Orange Is the New Golgotha

The Roman soldiers jeered at Jesus, called him towelhead and sand monkey, ripped off his garments and clad him in an orange jumpsuit. Then they pulled a black sack over his head and led him to an interrogation cell, where CIA operatives awaited him. They shackled Jesus\u27s wrists and strung him up so that he dangled from the ceiling. One of them questioned him, and when his responses weren\u27t to their liking, the other beat him. [excerpt

On Learning and Unlearning

I remember passing our lunch lady–the nice one with a big bleach-blond afro. She was perched on an elementary-school-sized desk, eyes fixated to the television. I glanced at the screen on the way into my classroom while my teacher hesitated in the hallway, whispering to the other adults. She reentered the room a few minutes later to explain. In the following months, my television provided me with one of the most formative, practical and comprehensive educational experiences of my life. First it was vocabulary building, with the words like “hi-jacker,” and “terrorist.” Then it was physics, learning that inertia is the reason for absolute devastation when your plane crashes into a building. Soon, “Al-Qaeda,” “the Taliban,” and “Osama bin Laden” became part of my reality, as I watched a broadcast of young men in the “Middle East” (I was learning geography too!) burning American flags. [excerpt

The New Normal

On September 19, 2013 an individual wielding a military-grade assault rifle fired sixteen bullets into a Chicago park harming thirteen individuals, among them a 3-year old named Deonta Howard who was shot in the cheek. On September 16, 2013 a man by the name of Aaron Alexis opened fire on the cafeteria at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. Thirteen people died, and eight others were injured. On December 14, 2012 Adam Lanza shot twenty-six people—twenty of whom were children between the ages of 6 and 7—in Newtown, Connecticut. Barack Obama called it the “worst day of [his] presidency.” On July 20, 2012, twelve people died and seventy others were injured at the hands of James Egan Holmes who entered a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and proceeded to launch tear gas grenades and shoot from multiple firearms into the crowd. Investigators called it “a scene straight out of a horror film.” [excerpt

So We Ran...

This paper tells the true story of a Hungarian refugee who\u27s family fled the communist regime there in 1971. Gabriella Bercze\u27s story reflects on what it was like to live in Hungary under communist rule, and her family\u27s experience in escaping the country, and fleeing to Italy, where they lived in a refugee camp for months before immigrating to the United States in the early 70s

Narrative Policy Analysis

This review explores the book All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagons View on Climate Change, written by Micheal Klare, highlighting how the US national security offices are viewing and responding to the ominous looming threats posed by climate change

“Little Soldiers with Big Guns”: The Language of Child-Soldiering in Africa

This project examines the language of child-soldiering in Africa, specifically in Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Uganda, comparing its use between Western observers and the Africans who experienced the conflict first hand. It concludes that Westerners unilaterally display ethnocentric conceptions of the sanctity of childhood in their admonitions of child-soldiering, while former child-soldiers, perpetrators, victims and local aid workers exhibit more diverse perspectives that more accurately reflect the complexity of the conflicts. Furthermore, it concludes that the use of rhetorical, monolithic language regarding child-soldiering perpetuates stereotypes about African conflict and state-failure while diverting attention from underlying root causes of conflict, and overlooks government corruption and human rights abuses that have gone largely unchecked by Western nations despite their condemnation of the violence

A Comparative Study of Extreme Religious Nationalist Terrorist Groups in the United States

The aim of this paper is to conduct a comparative study of Radical Right Wing terrorism and Radical Islamic terrorism both of which are categorized under the Religious Nationalism/Extremism typology of terrorism. In order to compare and contrast the two fairly, I broke down the ideology, motives, methods, and the demographic profile of members of both Radical Right Wing and Radical Islamic terrorism then provided examples of different groups that fall within those categories in order to effectively illustrate the striking similarities of the two categories that have been addressed and condemned differently by the United States. Then I had analyzed how and why the United States has approached groups that fall under Radical Right Wing terrorism vastly different than groups under Radical Islamic terrorism even though both fall under the same Religious Nationalism/Extremism category of terrorism. This comparative study is also being conducted to examine why the United States did not have the same reaction to Radical Right Wing terrorist groups before the September 11th attacks as it did to the Radical Islamic groups since Radical Right Wing groups had committed the most violent acts in the United States prior to September 11th 2001. Lastly, I will also briefly discuss the present day social implications associated with the difference of treatment between the two terrorist groups.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/uresposters/1289/thumbnail.jp

Flight from the Fight? Civil War and its Effects on Refugees

Civil war dominates conflict in the modern era. An effect of this is a large number of refugees, who flee from war-torn countries in favor of lands where they can live in safety. This paper examines the extent to which the number of these refugees is affected by the number of civil wars a country has had in a year. Previous literature suggests that civil wars increase destruction in a state and threaten people’s lives, which encourages migration out of a warring country. Based on this, this paper hypothesizes that increasing the number of civil wars in a country will likewise increase the number of refugees leaving that country. However, this explanation is not supported by this paper’s OLS model, with respect for human rights and type of government being shown as more important factors than the number of civil conflicts. A possible reason for this finding is the destruction of critical transportation infrastructure resulting from civil war. The results of this study warrant further investigation into what exactly motivates refugee behavior, especially during civil wars

Kittens and Nutella: Why Women Join ISIS

On February 18, 2015 CNN published a reported stating that Western women were leaving their homes to join ISIS because of a social media campaign featuring pictures of kittens and Nutella. This reported propagated the notion that women who join jihadist organizations are brainwashed or feeble minded. The reality is not so simple. This paper explores the motives women may have for joining ISIS through comparison to the motivations that drove women to partake in other violent jihadist organizations\u27 activities