The Burmese political system has entered a period of gradual democratization since the rise of the pro-Western National League for Democracy (NLD) in 1988 against the longstanding military regime. Myanmar/Burma is progressing insofar as democratic ideals are theoretically implemented; however, these provisions realistically function primarily to position the state more favorably in the international arena. This project describes the evolution of foreign diplomacy and the relationship between economic liberalization and the most recent period of democratization. To approach this subject, I focus on the legacy of British colonialism as establishing weak public institutions that promoted political disorder and exacerbated domestic conflict with the politicization of race. I look into the shift of public discourse from this hopeful unification to a regime that adopted an instutional reinforcement of colonialist racial hierarchies through militarization. My research seeks to answer why Myanmar/Burma has oscillated between democracy and authoritarianism historically based on the effects of economic growth and the potential for economic crises related to the globally interconnected economy. I emphasize the contrasting ideas between foreign and domestic actors to explicitly contextualize the ways in which political order is developing with the emergence of democratic ideals. The focus is on building state capacity since independence by using the analytic tools of modern political economy as informed by the growing importance of foreign influence on the integration into a global economy. I use the internationalization of Burma's politics to analyze the impact of foreign political support on acting as a stabilizer of domestic conflict. I conclude that the implications of foreign values taking root in Myanmar/Burma undermine domestic growth by adopting the faulty assumption that democracy is both necessary and sufficient for producing positive social and economic policies.

For my history thesis I am studying French intellectuals’ appropriation of World War II memory in debates over the Algerian war. My research involves close readings of the works of key French intellectuals, some of which were printed in major French periodicals like Le Monde, L’Express, and Les Temps modernes. I focus predominantly on the last Governor-General of Algeria Jacques Soustelle and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. In these intellectuals’ arguments, two opposing conceptions of national honor arise. Soustelle was a staunch supporter of French sovereignty in Algeria. He connected the war to France’s duty to combat totalitarian and tyrannical threats to democracy, embodied in his eyes in the FLN Algerian rebels. In contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre argued against the war and colonialism, disparaging France for resembling Germany during World War II and compromising its democratic values through the use of torture. Within the context of intellectual petitions and French military coup d’états, these opposing conceptions of honor polarized contemporary debates. These debates in turn contributed to an environment of political instability that brought about the fall of the Fourth French Republic in 1958 and pushed France to settle a cease-fire with the FLN in 1962. However, despite their differences, both Soustelle and Sartre’s conceptions of honor were rooted in the same democratic ideals of the French Resistance of World War II. My research thus also reveals the unique, powerful, yet also dangerous multiplicity of memory. Algerian war intellectual debates revealed that intellectuals could draw on the same collective memory of a previous conflict in order to support radically opposing contemporary arguments and agendas. This reminds us that contemporary conflicts and ensuing debates cannot be understood in a vacuum. Memory is a strong rhetorical tool, and in many ways must be considered central to political and historical scholarship.

What Persian politicians dubbed as ‘the woman question’ in the early twentieth century towards the end of the Qajar Dynasty became, and still remains, a hotly debated topic in Iran that is undeniably intertwined with Iranian ideas of nationalism. The question asked what the new role of women should be in society and what should be done to accomplish it. My honors history thesis examines how both the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-1979) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (1979-present) used women to visualize the national state of wellbeing. This thesis is rooted in extensive research in primary sources conducted over five months; my main sources include oral interviews of local Iranian-Americans, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s autobiography, Women and Her Rights in Islam by Ayatollah Motahari, Tehran’s most popular women’s magazine, Zan-e Ruz, private family photo collections, newspaper articles, and speeches by the main political figures of the time. I answer the questions: how did each of the respective governments use control of women’s clothing as a strategy to implement their contrasting nationalist ideologies, and what was their reasoning behind the specific compulsory dress codes? Through analysis of books and speeches by Mohammad Reza Shah and Ayatollahs Khomeini and Motahari [leading Shiite clerics of the creation of the Islamic Republic], I conclude that parallel to the cultural notion that women represent familial honor, both regimes viewed women as symbols of national honor, and thus sought to control their clothing and socialization. Through poetry, political cartoons, and advertisements found in Zan-e Ruz, I investigate the transitions between mandatory hijab to Western clothing in the 1930s and back to mandatory hijab after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Using oral history methodology, I determine a paradox that shows that despite outward appearances, a new contrary culture developed in the private realm.

Immigrant agricultural workers experience a sense of cultural confusion, an interruption of their sense of identity, and a disconnection from their sense of Historical Self. I describe the Historical Self as a Self that is informed and complicated by history. Although many individuals survive in the dominant American culture, through assimilation or assimilation of their children, many still struggle with a sense of existential loss. In this paper, I use Henry Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis as a framework for analyzing space, time, and energy in the fandango, a practice of participatory community music. I argue that participatory, community experiences in traditional art and music provide one fulfillment of the demand for connections to culture, identity, and history.

Conventional wisdom concerning labor migration in Southern Africa holds that cheap, migratory labor was necessary for the extraction of base metals and the profitability of colonial mining. The different geologic, political, economic, labor and domestic conditions of mines across the region has, as a result, been obscured. The deterministic view of labor migration within “cheap-labor theory” does not consider the individual reasons why workers and other migrants chose to migrate. As self-perception has become embedded in ideas of work-membership, able-bodiedness, and gender, specific historical analysis of urbanization in different contexts has become necessary. Using health data, colonial and mining company records, and anthropological accounts, along with secondary scholarship, this study addresses dependency relationships between urban black populations, native leaders and colonial and mining authorities. The hypothesis is that relationships of dependence may have translated into forms of citizenship that were not institutionally recognized or that may be antithetical to Western, liberal ideas of freedom. Assessing these relationships in the context of health offers an understanding for how individuals navigated issues of social and political change that are important for decision making in the fields of global and public health, and urban planning. Structural and institutional inequalities created by historical circumstances have resulted in the different quality of state membership experienced by marginalized communities. Understanding how membership and self-perception has been historically created is an essential element for deconstructing institutional and social barriers that contribute to global health inequalities in crucial ways.