College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/8
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
Browse
2 results
Search Results
Item Civic nationalism in postcolonial states: A comparative analysis of civic nationalism in Mauritus, India and Sri Lanka(2014) Singh, Ila; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)Civic Nationalism is the development of national identity for a state, rooted in egalitarian post enlightenment concepts emphasizing humanity and individual rights. Post colonialism, many developing states embarked on the path of civic nation creation, while implementing democracy in order to govern successfully. This dissertation, it is an extension of nationalism studies into the process of post-colonial nation-state building. The question is of why some post-colonial states developed civic nationalism while others developed ethnic or religious nationalism. Upon independence from Britain, former colonies Mauritius, India and Sri Lanka each had multinational populations, which they intended to govern with the creation of civic nationalism and liberal democratic principles. Instead, today each of the three states can clearly be placed in a progression from most civic to least civic. Mauritius is a liberal democracy bound by civic nationalism, India is working on civic nation creation, and Sri Lanka abandoned the civic nation creation project. This dissertation traces why these three nations evolved so differently when each started out in similar circumstances. Why was Mauritius successful in creating a civic nation, while India is still struggling and Sri Lanka devolved into ethnic nationalism? Addressing, whether an attempt was made during the process of nation-state building to create a civic nation and whether the founding fathers were successful in creating the desired civic nation bound by civic nationalism and a liberal democratic state. If a civic state was created by the founding fathers did subsequent political generations work to maintain and perpetuate the civic nation or did civic nationalism die, thus yielding way for illiberal nationalisms? The purpose of this dissertation is to draw out variables that are held in common across either success or failure in state consolidation of a common civic national identity. The dissertation has led to support for the following hypothesis that, the more committed to a civic nation the political and intellectual elite, and the better established the state’s civic, intellectual and educational institutions are at the time of independence and over subsequent generations; the more likely a liberal democratic state will be to establish and maintain civic nationalism.Item SPACE, IDENTITY AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY: NEGOTIATING DECOLONIZATION IN THE UNITED NATIONS(2006-05-11) Patil, Vrushali; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Beginning with the colonial and imperial encounters that constitute the early, conflict-ridden moments of trans-territorial contact, this research is interested in the relationship between gender, race, and shifting transnational power relationships. Bringing together work from Sociology, Women's Studies, and Postcolonial Studies, it is interested in the following questions. How are modern constructions of gender and race forged in transnational--colonial as well as 'postcolonial'--processes? How did they emerge in and contribute to such processes during the colonial era? Specifically, how did they shape colonialist constructions of space, identity and international community? How has this relationship shifted with legal decolonization? First, it offers a theory regarding these questions in the European colonial era, the theory of kinship. This theory posits that the colonialist construction of space, identity and international community historically relied on a trope of kinship, which operated by constructing the colonies as 'children' and the metropoles as 'parents.' Even more, kinship actually helped to constitute colonial notions of race (i.e., 'childlike natives') and gender (i.e., 'the lack of the nuclear household in African society as evidence of cultural immaturity'). In this manner, kinship helped to define colonized others as children, thereby to deny the subjectivity of these others (particularly their spatial and identity claims), and thus to ultimately build hierarchical structures of international community. Combining discourse and comparative historical methods of analysis, this work explores how colonialists and anti-colonialists renegotiate transnational power relationships within the debates on decolonization in the United Nations from 1946-1960. It argues that while colonialists continued to use the trope of kinship to legitimate the status quo, anti-colonialists insisted that the colonies had 'grown up' and that continuing colonialism was a humiliation that emasculated fully adult men. Thus, anti-colonialists attempted to reorder global power relationships by renegotiating the kinship trope. In other words, to the politics of paternalism, they responded with the politics of masculinity. Ultimately, then, the complex, shifting, politics of race relied on a politics of gender/sexuality, both of which were central to the changing contours of international community in the mid-20th century.