The MSc Violence, Conflict and Development is taught within a research environment of staff and PhD students working on conflict-related issues. In the last couple of weeks two of our dear PhD students have passed their vivas (hurray!), so it seems appropriate to devote a blog to them. I'm copying their abstracts as these give a really good idea of what kinds of topics people focus on for their doctoral studies.
Kim Wale
‘Making our own means’: Counter-Narratives
in Squatter Memories of Violence, Resistance and Transition in the Western Cape
The transition from apartheid to democracy
in South Africa did not bring structural economic transformation and the
majority of black South Africans remain marginalised. This thesis examines the
role of memory in legitimising and challenging this contradiction of transition
without transformation. It asks how local actors who were involved in the
squatter struggles of Crossroads in the 1980s bring their lived memories into conversation
with national memory discourse. Key findings demonstrate a contradictory
relationship between respondents’ lived memory and national memory discourse.
On the one hand, local memory is used as a resource through which respondents
attempt to gain inclusion into the dominant memory identities and discourses of
transitional justice and post-conflict development. On the other hand, it acts
as a weapon which challenges the underlying assumptions of this broader memory
field. This thesis offers insights into the way in which memory works and the ideological
role it plays in the field of transitional justice and postconflict development.
Conclusions draw out an alternative narrative of struggle and transition that challenges
the memory politics of South Africa’s recent history.
Matilde
Stoleroff
SOCIAL BOUNDARIES, POLITICAL ELITE BARGAINS
AND (DIS)ORDER IN GUINEA-BISSAU, 1974-1998
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| Matilde - centre! |
This thesis explores the establishment, breakdown and re-establishment
of political order in Guinea-Bissau by examining the evolution of the shape and
character of its political elite bargains from independence to the outbreak of
the civil war in 1998. While there are a variety of scholarly approaches that
focus on the structural conditions under which violent conflict is prone to
erupt in underdeveloped countries, this thesis adopts an interactional approach
to better appreciate how Guinea-Bissau’s political elite bargains have evolved
and how these developments explain the outbreak of conflict at a given time. It
takes off from and develops North et al’s (2009) framework on limited access orders and the Crisis
State Research Centre’s approach to state fragility and resilience and
contributes to the study of political elite bargains by proposing that a social
boundary analysis is central for assessing degrees of a bargain’s
inclusivity/exclusivity and for better understanding what lead to changes in
the bargains shape and character. It suggests that as relationships are both
the “glue” and the “scissors” underpinning every elite bargain, the analysis of
their evolution is key to problems of order and disorder. Applying this method
of analysis, it provides a detailed examination of how elite relationships in
Guinea-Bissau have changed over time based upon extensive documental research
and interviewing with key actors and informants. It explains which, why and how
different political identities have emerged, gained and decreased in political
relevance, and how their interactions have shaped subsequent interaction and
produced political change.
VERY SINCERE CONGRATULATIONS TO DR WALE AND DR STOLEROFF!!
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| Guinea Bissau plays Uganda - and wins! |
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