Modes of mobilisation : socio-political dynamics in Somaliland, Somalia, and Afghanistan

This thesis provides a framework for viewing socio-political contexts and how these relate to interventionist projects. The framework draws on and combines strands from international relations and sociological perspectives of social interaction. The central question becomes how intervention and existing social contexts interact to produce unintended outcomes. It applies the analysis to two separate wider contexts: Afghanistan and Somalia, with a particular focus on the self-declared independent Somaliland as an internally generated and controlled transformational process. Unlike abstract directions of theoretical development the framework seeks to provide a platform that sets aside ideological assumptions and from which interventionist projects can be observed and evaluated based on literature, field observations and interviews. Drawing on such diverse influences as fourth generation peace and conflict studies, Morphogenetics, and social forces theory, the framework explores conditions and interest formations to capture instances of local agency that are part of a continuity of local realities. It views social interaction without imposing Universalist value assumptions, but also without resorting to relativism or raising so many caveats that it becomes impractical. It exposes the agency of local interest formations hidden beneath the discourses of ideologically framed conflicts. These social agents are often dismissed as passive victims to be brought under the influence of for example the state, but are in reality able to subvert, co-opt, constrain or facilitate the forces that are dependent on them for social influence. In the end, it is the modes of mobilisation that emerge as the most crucial factor for understanding the relevant social dynamics

Afghanistan: Can the troop surge be effective?

The surge and connected strategy are logical when viewing the situation through Westernised lenses but pose a number of issues. General McChrystal explained the strategy of expanding bubbles of security that the surge will support in a recent interview. NATO/ISAF forces would provide a slowly expanding security presence and gradually be replaced by Afghan forces. Under this security umbrella farmers would chose to grow wheat instead of poppy and go to the market instead of to the gun. This makes perfect sense in a Western perspective. The war however is in Afghanistan

The Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE): The Dust Extinction Curve from Red Clump Stars

We use Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of red clump stars taken as part of the Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE) program to measure the average dust extinction curve in a ~ 200 pc x 100 pc region in the southwest bar of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The rich information provided by our 8-band ultra-violet through near-infrared photometry allows us to model the color-magnitude diagram of the red clump accounting for the extinction curve shape, a log-normal distribution of $A_{V}$, and the depth of the stellar distribution along the line of sight. We measure an extinction curve with $R_{475} = A_{475}/(A_{475}-A_{814})$ = 2.65 $\pm$ 0.11. This measurement is significantly larger than the equivalent values of published Milky Way $R_{V}$ = 3.1 ($R_{475} = 1.83$) and SMC Bar $R_{V}$ = 2.74 ($R_{475} = 1.86$) extinction curves. Similar extinction curve offsets in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have been interpreted as the effect of large dust grains. We demonstrate that the line-of-sight depth of the SMC (and LMC) introduces an apparent "gray" contribution to the extinction curve inferred from the morphology of the red clump. We show that no gray dust component is needed to explain extinction curve measurements when a full-width half-max depth of 10 $\pm$ 2 kpc in the stellar distribution of the SMC (5 $\pm$ 1 kpc for the LMC) is considered, which agrees with recent studies of Magellanic Cloud stellar structure. The results of our work demonstrate the power of broad-band HST imaging for simultaneously constraining dust and galactic structure outside the Milky Way.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in Ap

The CO-to-H2 Conversion Factor From Infrared Dust Emission Across the Local Group

We estimate the conversion factor relating CO emission to H2 mass, alpha_CO, in five Local Group galaxies that span approximately an order of magnitude in metallicity - M31, M 33, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), NGC 6822, and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We model the dust mass along the line of sight from infrared (IR) emission and then solve for the alpha_CO that best allows a single gas-to-dust ratio (delta_GDR) to describe each system. This approach remains sensitive to CO-dark envelopes of H2 surrounding molecular clouds. In M 31, M 33, and the LMC we find alpha_CO \approx 3-9 M_sun pc^-2 (K km s^-1)^-1, consistent with the Milky Way value within the uncertainties. The two lowest metallicity galaxies in our sample, NGC 6822 and the SMC (12 + log(O/H) \approx 8.2 and 8.0), exhibit a much higher alpha_CO. Our best estimates are \alpha_NGC6822 \approx 30 M_sun/pc^-2 (K km s^-1)^-1 and \alpha_SMC \approx 70 M_sun/pc^-2 (K km s-1)-1. These results are consistent with the conversion factor becoming CO a strong function of metallicity around 12 + log(O/H) \sim 8.4 - 8.2. We favor an interpretation where decreased dust-shielding leads to the dominance of CO-free envelopes around molecular clouds below this metallicity.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, 15 pages, 7 figure