Browsing by Subject "Dictatorship"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Dictatorships and the Globalization of Repression(2020-07) Kaire De Francisco, JoseDictatorships today are as violent as they were during the Cold War. This has surprised international observers, who a few years ago thought globalization would help protect human rights in these countries. Despite international efforts to hold abusive dictators accountable, human rights appear to have gotten worse in many dictatorships. To explain this puzzle, I first note how globalization threatens the political and economic interests of elites in dictatorships. In turn, elites demand compensation from the dictator. Where elites can credibly threaten the dictator with removal, the dictator is likely to increase repression to placate allies and avoid a coup. This compensation dynamic between autocrats and their ruling coalition explains why some dictatorships respond with increased violence to globalization while others do not. It also helps explain how different elements of globalization interact with each other in the domestic politics of autocracies to improve or weaken human rights.Item Essays in public Economics(2013-07) Pouokam, Nathalie CabreleThis dissertation consists of two essays of public economics. In the first essay, I build a new and rich quantitative model of unsecured and secured debt to study the impact of the 2005 bankruptcy reform law on the foreclosure crisis during the great recession. I find that the bankruptcy reform did not significantly affect the foreclosure rate, but it moderately lowered the foreclosure rate by raising the opportunity cost of a bad credit record, thereby making households less likely to default simultaneously on mortgage contracts and on unsecured credit contracts. In the second essay, I use a game theoretical model to show how political institutions shape prospects of economic growth. The study predicts that everything else equal, economies that are the most likely to grow are those with the strongest political institutions: the lowest probabilities of occurrence of a coup d'etat and the lowest probabilities of falling in an absorbing state of dictatorship. Consistently with empirical facts on growth, the relationship predicted between dictatorship and economic growth by the model is a non-linear one: given a probability of falling in the state of dictatorship, the occurrence of growth depends on the discount factor of citizens. The essay also shows that even when the economy is already growing as a dictatorship, a one-shot transition to democracy is still desirable to citizens as it reduces the payoffs that are necessary to provide dynamic incentives to politicians in power.Item The Media of Memories: Argentine and Brazilian Transitional Justice as Seen on TV(2019-03) Hill Cosimini, AmyGrounded in my own observation of the recent string of Latin American shows, such as Montecristo (Argentina, 2008) and Amor e revolução (Brazil, 2011), which directly confront traumatic national pasts, this project investigates what representative 21st century Argentine and Brazilian fictional and testimonial televisual accounts (telenovelas, miniseries and testimonial interviews) communicate about the role of television in the construction and mediation of the officially sanctioned memory narratives promoted by normative transitional justice mechanisms. In this vein, this project—The Media of Memories: Argentine and Transitional Justice as Seen on TV—poses a series of interrelated questions:1) How can transitional justice processes take place on the small screen? 2) How can understanding these televisual practices advance existing theories on transitional justice as it relates to the right to memory, and the protection of memory’s productive problematics—such as the respect for silence, gaps and hauntings inherent in remembering mass atrocities? And finally, 3) What alternative spaces for advocacy, if any, are opened up by these television programs? In the end, my project contends that television programs, in the Argentine and Brazilian cases, have the potential to operate as malleable discursive spaces that question hegemonic memory regimes and complicate normative truths put in place by the State. Furthermore, the telenovelas, miniseries, and testimonial interviews analyzed throughout this project function, to varying degrees, as dynamic memory mediums that simultaneously promote memory as memory entrepreneurs, profit from memory, frame what truths should be remembered, and digitally transmit memory. Thus, I maintain that moving televised images have the potential to operate as a widely accessible form of transitional justice that not only translates judicial arguments to the mass populace, but also provides alternative spaces for the re-definition of justice and the performance of multilayered activism. Through its visual depiction and fictionalization of the limit experiences of collective traumas, television stages those realities that resist verbal narration and operates as a form of symbolic reparations that restores dignity to victims, develops a more inclusive narrative of the past, and protects the right to memory.Item Rethinking disappearance in Chilean post-coup narratives.(2011-05) Howe, Alexis LynnThis dissertation explores Chilean narratives produced since the 1973 coup d'état (from the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods) and analyzes representations of disappearance, which range from the institutionalized practice of enforced disappearance during the dictatorship, to the erasure of inconvenient histories and memories during the transition to democracy, and the persistent vanishing of marginal subjects in neoliberal democratic Chile. Focusing on the work of Ana Vásquez, Luz Arce, Ariel Dorfman, Roberto Bolaño, and Diamela Eltit, who present disappearance in numerous forms and in a variety of genres (novels, testimonio, drama, film, and texts that blur generic boundaries), I argue that, as one of many authoritarian continuities in democratic Chile, disappearance persists in the present. My study begins to articulate other manifestations of disappearance that extend beyond the notion of enforced disappearance as a phenomenon contained during the dictatorship period, and constitutes a space for rethinking disappearance in neoliberal democracies.