College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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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 ALLIES OR ADVERSARIES? THE AUTHORITARIAN STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY IN ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE: A CASE STUDY OF THE MEKONG DELTA(2017) Wallace, Jennifer; Haufler, Virginia; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Natural resources are collective goods that the state has the authority and responsibility to protect from overuse and overexploitation. In order to achieve this protection, the state must rely on the actions of local actors, experts, and business leaders who are most closely connected to the natural resource base. The dependence of the state on local actors to implement resource-protection policies makes the conduct of environmental management within authoritarian regimes a particularly interesting area in which to observe the state’s strategic choices concerning its relations with civil society. The potential threat to state control posed by an emergent civil society means that the state must weigh its interests in maintaining its authoritarianism against the benefits provided by civil society, such as the ability to analyze and implement the state’s policies effectively. This dissertation focuses on how the government of Vietnam manages these apparent tensions between allowing participation on a critical issue area and maintaining its control as an authoritarian state. I argue that the state does not respond uniformly or consistently to all types of civil society actors, even within a single issue area such as natural resources protection. Prevailing explanations of why the authoritarian state has shown permissiveness toward civil society actors fail to account for variation in the state’s response to different actors and across levels of governance. In this paper I present an alternative framework that provides a more nuanced understanding of the state’s interests with respect to various types of civil society actors. I argue that the state’s engagement with various civil society organizations depends primarily on three characteristics: 1) the organization’s mobilizing capacity; 2) issue independence; and 3) the external strategic value of the organization. These three characteristics shape whether the authoritarian state of Vietnam views the organization as a threat to be subverted and repressed in order to maintain its own authority, or a cooperative partner in the management of the state’s natural resources. In addition, this dissertation discusses the implications for successful water management in the region.Item A POST-CONFUCIAN CIVIL SOCIETY: LIBERAL COLLECTIVISM AND PARTICIPATORY POLITICS IN SOUTH KOREA(2007-11-14) Kim, Sungmoon; Alford, Fred; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how South Koreans have creatively appropriated the meanings of democratic civility and national citizenship using Confucianism-originated familial affectionate sentiments (chŏng), while refusing their liberal individualistic counterparts through a cross-cultural and comparative theoretical approach. By investigating four recent civil-action cases in South Korea, it argues that the chŏng-induced politico-cultural practice of collective moral responsibility (uri-responsibility), which transcends the binary of individualism and collectivism and of liberalism and nationalism, represents the essence of Korean democratic civility. It theorizes the ethical quality that uri-responsibility generates, when practiced in the public sphere of a national civil society, in terms of "transcendental collectivism," and claims that unlike a liberal civil society aiming to empower the independent self's individual agency, the post-Confucian dialectic between agency and citizenship is focused on the interdependent selves' shard cultural-political identity, collective freedom, and democratic citizenship. This dissertation generalizes the liberal yet non-individualistic political practices that transcendental collectivism promotes in terms of "liberal collectivism" as opposed to liberal individualism, and argues that liberal collectivism has great potential to contribute to both liberal nationalism and participatory democracy in post-Confucian Korea.Item Brushing History Against the Grain: What The Experience of East European Dissent Teaches us about Democracy(2005-04-04) Kammas, Anthony; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)After the fall of communism in Europe, it was thought that those in the East would look westward to learn about building stable, vibrant democracies. This dissertation, however, proceeds against the current, and considers what the East can teach the West (and the world in general) about the as-of-yet-unexplored possibilities latent within democratic politics. While focusing on the role of the post- and non-Marxist Left in Eastern Europe, my research explains how radical, emancipatory thought and engagement took a non-violent, democratic turn, and subsequently aided in the development of what later came to be known as civil society. Thus, my dissertation offers an answer to the following question: What can the Left's role in the revival of engaged citizenship and democratic politics in Eastern Europe teach us about confronting the enduring dilemmas associated with making democracy work? The analysis critically assesses the East European dissident experience, between the crushing of Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring (1968) and the East European revolutions of 1989. It finds that democracy was able to develop in this hostile environment because the opposition remained committed to a non-violent, pluralist spirit of radical political theory and praxis. Furthermore, by revisiting the emergence of democracy precisely where it was not permitted to exist, this research re-presents the East European dissident experience as a constellation of ideas and actions that challenges us to reconsider contemporary forms of citizenship, political engagement, and democracy.