PHD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Political Science

Using the ICC's first convictions for rape as a war crime and crime against humanity, this study finds that the role of NGOs in forging the path of international justice have shifted with the institutionalization of the Court. In this work, I investigate quantitatively the degree of public-facing activism on the part of two major international NGOs during the ICC trials of Jean-Pierre Bemba and Bosco Ntaganda. Using qualitative data collected in court documents, journalist reports, government reports, scholarship, and via interviews with those directly involved in the work, I investigate the less public roles of various actors in the evolution and implementation of international law regarding sex and gender-based violence in these two cases. I find that while NGOs seem, publicly, nearly silent on the pursuit of justice for myriad sexual and gender-based crimes committed by these two individuals and those under their command, the work of NGO leaders and activists continues to lend expertise to the Court. This is especially obvious through the formulation and implementation of specific policy papers coming from the Office of the Prosecutor. Further, using data on the daily progression of each case, I argue that the Court is in a period of norm fortification, during which the practice of holding individuals criminally responsible for the crime of wartime rape has surpassed the existence of a law on the books and is increasingly supported in jurisprudence and precedent.

Committee: Julie Mazzei (Committee Chair) Subjects: Political Science

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1950, History

Committee: R. Stanley McCordock (Advisor) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, English

The police have a literary history. By the Book canvasses a broad range American novels that depicted many of the organizational developments and institutional operations of municipal law enforcement in United States cities from the late-nineteenth through the early-twentieth century. I examine the rise of the police procedural as a literary genre in the true-crime fiction of Julian Hawthorne and the detective novels of Anna Katharine Green that promote the investigative processes of the New York Police Department and its specialized crime units. I examine the futurist fiction of J. W. Roberts and Frederick Upham Adams, which pushed back against debates about law enforcement's own future in their explorations of interpersonal crime, criminal enterprise, and riot control in metropolises such as Boston, Chicago, and New York. Finally, I examine social problem novels by Sutton E. Griggs that tackle the Jim Crow police state created in Southern cities like Richmond and Nashville through police abuse and neglect toward black Americans. Ultimately, the story that emerges in By the Book is about competing civic narratives -- of the police as collective protagonist and collective antagonist in American society.

Committee: Elizabeth Hewitt (Advisor); Molly Farrell (Committee Member); Andrea N. Williams (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Sociology

The central questions of this dissertation are threefold: First, are female criminal defendants punished more leniently than male defendants? Second, have gender-based disparities in criminal sentencing changed over time? Last, do male and female judges vary in their sentencing practices? Using a data set of all adult felony cases in the state of Minnesota from 1982 to 2017 (N=416,753) I first test for defendant gender-based disparities in criminal sentencing. With the exception of sentence length decisions for drug defendants, women are punished more leniently than men. However, legally relevant variables (e.g., criminal history) account for the majority of gender variation in sentencing. Second, in an analysis of longitudinal patterns in gender-based sentencing disparities, I find the gap in gender disparities in sentencing has narrowed over time. Specifically, from 1982-2017, men are sentenced more leniently over time while women are sentenced more punitively. With regard to judge-gender-based disparities in sentencing, I find that male and female judges do not differ in their sentencing practices.

Committee: King Ryan Dr. (Advisor); Dwyer Rachel Dr. (Committee Member); Brehm Hollie Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

This study analyzes the colorful phenomenon of the shanson in the context of contemporary Russian culture and politics. It targets the shanson's complex symbiotic relationship with Putin's regime and its paradoxical place within the national consciousness. This musical genre has undergone a veritable sea change over time, evolving from a subcultural form mocking official powers to a normalized, commodified cultural product that now bears the Kremlin's stamp of approval. Faced with the new post-Soviet economic reality, the underworld song underwent mutations that transformed it from a subcultural expression to a commercially successful vein of contemporary music currently acknowledged, and even deployed, by the Russian authorities. While such shifts often mark subcultures' lifecycles worldwide, what is particularly striking in this case is the shanson's continued bond with the underworld. It is this study's claim that such a paradox arises from the specific nature of the Putin regime and from Russian society's particular mode of existence, in which both the population and the state have internalized the norms of the criminal world. The current analysis briefly covers the development of underworld music, from folk songs about criminals and rebels in the early period in Russian culture (seventeenth century) to the merchandising of the shanson in the 1990s, and then delves into manifestations of an incongruous quid pro quo synergy between the shanson and the president's politics, especially examining the genre's incorporation into the official discourse of the Putin era. My research demonstrates that in Russia, where the difference between the authorities and criminals is not always easily distinguishable, the shanson has been enjoying privileges bestowed on it by the current regime. In other words, in today's crime-ridden Russia, the shanson has found an officially approved home.

Committee: Helena Goscilo (Advisor); Ludmila Isurin (Committee Member); Jennifer Suchland (Committee Member); Robert A. Rothstein (Committee Member) Subjects: Slavic Studies

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2017, Sociology

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) impacts thousands of American women every year. This study examines the effect of law enforcement training to improve police officers' attitudes towards victims, and the race or ethnicity of an IPV victim, on her willingness to involve police in future IPV assaults. I propose that higher satisfaction with past police attitudes leads to a higher willingness to involve police in future IPV assaults. I also propose that victims with higher levels of education and paid employment will be more willing to involve police. Data were collected from 547 IPV victims receiving assistance from service providers in New York and Texas. Logit regression was used to examine the relationship between satisfaction with past police attitudes, respondent's education level, and employment status for the full sample. In addition, by adopting an intersectional analytical approach, I examine these variables using White-, Black-, and Latina-specific models. Results indicate that higher levels of satisfaction with past police attitudes increases an IPV victim's willingness for future police involvement. The effects of the independent variables operate differently for White, Black, and Latina victims. This study suggests that general police training to develop more compassionate attitudes towards IPV victims does increase an IPV victims' desire to involve police in the future, although there are variations by race and ethnicity. Social policy should consider how IPV victims are affected by intersections of gender, race or ethnicity, and social class.

Committee: Matthew Lee Ph.D. (Advisor); Kathryn Feltey Ph.D. (Committee Member); Stacey Nofziger Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Criminology; Sociology; Womens Studies

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Arts and Sciences: History

This dissertation examines the politics of punishment and application of Ottoman prison reform in the three major port cities, Izmir, which receives the greatest attention, Istanbul, and Salonica in the late Ottoman Empire. This work explores Ottoman prisons on a daily scale and in a larger imperial frame by re-thinking the idea of social control and surveillance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the ways in which the Ottoman government dealt with the prisons as `modern' and `European' legal institutions. By using primary sources drawn from Ottoman archives, and relying heavily on Ottoman and British newspapers and journals, this dissertation examines Ottoman prison reform from various angles such as sustenance of prisoners, health and hygiene; the usage of cannabis (esrar) in Ottoman prisons; prison work; prison architecture; and urbanization. Until the first half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was using various buildings as prisons, including old fortresses, such as Baba Cafer Zindani and Yedikule in Istanbul; military barracks; shipyards, such as Tersane Zindani (Bagnio); khans, such as Cezayir Hani in Izmir; and local notables' (ayan) palace dungeons. The bureaucratization and centralization attempts of the Tanzimat reformers and, more importantly, the promulgation of the criminal codes of 1851 and 1858 not only paved the way for the shift from corporal and capital punishment to imprisonment but also allowed for the establishment of a new set of definitions in terms of crime and punishment. However, the establishment a modern prison remained merely an ideal until 1871 when the first general prison (hapishane-i umumi) was built in Istanbul. The construction of purposefully built prisons continued in the major cities of the Empire, including Izmir and Salonica, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Izmir as one of the major port cities of the Empire saw immense and fluctuating flows of people due to wars, migration, and (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Elizabeth Frierson Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Kent F. Schull Ph.D. (Committee Member); Evangelos Kechriotis Ph.D. (Committee Member); Raja Adal Ph.D. (Committee Member); Robert Haug Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Middle Eastern History

BA, Oberlin College, 2014, Psychology

The present research investigates how masculine dominance in the criminal justice system is upheld through misleading media representations of violent criminality in women as predicated upon masculine traits or mental illness and masculine Identity Protection Cognition (which demonstrates the how implicit social information influences an individual to make judgments in favor of protecting their own socially dominant group). Responses to an online survey of 413 participants demonstrated that overall participants assumed men to be more likely than women to engage in violent action, and violence in men was judged to be a function of power, whereas violence in women was believed to be a reaction to victimization by a man. Overall participants rated violent women as more likely than men to have a mental illness, however the opposite was true for extremely masculine participants. For the purposes of this study mental illness was defined by the M'Naughten Rule, used in common law jurisdictions to identify if the defendant is not guilty by reason of insanity. Participants judged perpetrators exhibiting psychotic, histrionic and/or romantically obsessive symptoms to be more likely female, whereas perpetrators exhibiting anti-social, hypersexual or vengeful symptoms were assumed to be men. Extremely masculine participants were more likely to excuse sexually violent and psychopathic male perpetrators as not guilty by reason of insanity while women who acted violently because of postpartum depression/psychosis and even Battered Woman's Syndrome were not excused under the M'Naughten Rule.

Committee: Patricia DeWinstanley (Advisor); Travis Wilson (Committee Member); Cindy Frantz (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Behavioral Sciences; Cognitive Psychology; Criminology; Legal Studies

Master of Science in Criminal Justice, Youngstown State University, 2010, Department of Criminal Justice

This research explores how higher education among law enforcement officers may influence liability. Research in the area of police officer educational level and liability is sparse, with most comparing education with performance or other levels of measure. More specifically this thesis investigates complaints among police officers by level of education. In particular, the focus is on law enforcement officers with baccalaureate and more advanced degrees and their liability rates when compared to those with high school diplomas or GEDs. This study will examine criminal, civil, and administrative complaints that were filed against degreed and non-degreed law enforcement officers from a police department in Mahoning County, Ohio. These proceedings will then be analyzed to determine whether the degreed officers have a reduced risk of criminal, civil, and administrative liability. The central hypothesis is that degreed officers will have a lower rate of complaints sustained (in other words found guilty) when officially complained of wrongdoing in 1) criminal, 2) civil, and 3) administrative proceedings. The primary variables will be complaint type, education level, and complaint outcome. The importance of this research will assist law enforcement administrators address departmental liability risks and provide potential options to reducing liability.

Committee: Patricia Wagner J.D. (Committee Chair); John Hazy PhD (Committee Member); C. Allen Pierce PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Adult Education; Community Colleges; Continuing Education; Criminology; Education; Higher Education; Inservice Training; Management

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2008, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

The intention of this paper is to demonstrate that the regulation of social subjects within the family was the impetus to regulation of legal subjects in both mandatory Syria and Lebanon (The Levant) and the French metropolis. First, this paper explores female subject construction under the post-WWI French mandate of the Levant. It then discusses how Enlightenment-thinking influenced the Ottoman Empire in its appropriation of the French Penal Code followed by the contemporary legal theory dividing Western and Islamic contexts. It then examines criminal court cases from the Levant and France that deal with domestic violence or murder as reactions to adultery with comparisons of how the French state in each context regulated citizens' morality. The paper concludes its genealogy of patriarchy in the law with Orientalist understandings of "honor killings" that neglect factoring in overlapping histories and current feminist approaches to confronting "Eastern" forms of violence.

Committee: Joseph Zeidan (Advisor); Snjezana Buzov (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; History; International Law; International Relations; Law; Middle Eastern History; Social Structure; Womens Studies

Bachelor of Arts, Miami University, 2006, College of Arts and Sciences - English

What is the potential for expanding international women's human rights in the wake of armed conflict? How can the domestic enforcement of international criminal law, through the use of hybrid tribunals, contribute to establishing gender-specific provisions in the judiciary of post-conflict states? The Special Court for Sierra Leone provides a unique empirical basis for evaluating the dialogue between international and domestic law and culture, with regard to women's rights. This Article seeks to address the need to progressively develop women's rights, and to do so in a manner that is consistent with both universal international human rights norms and local cultural differences. It is particularly concerned with the successes and failures of hybrid courts in facilitating gender justice in post-conflict environments. Specifically, this Article will examine the potential of the SCSL to offer substantive and normative post-conflict progress in the development and application of gender provisions aimed at addressing the silent war crime of sexual violence.

Committee: John Forren (Advisor) Subjects: