demonstrate that the use of precipitation data weighted by land area and population, a variable with variation, is a correlate for water resource availability, a static variable; and thereby providing results that are more reliable. This correlate advances the environment-conflict discourse by more directly linking the data that describes the natural world to the social changes to which those natural phenomenon are purported to relate. This study also finds that institutional capacity to manage water resources creates opportunities for rent-seeking but that open political institutions mediate between water resources and conflict.