Living with the Stasi: Experiences and Opinions of East Germans, 1945-90

This paper discusses how East German citizens felt about the East German Secret Police (Stasi). It focuses on German sentiment and everyday life during East German rule, rather than how Germans retrospectively reacted once the Berlin Wall fell and the true extent of Stasi surveillance had been discovered. It also attempts to disaggregate different demographics of East German society – artists, doctors, the clergy, etc. – and posits that there was no universal ‘East German experience’ of the Stasi. It further explores equally wide range of reasons why an East German citizen might become an ‘inoffizielle mitarbeiter’ – an informer – for the notorious secret police

Spartan Daily, November 1, 1960

Volume 48, Issue 25https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4079/thumbnail.jp

Defect Or Defend? Explaining Military Responses During the Arab Uprisings

The Arab uprisings demonstrated that a military\u27s response to the domestic unrest had a significant impact on whether the protests were successful and triggered regime change. In Egypt and Tunisia, the militaries defected from the incumbent regimes, and as a result the ruling leaders were removed, whereas in Bahrain, the military defended the regime and used violence against protesters, which led to the continuation of the government\u27s rule. Scholars identify numerous factors to explain Middle East and North African (MENA) military behavior during the Arab uprising but overall these arguments tend to overemphasize individual case studies and fail to provide a region-wide, systematic argument as to what explains regime defection or regime loyalty during the uprisings. My dissertation explains the variation of MENA military responses during the Arab uprisings systematically through the creation of a dataset, called the MENA Military Index. This dataset comprehensively examines twenty variables across twenty-one MENA countries in order to better understand the factors that caused some militaries to defect, others to fracture, and others to defend ruling regimes. My dissertation finds that two conditions were needed in order for a MENA military to either defect or fracture during the Arab uprisings. First, a country had to possess certain institutional variables that paved the foundation for possible military insubordination such as rivalries between the military and the state\u27s internal security forces, parallel security forces that counterbalanced the military, the military having the autonomy to make personnel appointments within the armed forces, and a system of military conscription. Second, during the uprising there had to be specific social conditions that encouraged military insubordination and raised the costs of state violence towards protesters, such as the protests being large, broad-based, non-violent, comprising of non-traditional demonstrators, and specifically aiming to win over the military. Only if these two conditions were met did MENA militaries refrain from using violence against protesters and either defect or fracture from the ruling regime

Rails to Revolution: Railroads, Railroad Workers and the Geographies of the Mexican Revolution

This dissertation is a historical geography of the role of railroads and railroad workers in the Mexican Revolution. It shows that despite the presence of railroads in the popular imagination of the Mexican Revolution, the role of railroads and railroad workers themselves remains largely missing from scholarly accounts of the conflict. I argue that railroad workers were central to the revolutionary process from its beginning, and I demonstrate that their close relationship to a critically important transportation network allowed them to intervene at crucial moments of the revolutionary process. Undoubtedly, this relationship to transportation networks also had a formative impact on their political involvement and their relationship to the revolution. I contend that during the revolutionary process, revolutionaries and railroad workers took advantage of the capacity for time-space compression and time-space expansion in order to achieve their aims. Workers and revolutionaries also mobilized these capacities to engage in multi-scalar struggles against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz to contend for power in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. In the process, the railroad is transformed from a means of accumulation to a means of liberation by becoming a vehicle for revolutionary social change

The culture of combination: solidarities and collective action before tolpuddle

Beyond the repression of the national waves of food rioting during the subsistence crises of the 1790s, workers in the English countryside lost the will and ability to collectively mobilise. Or so the historical orthodoxy goes. Such a conceptualisation necessarily positions the Bread or Blood riots of 1816, the Swing rising of 1830, and, in particular, the agrarian trade unionism practised at Tolpuddle in 1834 as exceptional events. This paper offers a departure by placing Tolpuddle into its wider regional context. The unionists at Tolpuddle, it is shown, were not making it up as they went along but instead acted in ways consistent with shared understandings and experiences of collective action and unionism practiced throughout the English west. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the forms of collective action – and judicial responses – that extended between different locales and communities and which joined farmworkers, artisans and industrial workers together. So conceived, Tolpuddle was not an exception. Rather, it can be more usefully understood as a manifestation of deeply entrenched cultures, an episode that assumes its historical potency because of its subsequent politicised representation

Police, state and society : the Palestinian police and security forces and the maintenance of public order.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN035544 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo