When recipients become donors: Polish democracy assistance in Belarus and Ukraine

The dissertation is a first attempt to explore democracy assistance efforts provided by a young democracy that was a recipient of similar aid in the past. The study investigates approaches to democracy assistance, reasons for a young democracy's engagement, methods and effectiveness of efforts to promote democratic ideas and practices in recipient countries. Specifically, the research examines how government and social actors in a young democracy conceptualize democracy assistance and how their view on democracy aid is different from approaches used by Western donors. Then, why and how a former recipient country goes about assisting other states in their struggles for democracy are investigated. Finally, the research is motivated by the question of how democracy assistance efforts by a young donor can be evaluated in terms of their potential to diffuse democracy to other recipient countries. This project demonstrates several main findings based on comparative case studies of Polish democracy assistance to Ukraine and Belarus. These conclusions contribute to the theory and practice of democracy assistance. First, the Polish approach to democracy assistance takes into account the political situation of recipient country and is carefully crafted when directed to authoritarian and democratic regimes in terms of types of assistance, choice of domestic partners, and strategies used in the programs. This assistance also seems to avoid pitfalls described in the literature on democracy assistance. Second, this dissertation reinforces the importance of civil society as a sender and recipient of democracy assistance. This study unveils the key role of Polish NGOs in shaping the state's democracy assistance and their unique ability to reach civil society groups in recipient Belarus and Ukraine. Third, this research reveals a great deal about the features of cross-border work as a method of democracy assistance to exert an impact on civil society groups. Polish NGOs engage in close collaborative work with foreign civil society groups. By demonstrating the democratizing potential of cross-border projects, the dissertation shows that this form of assistance may contribute to the overall diffusion of democracy in the region, thus strengthening the role of regional actors in promoting democratic values and practices. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

King of America

This is a collection of poetry and prose by Curtis Rutherford. The majority of this manuscript was written between April 2010 and February 2011. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Love's praxis: the political in Kierkegaard's Works of love

The goal of this dissertation is to incorporate Kierkegaard's Works of Love into current theorization of love as a political concept by showing how it models political sensibilities that can be responsive to contemporary problems of political and social injustice. It will be shown that the themes of `love' and `the neighbor', as contained in Works of Love, represent a politics that are critical not only in combating individual commitments to what bell hooks calls, "...the will to dominate and subjugate..." (hooks 1995, 262-272), but the structures of discrimination and oppression that result from such individual commitments as well. This dissertation, then, is concerned with the political subjectivity of the individual as it is, potentially, oriented around the praxis of love of the neighbor, concepts that populate what Lukács termed Kierkegaard's "qualitative dialectic" (Lukács [1952] 1980, 256). (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

University teachers' perceptions and evaluations of ethics instruction in public relations curriculum

This study examined the present state of teaching ethics in university public relations departments in the U.S. and abroad. The results indicated that public relations teachers perceived ethics instruction in public relations education to be essential, and they believed in a close tie between general morality and professional ethics. However, as the results of a quantitative survey suggested, foreign participants believed that ethics instruction helps students make right choices on the job less so than did participants who were born and teach in the U.S. A series of qualitative interviews with communication teachers in Western European universities revealed that the foreign teachers did not perceive themselves as direct contributors to the public relations industry. Instead, they saw themselves as individuals who are responsible for general liberal education of the youth, not specialized training. Multiple regression analysis of a number of respondents' demographics showed that the higher the participants' rank, the less favorable attitude they held toward the value of ethics education to students. This result is a subject of a future investigation. The majority of participants recognized ethics instruction incorporated in courses throughout the PR curriculum as the most valuable format of ethics instruction delivery. The most used pedagogies--teacher lectures, case studies, and group discussion--appeared to be the most effective approaches, whereas the most used resources in teaching ethics--textbooks, trade magazine articles, and newspaper or magazine stories--were perceived as the most effective material in teaching ethics. Future research should focus on the content of ethics courses; theoretical systems (e.g., Judeo-Christian ethics, Kantian deontology, utilitarianism, and others) examined in the course; whether and to what extent ethics is not only a teaching, but also a research interest of public relations teachers; and, the most important, whether and to what extent ethics instruction affects public relations graduates' future as individuals and professionals. This study makes a pedagogical and theoretical contribution to a thin literature on ethics education. Research based on examination of teachers' perceptions and preferences may help public relations educators see trends in contemporary education, better understand their underpinnings, and possibly enhance their own teaching and educational curricula. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

A comparative test of theories of polarity and conflict

Works on the relationship between polarity and war in the past produce inconsistent, sometimes, self-conflicting conclusions. This is caused by the lack of a comparable way of conceptualizing and defining polarity and the lack of a common gauge for estimating that relationship. This research addresses these methodological shortcomings and explores the linkage between the international system of the major powers and dyadic conflict by conducting a comparative study of polarity and war. It tests the targeted relationship using: 1) a number of quantifiable polarity concepts proposed by several representative scholars, including John Mearsheimer, Jack Levy, Charles Kegley and Gregory Raymond, and George Modelski; 2) a common research design that has incorporated the Kantian variables and has drawn the essence from the latest progress in this discipline, and 3) an objective method of calculating a continuous measure of the polarity among the great powers. Such a research design can compare the impact of various types of polarity on the onset of wars while controlling for both realist and Kantian influences. It provides a broad prospective on the connection between polarity and war. This study confirms the existence of a connection between polarity and war of unipolarity > bipolarity > multipolarity in order of peacefulness. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Piaffe into politics: power and identity in horsemanship training

The universal centering of human life and activity produces the binary of the human as different from and superior to the nonhuman animal. This centering establishes the priorities, comfort, and survival of humans as more important than the health and well being of nonhuman animals. This preference for human concerns belittles the needs of nonhuman animal others. If human interaction with animals reflects much more about the human than the animal, then, this pervasive experience of preferential treatment for the human species is incontrovertibly linked to (human) conceptions of power and political identity. This project will specifically examine the possibilities of equitable horse and human relationships within the context of dressage training. I ask, "can training allow for a praxis of equity and justice between horses and humans?" (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Deep in the heart: Mark Twain and Walker Percy as authors of agency

The following project examines the transformative power of literature against certain problems of the modern and postmodern experience as articulated by political theory. The primary concern is what theologian David Kyuman Kim calls "melancholic freedom," a condition wherein the intelligibility of the self has been compromised by the decreases in personal agency brought on by a modern disconnect from moral and ethical sources. As such, this work is situated within the contemporary debate on the interrelatedness of identity and agency, and thus the work of Charles Taylor will figure prominently. Much of the work of twentieth and twenty-first theorists has centered around attempts to resolve the complications that have developed in the wake of our modern era, to explain the tradeoffs and contradictions. Kim suggests the need for "projects of regenerating agency," which satisfy the following criteria: 1) provide suggestion of a religious imagination at work; 2) support a cultivation of the self; 3) demonstrate a search for moral identity and present opportunities for spiritual exercise; and 4) exhibit an aspiration toward a vocation of the self. It is my argument that engagement with the literary arts, either as a reader or writer, fulfills these conditions and presents an alternative site for regenerating agency. This expansion of Kim's work opens theory to wider application and joins political philosophy and literature in a common project of expanding the discourse on identity and agency. I will demonstrate how the writing and lives of Mark Twain and Walker Percy meet Kim's criteria for such a project. Twain and Percy as authors of projects of regenerating agency advance the case that art has the capacity to be instructive and illuminating as part of our moral discourses in ways that theory cannot replicate. Also, a reading of literature motivated by the concerns of political theory--in this case the discussion on identity, agency, and their points of intersection--allows us to reinvigorate the critical appreciation of these two authors. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

European integration and the nationalist parties

This dissertation presents a comprehensive analysis of the factors affecting nationalist parties’ support for the EU over time and across regions. Investigating how European integration and nationalist parties interconnect and looking for patterns among a large number of cases are important to understanding the nature of nationalism and the future of the EU. The approach of looking for patterns among a large number of cases contributes to overcoming limitations of existing studies that are based on a small number of cases and allows more valid generalizations about the nature of nationalist parties in the European context. This study combines a big-N method with case studies. The big-N method relies on aggregated data over a 30-year period from 1984 to 2014 in both Western and Eastern EU member countries to investigate the attitudes and behaviors of all kinds of contemporary nationalist parties toward European integration. A total of 105 nationalist parties across 26 EU member states are included. I build on Arnold, Sapir, and De Vries’s (2012) model for predicting Western European parties’ EU positions based on their electorate, parties, and party system characteristics. The differences are that (1) I focus strictly on nationalist parties, while Arnold, Sapir, and De Vries included all parties, (2) I broaden the scope to include both Western and Eastern European countries, and (3) I have added a variety of country-level variables. In particular, I emphasize party-level variables and party system characteristics, but other country-level variables are also included as controls because these might matter too. A variety of possible variables are classified into two categories: party-level (including ideology, party type (statewide versus minority nationalist), party size, and incumbency) and country-level (including party system fractionalization and polarization, as well as East versus West, state size, immigrant population, the length of EU membership, economic conditions, and public opinion). I look separately at statewide nationalist parties and minority nationalist parties, in addition to all nationalist parties combined, in order to investigate whether the independent variables have different effects for different types of nationalist parties. I found that extreme nationalist parties are more negative toward the EU, minority nationalist parties are more positive than statewide nationalist parties, larger nationalist parties are more positive, incumbent nationalist parties are more positive, political context matters differently for statewide nationalist parties and minority nationalist parties, and characteristics of the state matter more for minority nationalist parties than for statewide nationalist parties. Along with the big-N method, I conducted three case studies in order to investigate the actual changes in strategies and behaviors within real-life political contexts and to access similarities and differences between strategies of different parties in a comparative context. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries