MA, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

This thesis explores the early history of the U.S. Air Force Security Service (USAFSS), an early Cold War military communications intelligence (COMINT) agency established by the Air Force on October 20, 1948. Using bureaucracy theory, the study seeks to understand why the U.S. Air Force was motivated to create a separate COMINT capability at this point in time, how the capability would be organized, and what functions the organization was expected to provide. Drawing upon a number of declassified Air Force and Executive Branch documents, congressional testimony, official historical studies and oral history materials, this study argues that the Air Force developed the USAFSS to resist dependence upon other military intelligence efforts and that the organization successfully accomplished Air Force objectives for a separate, communications intelligence capability.

Committee: Ann Heiss Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: American History; Armed Forces; History; Information Technology; International Relations; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History; Technical Communication; Technology

BA, Kent State University, 2014, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

The United States Air Force Security Service (USAFSS), created in 1948, was the first signals intelligence organization to be created post-World War II and played an integral role in Cold War intelligence gathering. Indeed, despite its relatively young age compared to its Army and Navy counterparts, the USAFSS soon became the premier agency for signals intelligence in the early Cold War and was responsible for hundreds of secret listening posts around the world. This thesis argues that the USAFSS was able to have such a large impact on the post-World War II intelligence community due to a high level of technological proficiency, dedication, and a close working relationship with the National Security Agency (NSA) after its establishment in 1952. Using oral history interviews and declassified government documents, this thesis explores how the USAFSS was established and how it grew to leave a lasting impact for both contemporary Cold War intelligence agencies and the modern incarnation of Air Force intelligence.

Committee: Elizabeth Smith-Pryor Ph.D (Advisor); Timothy Scarnecchia Ph.D (Committee Member); Fred Endres Ph.D (Committee Member); Leslie Heaphy Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Armed Forces; Computer Science; Engineering; European History; History; Information Science; Information Technology; International Relations; Mass Communications; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History; Political Science; Russian History; Science History; Technical Communication; Technology; World History

Master of Computing and Information Systems, Youngstown State University, 2009, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems

Is Microsoft a threat to national security? This thesis evaluates Microsoft's policies, business model, and products to determine whether Microsoft is a threat to national security. The first part of this thesis investigated Microsoft's policies and products. In the second part of this thesis, two networks were investigated. The first network, which will be known as network “honey,” was designed and configured to examine the techniques of hackers. The second network, which will be known as network “X,” is a real business enterprise network that was the target for penetration testing. The investigation provided an inside look at the security threats in Microsoft Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1, Microsoft Server 2000 SP4, and Microsoft Server 2003 SP2 operating systems on a network. The results of this investigation serve as a microcosm to a macro-problem. Microsoft Windows networks are too vulnerable to serve as the backbone for any institution or organization's networking infrastructure, especially entities considered to be government critical infrastructures.

Committee: Graciela Perera PhD (Advisor); Alina Lazar PhD (Committee Member); John Sullins PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Information Systems; Systems Design

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Mechanical and Systems Engineering (Engineering and Technology)

The world is currently experiencing a shortage of semiconductor chips. This shortage is affecting different industries that rely on electronic components that involve semiconductor chips to manufacture their products. Due to the shortage of chips, manufacturers are unable to complete the final assembly of their products, resulting in a delay in delivering the finished products to their customers. To address this issue, the US Congress passed the "Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act of 2022" on 9th August, 2022. This act aims to improve the competitiveness, innovation, and national security of the US. This dissertation focuses on addressing the chip shortage through the reduction of chronic semiconductor manufacturing process quality problems caused by wafer map surface defects. The proposed solution involves detecting mixed-type wafer map surface defect patterns using Ensemble Deformable Convolutional Neural Networks. The framework for defect detection proposed in this dissertation outperforms other machine learning models from literature, such as Conv-Pool-CNN, All-CNN, NIN-CNN, DCNN-v1, and DCNN-v2, in terms of F1-score. The proposed framework uses an industrial wafer map dataset (MixedWM38) from a semiconductor wafer manufacturing process to train the base models for the ensemble method. The results show that the proposed framework accurately identifies multi-pattern defects from the surface of wafer maps. This dissertation will contribute to advancing academic literature for the new field of detecting mixed-type defect patterns from the surface of wafer maps. Defects are indicators of process problems, and preventing quality defects in advance is the best approach to achieving positive yield. The efficient and accurate detection of wafer map mixed-type surface defect patterns is important for addressing chronic manufacturing process quality problems. The proposed framework can be used by semiconductor manufacturer (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tao Yuan (Advisor); Gary Weckman (Committee Member); Ashley Metcalf (Committee Member); William Young (Committee Member); Saeed Ghanbartehrani (Committee Member); Omar Alhawari (Committee Member) Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Science; Engineering; Industrial Engineering; Mathematics; Mechanical Engineering; Nanotechnology; Operations Research; Statistics; Systems Design

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2021, Leadership and Change

The U.S. intelligence community is a critical mission industry responsible for protecting lives and safety in ways that impact the global security environment. Research on the deleterious impact of toxic workplace behavior on other critical mission fields, such as health care and the U.S. military, is robust. However, intelligence scholars publishing within the unclassified arena have been silent on the phenomenon, how personnel respond to it, and how it may impact the intelligence function. This lack of scholarship has afforded an opportunity to understand what constitutes toxic behavior in the intelligence environment and how it may affect U.S. national security objectives. This study presents a theoretical model of response to toxic workplace behavior among intelligence officers in the U.S. intelligence community that centers on a single goal: Holding Self. Using grounded theory methodology and situational analysis in two segments, the study examines how intelligence officers responded and the role that efforts to hold onto self-concepts played in those responses. The findings included three psychological dimensions, three action dimensions, and two inter-dimensions of response. The findings also included identification of the broader ecological situation conditioning response and how those choices operationalized into the business of being intelligence officers. The final model serves as a foundation for future empirical research on the topic. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, https://aura.antioch.edu/, and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/.

Committee: Elizabeth Holloway Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Aqeel Tirmizi Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jan Goldman Ed.D (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; Cognitive Psychology; Gender; Personal Relationships; Political Science; Psychology; Social Research

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Political Science

Serving to preserve sovereignty, guarantee survival, and facilitate freedom of action, national security is arguably the lead objective of the state. In contrast, moral norms are commonly held international rules built on morality that, among other effects, can inhibit states in their pursuit of that primary goal. The question posed here, then, is why states would willingly make national-security sacrifices for moral-normative reasons. And yet they do. In numerous wars, militaries have chosen to forego attacks on tactically and operationally valuable targets to protect civilian lives. Additionally, in militarized conflicts from World War I to the Gulf War and beyond, political and military leaders have selected their weapons not only by military value but also by categorization, what some scholars call “taboos.” These moral norms of civilian immunity and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) taboos appear to play a substantial role in state conduct, as shown by the wide-ranging statements of policymakers and commanders and real-world practical constraint. However, experimental research indicates a striking willingness among the public to both violate civilian immunity and use weapons of mass destruction if they appear militarily effective. In prior studies where participants make ex ante and post hoc evaluations of norm-violating attacks on terrorist and conventional adversaries, large numbers of participants—in some cases, well over half—endorse civilian-killing nuclear strikes. This discrepancy in findings derives in part from incomplete specification of how moral norms exist and function at the decision-making level, where adherence to, or violation of, the moral norm is determined. This dissertation uses a dual-process theory of affect and cognition to describe decision-makers' moral-normative and national-security attitudes and their effects on wartime decision-making. Moral norms appear as affect-dominant attitudes, supported overwhelmingly by feelings an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Richard Herrmann (Advisor); Christopher Gelpi (Committee Member); Alexander Wendt (Committee Member) Subjects: International Relations; Military Studies; Political Science

BA, Oberlin College, 2020, Environmental Studies

The Himalaya-Hindu Kush mountain range and the Tibetan Plateau birth ten of Asia's most prominent rivers providing irrigation, energy, and drinking water to over two billion people across several countries today. Therefore, transboundary water sharing is a constant source of conflict for several South Asian countries that rely on rivers to support their primarily agrarian economies.In recent years, climate change has drastically increased global temperatures. As a result, the Indian subcontinent has been plagued with extreme riverine flood and drought events.Climate change-related events like riverine floods and drought, exacerbate the politicization of conflict between nations that share natural resources like water. This politicization is visible in the media coverage of conflict, and the way water-sharing issues are linked with other transboundary conflicts, especially those pertaining to national security. This paper explores the relationship between climate change and water-sharing conflicts in three South Asian nations: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the national media coverage of transboundary river systems, Indus and Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna, this honors thesis explores how climate change affects the politicization of water-sharing conflicts between these three nations.

Committee: Swapna Pathak (Committee Member); Md. Rumi Shammin (Committee Member); Laurie Hovell McMillin (Committee Member) Subjects: Environmental Studies; Mass Media

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2019, History

Harry Truman based his efforts to create and run the Department of Defense on his interpretation that the best way to sustain effective national security was through balanced budgets. Once Defense budgets fell, Truman could offset the security imbalance through programs such as Universal Military Training and aid programs to Europe for mutual defense. Desperate to cut military expenditures after World War II, Truman failed to provide adequate leadership during the unification debates and allowed James Forrestal to much control over the shape of the Department. Forrestal, whose national security ideology favored coordination of efforts, struggled to effectively execute either national security vision. The dysfunction of the Department of Defense in its first five years emerged from this ideological clash. Consequently, when given a chance to amend the original National Security Act and replace Forrestal, Truman selected a Secretary who did not possess a unique security ideology and would execute Truman's directions. While initially successful in reducing defense budgets, the rising tensions of the Cold War ultimately revealed the dangerous shortcomings of Truman's policies. Truman's hope to create and sustain cost-effective security fell apart with the outbreak of the Korean War and the increased anxiety of the Soviet threat.  

Committee: Amanda McVety (Advisor) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, African-American and African Studies

This dissertation highlights racism's role in the evolution of the U.S. national security state between 1959 and 1980. It investigates the U.S. government's violent responses to domestic and global nationalist movements, including the Cuban Revolution, the Black urban rebellions in Harlem and Watts, the Viet Nam War, the Black Panther Party, and the war for liberation in Zimbabwe. In doing so, it challenges the rigid boundary separating events that occur at home from those abroad. Seen together through a racial lens, U.S. domestic and foreign activities comprise a singular apparatus that I identify as the national security state. Moreover, the state and these movements employed tactics against each other that involved constant adjustment. This dissertation therefore also conceptualizes the modern U.S. national security state as a culmination of the moves and countermoves between these oppositional forces. During the 1960s and 1970s, state forces utilized increasingly preemptive and punitive tactics against Black and Third World populations. This development, I argue, stemmed from the institutionalization of counterrevolutionary warfare as a permanent condition afflicting Black and Third World peoples. Mass incarceration, counterinsurgency, proxy war, and protracted military occupation comprise the U.S.'s modern and global counterrevolutionary war. This dissertation concludes that war became the predominant mode of racial domination after the 1960s. Through war, the U.S. national security state buttressed and elaborated the racialized global order. As such, racial violence, and the resistance against it, compelled adaptations in policing and warfare, which were consolidated into a militarized operation that transcends borders.

Committee: Kwaku Korang (Advisor); Leslie Alexander (Committee Member); Curtis Austin (Committee Member); Mathew Coleman (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American History; Black History; Black Studies; Comparative; Geography; History; International Relations; Modern History; Political Science; Social Structure; World History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, History

The purpose of this study is to examine American nuclear policy toward the French and Chinese nuclear weapons programs between the years 1961 and 1976 in order to provide a comprehensive narrative utilizing two parallel case studies of bilateral American nuclear policies. This is accomplished by examining United States government documents obtained from the Foreign Relations of the United States series and the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars according to a method of policy analysis based primarily on a six-step model developed by Garry D. Brewer and Peter deLeon. The thesis examines two case studies of bilateral nuclear policies between the United States and France and the People's Republic of China, characterizing the formation and enactment of each bilateral policy chronologically according to the six-step model in order to provide a fuller picture of the development of American nuclear policy during 1961-1976 than was possible for previous scholarship for which many of these documents remained unavailable. The study argues that US-Franco and US-Sino nuclear policies saw great changes between the Kennedy and Ford years. US officials explored using aid to the French nuclear weapons program to influence French foreign policy, but eventually severed US-Franco nuclear ties under the Johnson administration in response to Charles de Gaulle's increasing hostility toward the United States. Nixon officials reversed this policy and provided direct aid to de Gaulle's successors, eventually expanding aid under the Ford administration in order to shift French foreign policy in line with American interests. Conversely, American officials explored means to stop Chinese proliferation under Kennedy and Johnson, including preemptive American military action, but warmed to Chinese rapprochement by the end of the Johnson era. Nixon officials continued this rapprochement and unilaterally eased nuclear tensions by re (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Walter E. Grunden PhD (Advisor); Marc V. Simon PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History; International Relations; Military History; Modern History; Political Science; Science History

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, History (Arts and Sciences)

This dissertation focuses on U.S. Army forces in Berlin from 1945 to 1994 and on broader issues of U.S. and NATO policy and strategy for the Cold War. It seeks to answer two primary questions: Why did U.S. officials risk war over a location everyone agreed was militarily untenable, and how did they construct strategies to defend it? Much of the Berlin literature looks at the city only during the two crises there, the Soviet blockade in 1948 and 1949 and Moscow's periodic ultimatum between 1958 and 1962 that the Americans, British, and French leave the city. These works maintain that leaders conceived of Berlin's worth as only a beacon of democracy in the war against communism, or a trip wire in the event that the Soviet Union invaded Western Europe. This dissertation looks beyond the crises, and contends that a long view of the city reveals U.S. officials saw Berlin as more than a liability. By combining military, diplomatic, political, and international history to analyze the evolution of U.S. diplomacy, NATO strategy and policy, and joint military planning, it suggests that U.S. officials, realizing they could not retreat, devised ways to defend Berlin and, when possible, use it as a means to achieve strategic and political ends in the larger Cold War, with both enemy and friend alike. This research is broadly concerned with national security, civil-military relations, and alliance politics. It focuses on the intersection of the military and political worlds, and tries to answer how governments analyze risk and form strategy, and then how militaries secure political and military objectives. Ultimately, it is a study of deterrence in modern war, an examination of how leaders can obtain objectives without harming friendships or instigating war.

Committee: Ingo Trauschweizer (Advisor); Steven Miner (Committee Member); Chester Pach (Committee Member); James Mosher (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Armed Forces; European History; History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Public Policy and Management

This dissertation examined whether participation in US Defense Security Cooperation (DSC) programs leads to reductions in a regime's willingness to inflict political terror such as extrajudicial killing, torture, disappearances, and political imprisonment. Two objectives framed the research: first, to identify structural factors that give rise to political terror, and second, to assess the efficacy of non-kinetic US intervention policies in allied nations. Though DSC programs are widely studied, the programs have been primarily evaluated in output terms such as dollars (Foreign Military Sales), the number of foreign officers trained (International Military Education and Training), and the number and cost of engagement events (National Guard State Partnership Program; SPP). To advance knowledge on DSC programs in outcome terms, this research started by recreating the key components of Poe and Tate (1990, 1994) causal frameworks on personal integrity rights. The initial objectives were to confirm or refute predictor variable results and to determine if the Poe and Tate-derived Political Terror Scale (PTS) was an appropriate measure to evaluate the efficaciousness of DSC programs. Next, the research expanded to include both a 167-country global time-sensitive cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis and a 46-country regional TSCS analysis using the US Geographic Combatant Commander Areas of Responsibilities (AORs) as its country-by-country delineation. Data collection began by creating the Rebuilding Failed and Weak States Dataset (RFWS Dataset) which included extensive data on a myriad of variables theorized to influence political terror. The RFWS Dataset covered 20 years from 1993-2012 plus four years 1989-1992 for variable lag effects. The PTS and the Fund for Peace's Fragile States Index (FSI) were the dependent variables since they represent globally respected indices of political terror and human rights abuses. Results validated the extant literature's conclusions (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Trevor Brown (Committee Chair) Subjects: Military Studies; Public Administration; Public Policy

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1985, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

This dissertation traces the shifts in queer figures of life and death over the past three and a half decades in the United States, with particular attention to the dynamics of racialization in these transformations. It places the passage of the HIV ban on immigration (and its subsequent removal) as well as the intensification of post 9/11 national security practices in the context of neoliberal biopolitics. The dissertation argues that the formation of racialized abject figures, such as that of the transgender detainee and the immigrant female living with AIDS, predicates the shift within gay white men from being figures of death into figures of life. This dissertation assembles an unruly archive of queer politics in the US in order to delineate the ways in which certain kinds of bodies come to be marked as queer subjects of life while many others are relegated to death. I trace two crucial moments within which neoliberal biopolitics intensifies its grip over queer lives in the US. First, I situate the emergence of the AIDS epidemic as a kind of social trauma that operates as a form of melancholia within gay white men dealing with AIDS. The loss of lovers as well as sexual cultures is internalized within the ego formation of gay white men. I situate these as psychic processes through which white gay white men are disciplined as responsible subjects deserving of life within the gates of the nation-state. This respectable good life is signified through inclusion within institutions such as marriage and the US army. Contrary to the shifts within white gay men from figures of death into figures of life, the figure of the immigrant living with AIDS emerges as an absolute limit to life within the US. The passage of the HIV ban on immigration operates as a technology of regulation and institutes a certain kind of biopolitical racism. Secondly, then, the dissertation traces the figure of the transgender detainee as a figure of death in relation with the intensification o (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Shannon Winnubst (Committee Chair); Mary Thomas (Committee Member); Lynn Itagaki (Committee Co-Chair); Jennifer Suchland (Committee Member) Subjects: Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, History

Historians have only begun to grapple with the implications of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the longest-running arms control negotiation in modern history. This dissertation breaks with the existing literature by examining the process from beginning to end, and placing an in-depth examination of SALT at the center of the narrative. In effect, SALT's structural constraints limited the progress that could actually be achieved in reducing arms. Rather than retreating from the process, the leaderships of both superpowers embraced it as a way to reassert their control over fractious domestic interests and restive polities, using foreign policy to effect a “domestic condominium” between them. Widespread discontent with the threat of nuclear annihilation prompted the superpowers to redirect SALT to enhance their control over their military and diplomatic apparatuses and insulate themselves from the political consequences of continued competition. Prolonged engagement with arms control issues introduced dynamic effects into nuclear policy in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. Arms control considerations came to influence most areas of defense decision making, while the measure of stability SALT provided allowed the examination of new and potentially dangerous nuclear doctrines. Verification and compliance concerns by the United States prompted continuous reassessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions, while challenging their definitions of knowledge itself. This framework grew strained as the short and long-term interests of the superpowers began to diverge. The Reagan administration came to power promising to break this cycle, but could not find a way to operate constructively within the existing framework. The SALT process, broadly construed, reached its definitive end with the Soviet walkout from arms control talks in 1983.

Committee: Peter Hahn (Advisor); Robert McMahon (Advisor); Jennifer Siegel (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History; International Relations; Military History

PHD, Kent State University, 2014, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of History

The use of atomic weapons against Japan in August 1945 ushered in a new age—not only in the context of international relations, but within U.S. popular culture as well. While Americans rejoiced that World War II had at last come to an end, the technological innovations that secured Allied victory also laid the groundwork for unprecedented anxiety. Suddenly, the destruction of the world through nuclear annihilation became a practical possibility rather than simply fodder for science fiction novels. Negotiating this unfamiliar terrain, American policymakers, military leaders, and ordinary citizens debated strategies surrounding civil defense and national security, often utilizing gendered language and reproductive metaphors that reflected concerns about American masculinity. Popular films and novels of the era also imagined a variety of post-apocalyptic American societies if a worst-case scenario should ever be realized. In both political discourse and popular culture, Americans asked similar questions: Would it be possible to survive a nuclear war? What should men and women do to protect themselves—if anything? Would federal attempts to prepare the nation for nuclear attack serve as a public acknowledgment of U.S. vulnerability? And in the event of nuclear annihilation, who might be left to repopulate America? This dissertation examines how the discourse of American survival reflected gendered constructions of Cold War national identity. Examining civil defense discourse in the context of Cold War anxieties surrounding masculinity and male fertility illuminates areas in which political and science fiction narratives overlap, challenge, and reinforce each other. For example, civil defense planners recognized the importance of image in the 1950s and in many ways attempted to construct civil defense in the nuclear age as a reflection of strong, white, middle-class masculinity that was just as significant as military programs for the nation's defense. In the context (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mary Ann Heiss (Advisor); Elizabeth Smith-Pryor (Committee Member); Walter Hixson (Committee Member); David Trebing (Committee Member); Patricia Dunmire (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, 2014, International and Comparative Politics

As the United States moved closer to ending its military involvement in Afghanistan by the end of 2014, intense debate on the relevance and success of the United States' counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in the country continues. Many observers have been quick to declare the strategy a failure without fully analyzing the critical components of COIN doctrine that are necessary for a campaign to succeed, and the extent to which those components were in place in Afghanistan. This study examines the case of Afghanistan by determining whether the U.S.'s counterinsurgency strategy was successful in achieving the four main objectives identified by FM 3-24 as necessary for COIN's success. This study also looks at whether or not the United States' COIN strategy was successful in generating and maintaining the public support needed to carry out a prolonged counterinsurgency operation. By utilizing a mix of deductive logic based on contemporary COIN theory and currently available scholarly resources, government documents, and U.S. and ISAF military field reports, this study seeks to answer whether the counterinsurgency strategy devised by Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal was successful in achieving the four main objectives needed for the success of this strategy in Afghanistan.

Committee: Pramod Kantha Ph.D (Committee Chair); Vaughn Shannon Ph.D (Committee Member); Donna Schlagheck Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative; International Relations; Military Studies; Political Science

MA, Kent State University, 2013, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Geography

Food is globalizing, placing national identity and food security in jeopardy. With economic crises, environmental hazards, increasing population, and international warfare, food security should be of increasing global concern, yet it remains an oversight in many countries. There is specific neglect in developed nations where the more obvious signs of food insecurity, such as food shortages, malnutrition, and starvation, are not present. Instead the danger lies in interrupted import systems, sudden environmental disasters, global economic crises, and a myriad of other threats. One method of safeguarding against these less obvious threats is to cultivate a sustainable, internal food source. Geothermal greenhouse agriculture presents an opportunity for countries in cold climates with non-arable land to have such a food source. Low-enthalpy geothermal sources are abundant in most countries and can easily be used to naturally heat soil for agriculture. It is surprising that countries in cold climates are not taking greater advantage of this inexpensive, sustainable method of agriculture. Could a greater emphasis on geothermal greenhouse agriculture in developed countries such as Iceland increase food security and restore national identity?

Committee: David Kaplan Ph.D. (Advisor); Chris Post Ph.D. (Committee Member); Sarah Smiley Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Geography

MCP, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Community Planning

This research evaluates the national action plans that were prepared between June 2005 and October 2008 as a response to the United Nations Security Council's Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security (UNSCR 1325). Resolution 1325 was adopted unanimously on October 31, 2000; it mentioned the consequences of conflict on women and girls, and noted the role of women in the peacebuilding and post-conflict processes. It is one of the most important UN resolutions within the field of peace and security policy. In addition to the UN Security Council President's Statement of 31 October 2002, the UN Secretary General's Report of 13 October 2004 on women, peace and security invited the states to prepare national action plans in order to take strong steps towards the implementation of UNSCR 1325. Since the Secretary General's Report, eleven United Nations member countries – namely Austria, Cote d'Ivoire, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom – have published national action plans. This study examines the similarities and the differences of the national action plans that were prepared as a response to the UNSCR 1325. In addition, national action plans are compared to the statements identified in the UNSCR 1325. The research points out the importance of national action plans for the implementation of UNSCR 1325. It also outlines the important aspects of a national action plan–such as the involvement of NGOs, time frames, financial allocation, monitoring processes, and the inclusion of awareness-raising activities. The main finding is that the existing action plans provide a set of examples for the countries that are preparing or will prepare national action plans. Therefore, the research should be continued as new national action plans are emerging. The study is significant, because it contributes to the small amount of research literature that is available on UNSCR 1325 and the national action plans. (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jan Fritz PhD (Committee Chair); David Edelman PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Urban Planning; Womens Studies

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Arts and Sciences : Psychology

Emotional intelligence (EI) is the presumed ability to successfully understand and manage emotion. EI may affect the ability of security personnel to gauge the relevance of emotional cues in determining whether a suspect is a terrorist. 180 participants decided whether “virtual reality” animated characters were to be designated as terrorists, in a discrimination-learning paradigm. Three types of identifying cue (positive or negative facial emotion, and an emotion neutral cue) were manipulated, and the number of errors was recorded, over 100 trials. EI, personality, and general cognitive ability were assessed pre-task. Subjective state was assessed pre- and post-task. Results showed faster learning with emotive cues. EI and personality failed to predict performance; but EI predicted subjective state, which predicted rate of learning with emotive cues. Practical techniques for support of security personnel should focus on how subjective states may impact attention to potentially relevant cues to the status of a suspect.

Committee: Dr. Gerald Matthews (Advisor) Subjects: