College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item Camus and Sartre: The Unsettled Conflict on Violence and Terror(2008) Ahmed, Nadine Sara; Brami, Joseph; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The broad purpose of this paper is to bring attention to the subject of terrorism. In the paper two plays by are compared which both treat this matter somewhat differently. The first play is "Les Mains Sales" by Jean Paul Sartre and the second play is "Les Justes" by Albert Camus. The two authors who are both descendents of the existentialist time period have quite differing views on the subject. Sartre was known for his belief in action while Camus was known to be more of a pacifist. Both of these issues are portrayed in the paper. This paper also goes one step further because it looks at the literary aspect of both plays yet also places them and their theories into today's context. Both of the plays look terrorism from the eyes of the terrorist. This is something that is not very common even today in the middle of the all the terror that exists around the globe. However the issues and theories presented here bring some insight into the terrorists mind and how that affects the world today.Item After Empire: Ethnic Germans and Minority Nationalism in Interwar Yugoslavia(2008-11-30) Lyon, Philip; Lampe, John R; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study traces the (ethnically German) Danube Swabians' embrace of national identity in interwar Yugoslavia with attention to the German national movement's antecedents in Croatia-Slavonia and Vojvodina under the Habsburgs. We examine the important role of German national activists in Yugoslavia and survey the institutions they built to stimulate, shape and mobilize Yugoslavia's German population as a specifically national minority based on the Swabians' history and collective memory as colonists in the region. Thereafter, we discuss the rift that emerged inside the German minority during the 1930s, when the German leadership and its conservative variety of German nationalism were confronted by brash, young challengers who sought to "renew" the German minority in a Nazi image. These young enthusiasts for National Socialism directed their extreme nationalism not at the repressive Yugoslav authorities, but rather at their older rivals in the Germans' main cultural and political organization, the Kulturbund. German culture and national authenticity became key criteria for German leadership in this struggle to control the Kulturbund. Meanwhile, German Catholic priests also resisted the Nazi-oriented Erneuerungsbewegung insurgency. Ultimately, we see in this clash of generations both support for and resistance to local manifestations of Nazism in Southeastern Europe. One of this study's major finds is the stubborn endurance of national indifference and local identity in Southeastern Europe throughout interwar period, when national identity was supposed to be dominant. Many Germans embraced national identity, but certainly not all of them. The persistence of this indifference confounded the logic of twentieth century nationalists, for whom national indeterminacy seemed unnatural, archaic, and inexplicable. Even after years of effort by German nationalist activists in the nationalized political atmosphere of interwar Yugoslavia, some ethnic Germans remained indifferent to national identity or else identified as Croats or Magyars. There were also those who pined for Habsburg Hungary, which had offered a dynastic alternative to national identity before 1918. Still others' identity remained shaped by confession as Catholic or Protestant. We conclude therefore by observing the paradoxical situation whereby Nazi-oriented extreme nationalism coexisted with instances of German national indifference in Yugoslavia until the eve of the Second World War.Item Casualties of Cold War: Toward a Feminist Analysis of American Nationalism in U.S.-Russian Relations(2008-07-24) Williams, Kimberly; Moses, Claire G; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using a feminist transdisciplinary research approach, this dissertation interrogates the discursive configurations that constituted the framework of meaning within which the United States conducted its relationship with the Russian Federation between 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It calls attention to the production and operation of what I refer to as "gendered Russian imaginaries" (i.e., the range of masculinities and femininities that have been assigned to narrative and visual depictions of Russia and Russians in American political and popular culture) that have been invoked as part of American cold war triumphalism to craft and support U.S. foreign policy. The dissertation has two parts. While much has been written about the consequences of U.S. Russia policy, I explore its ideological causes in Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4. Chapter 1 enumerates the foundational precepts upon which my project relies, while Chapter 2 offers some necessary background information concerning the evolution and deployment of gendered nationalisms in the Russian Federation and in the United States. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the metaphors and analogies deployed throughout the congressional hearings that led to two pieces of U.S. legislation, the Freedom Support Act of 1992 and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. Through visual, narrative, and discursive analyses of several popular culture texts, including 1997's animated feature film Anastasia (Chapter 5), NBC's hit television series The West Wing (Chapter 6), and Washington, D.C.'s popular International Spy Museum (Chapter 7), part two explores the ways in which Russia and Russians were visually and narratively depicted in U.S. popular culture at the turn of the twenty-first century. Given the Russian Federation's status as the world's second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, the importance of Russia to contemporary U.S.-Middle East politics can no longer be in any doubt. Consequently, the mistakes, assumptions, and triumphalist arrogance of the United States since 1991 must be reckoned with and accounted for. This dissertation contributes a feminist analysis to that endeavor by drawing attention to the links between cultural and national identities, the gendered politics of knowledge production, and the circulation of power in transnational contexts.Item Toward Theory Building for Comparative Public Diplomacy from the Perspectives of Public Relations and International Relations: A Macro-Comparative Study of Embassies in Washington, D.C.(2005-09-15) Yun, Seong-Hun; Grunig, James E; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite a century of history, public diplomacy research has lacked defining conceptual frameworks for two focal constructs, public diplomacy behavior and excellence in public diplomacy management. Without such frameworks, the discipline has focused on historical, ideological, and descriptive research on public diplomacy practices and management. At the same time, research has been instrumental, serving the policy concerns of government by studying what effects public diplomacy programs have, can have, and should have from the paradigm of communication effects. Consequently, public diplomacy seldom has been studied as a set of dependent variables. Scholars have rarely asked theoretical questions about what factors affect public diplomacy behavior and management. The lack of conceptual frameworks has further discouraged comparative questions about whether and why governments are different or similar in their practices and management of public diplomacy. Even when comparative questions were asked, they lacked methodological frameworks for comparative study on a large scale--of a large number and different types of governments. To overcome the limitations, this dissertation proposed a conceptual framework for the two focal constructs based on an application of the Excellence study (L. Grunig, J. Grunig, & Dozier, 2002), a program of public relations research. From the perspective of international relations, this study constructed and tested a theory of comparative public diplomacy on how a government's contextual variables-- culture, political system, interest-group system, and interstate dependence-- are associated with her public diplomacy behavior and management. Lastly, this study employed an innovative methodological framework of using embassies as "matching samples" as well as "surrogate governments." Out of 169 embassies in Washington, D.C., 113 embassies participated in a survey that measured their policy communication behavior in the form of press relations and overall management of the public diplomacy function. This study found that uncertainty avoidance, one of Hofstede's (2001) four dimensions of culture, was the most salient in explaining excellence in public diplomacy. Countries with a low uncertainty avoidance culture were most excellent in public diplomacy management. It also found no significant empirical evidence for linkages between culture and public diplomacy behavior. Of the contextual variables investigated, only the political system had significant associations with public diplomacy behavior. The findings also suggested that electoral and non-democracies have more excellent public diplomacy overall than liberal democracies. In addition, the findings showed that interstate dependence is empirically associated with the outsourcing practices of foreign governments for their public diplomacy through local public relations and lobbying firms. The findings also indicated that the outsourcing practices, in turn, increased the excellence of the clients' (i.e., embassies) public diplomacy behavior. Moreover, the findings confirmed an empirical convergence between public relations and public diplomacy not only at the level of communication behavior but also at the level of communication management. This dissertation, a macro-replication study having governments as the units of analysis, replicated the normative theory of global public relations (Vercic, J. Grunig, & L. Grunig, 1996). Among other things, this study pioneered the macro-comparative research strategy of studying embassies throughout the world capitals. This methodological framework for comparative public diplomacy should offer a myriad of opportunities for advanced theory building from various theoretical perspectives and research methods.Item Walter Lippmann, Strategic Internationalism, the Cold War, and Vietnam, 1943-1967(2004-08-06) Wasniewski, Matthew A.; Zhang, Shu Guang; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the Cold War writings and activities of the American commentator Walter Lippmannin particular his observations about U.S. policy in Vietnam. Lippmann was the preeminent columnist of his era, writing 2,300 installments of his Today and Tomorrow column between 1945 and 1967. Lippmann crafted a conceptual framework for promoting American internationalism that blended political realism, cosmopolitanism, and classical diplomacy. That approach shaped his role as a moderator of the domestic and international dialogue about the Cold War, as a facilitator of ideas and policies, and as a quasi-diplomat. Chapter one suggests that based on new archival sources a re-evaluation of Lippmann is necessary to correct inadequacies in the standard literature. Chapter two surveys his strategic internationalist approach to foreign affairs from the publication of his first foreign policy book in 1915 to three influential volumes he wrote between 1943 and 1947. Chapter three explores Lippmann's position on a prominent and controversial Cold War issuethe partition of Germany. Chapter four makes a comparative analysis of Lippmann with the French commentator Raymond Aron, examining Lippmann's part as a dialogue-shaper and public broker during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the subsequent debate about nuclear sharing in the Atlantic Alliance. Chapter five moves the study toward his writings on U.S. policy in Asiaparticularly U.S.-China policy and the Korean War. Chapter six examines Lippmann's analyses of U.S.-Vietnam policy from 1949 to 1963 framed by three consistent arguments: first, that America had no vital interests at stake there; second, that it could not win a military victory there at any reasonable cost; and, third, that its best course was to use diplomacy to promote Vietnamese neutralism. Chapter seven explores Lippmann's efforts to dissuade U.S. officials from intervention in 1964. Chapter eight details policymakers' elaborate efforts to delay Lippmann's public criticisms of the Vietnam policies. Chapter nine explores the Johnson administration's determination to discredit Lippmann's public criticisms of the war after July 1965. Chapter ten counters the standard literature's portrayal of Lippmann's Cold War commentary and suggests that his most influential activity as a public figure may have been as a quasi-diplomatist.Item Reviewing United Nations World Conferences on Women for Korean Women's Empowerment(2004-04-13) Bae, Geum-Joo; Moses, Claire; Women's StudiesThis thesis explores the historical shifts of the United Nations world conferences on women, considering what is at stake in "thinking globally and acting locally," especially for the Korean women's movement. The following questions are addressed: How have the main issues shifted from the first conference in 1975 to the final one in 2000? What were the linkages between practical issues and epistemic discourses during this process? What kinds of power dynamics have been working in the global arena in terms of transnational feminism? In what context could diverse women's groups succeed in negotiating and producing a consensus? How has the Korean women's movement interacted with the international process? And, in conclusion, what concrete measures might Korean policymakers and women's movement activists undertake as feminists pursuing gender equality?