Soft power as the new norm: How the Chinese-Russian strategic partnership (soft) balances American hegemony in an era of unipolarity

This study explores how great powers not allied with the United States formulate their grand strategies in a unipolar international system. Specifically, it analyzes the strategies China and Russia have developed to deal with U.S. hegemony by examining how Moscow and Beijing have responded to American intervention in Central Asia. The study argues that China and Russia have adopted a soft balancing strategy of to indirectly balance the United States at the regional level. This strategy uses normative capabilities such as soft power, alternative institutions and regionalization to offset the overwhelming material hardware of the hegemon. The theoretical and methodological approach of this dissertation is neoclassical realism. Chinese and Russian balancing efforts against the United States are based on their domestic dynamics as well as systemic constraints. Neoclassical realism provides a bridge between the internal characteristics of states and the environment which those states are situated. Because China and Russia do not have the hardware (military or economic power) to directly challenge the United States, they must resort to their software (soft power and norms) to indirectly counter American preferences and set the agenda to obtain their own interests. Neoclassical realism maintains that soft power is an extension of hard power and a reflection of the internal makeup of states. The dissertation uses the heuristic case study method to demonstrate the efficacy of soft balancing. Such case studies help to facilitate theory construction and are not necessarily the demonstrable final say on how states behave under given contexts. Nevertheless, it finds that China and Russia have increased their soft power to counterbalance the United States in certain regions of the world, Central Asia in particular. The conclusion explains how soft balancing can be integrated into the overall balance-of-power framework to explain Chinese and Russian responses to U.S. hegemony. It also suggests that an analysis of norms and soft power should be integrated into the study of grand strategy, including both foreign policy and military doctrine.

Three essays on trade and investment

From H. G. Johnson's work (Review of Economic Studies, 1953–54) on tariff retaliation, the questions of whether a country can win a “tariff war” and how or even the broader question of what will affect a country's strategic position in setting bilateral tariff have been tackled in various situations. Although it is widely accepted that a country will have strategic advantages in winning the tariff war if its relative monopoly power is sufficiently large, it is unclear what are the forces behind such power formation. The goal of this research is to provide a unified framework and discuss various forces such as relative country size, absolute advantages and relative advantages simultaneously. In a two-country continuum-of-commodity neoclassical trade model, it is shown that sufficiently large relative country size is a sufficient condition for a country to choose a non-cooperative tariff Nash equilibrium over free trade. It is also shown that technology disparities such as absolute advantage, rate of technology disparity and the distribution of the technology disparity all contribute to a country's strategic position and interact with country size. ^ Leverage effect is usually used to explain the phenomenon of asymmetric volatility in equity returns. However, leverage itself can only account for parts of the asymmetry. In this research, it is shown that stock return volatility is related to firms’ financial status. Financially constrained firms tend to be more sensitive to the return changes. Financial constraint factor explains why some firms tend to be more volatile than others. I found that the financial constraint factor explains the stock return volatility independent of other factors such as firm size, industry affiliation and leverage. Firms’ industry affiliations are shown to be very weak in differentiating volatility. Firm size is proven to be a good factor in distinguishing the different levels of volatility and volatility-return sensitivity. Leverage hypothesis is also partly corroborated and the situation where leverage effect is not applicable is discussed. Finally, I examined the macroeconomic policy's effects on overall market volatility. ^

Entre la provincia y el mundo. Modernidad e innovacion en la narrativa de Lino Novas Calvo

Lino Novás Calvo (1903–1983) is by many considered the best Cuban short story writer. Critics acknowledge his major contribution to the modernization of narrative prose in that country. With Cayo Canas and La Luna Nona, the short story achieved a language of its own, a precise technique, an acute outlook and an awareness of its own individual art form. Nevertheless, his novels and short stories have not received the recognition and the distribution they deserve, in part because his books have not been reprinted. ^ The purpose of this dissertation is to analyze the innovative character of Novás Calvo's work. From the starting point of traditional discourse, he gathered together the main tendencies that until then co-existed in Cuban literature (realism, social criticism, criollismo, Afro Cuban themes and cosmopolitism) and renewed them with modern contributions, mainly assimilated from American authors writing between the two World Wars. He based himself in a concept of realism that does not limit itself to recreating reality and that eludes language localisms and the portrayal of environments. He brought Cuban characters and themes to his stories which at the same gave them a universal dimension. Novás Calvo participated in debates which amounted to a rupture between tradition and localism and brought universality to the Cuban short story. This achieved the aesthetic syncretism imposed by modernity. ^

Soviet and Western bloc competition in the less developed world and the collapse of Détente

The purpose of my dissertation was to examine the competition between the U.S.-led Western bloc and the Soviet bloc in the less developed world during Détente. I assessed whether or not the Soviet bloc pushed for strategic gains in the less developed world in the middle-to-late 1970's and whether this contributed to the U.S. decision to abandon Détente in 1979. I made the attempt to test the international relations theory of balance of threat realism (Walt, 1992). I accomplished the test in two ways. First, I measured the foreign aid allocations (military and economic) made by each respective bloc towards the Third World by using a quantitative approach. Second, I examined U.S. archives using the process-tracing/historical method. The U.S. archives gave me the ability to evaluate how U.S. decision-makers and U.S. intelligence agencies interpreted the actions of the Soviet bloc. They also gave me the chance to examine the U.S. response as we evaluated the policies that were pushed by key U.S. decision-makers and intelligence agencies. On the question of whether or not the Soviet bloc was aggressive, the quantitative evidence suggested that it was not. Instead, the evidence found the Western-bloc to have been more aggressive in the less developed world. The U.S. archives also showed Soviet actions to have been defensive. Key U.S. decision-makers and intelligence agencies attested to this. Finally, the archives show that U.S. officials pushed for aggressive actions against the Third World during the final years of Détente. Thus, balance of threat realism produced an incorrect assessment that U.S. aggression in the late 1970's was a response to Soviet aggression during Détente. The evidence suggests structural Marxism and domestic politics can better explain U.S./Western actions. The aggressive foreign aid allocations of the West, coupled with evidence of U.S. decision-makers/agencies vehemently concerned about the long-term prospects of the West, strengthened structural Marxism. Domestic politics can also claim to explain the actions of U.S. decision-makers. I found extensive archival evidence of bureaucratic inter-agency conflict between the State Department and other intelligence agencies in areas of strategic concern to the U.S.

Trojan horses: On the origins of national security concerns over foreign investments in the United States from 1919 to 2008

In this thesis I sought to explain the origins of national security concerns over foreign investments in the United States from 1919 to 2008. I identified and examined 29 cases of national security concerns over foreign investments in the United States during that period, and argued that in order to understand the circumstances under which foreign investments in the United States are perceived to be threats to the U.S. security we must rely on a combination of democratic peace theory and the version of political realism known as power transition theory. Thus, I tested the argument that national security concerns over foreign investments in the United States from 1919 to 2008 resulted from: (1) perceptions of international power transition, (2) perceptions of ideological and institutional differences between the United States and the home country of the investor, (3) perceptions of the strategic importance of the sector where the investment is made, and (4) perceptions of participation or control of the foreign investor by the government of the country of origin. I found that all these hypotheses have some explanatory power.

Mundos prohibidos: El poder en el discurso epistolar de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Juana Borrero

This dissertation analyses, through a theoretical framework and a critical approach, letters of Cuban writers Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Juana Borrero. While love letters have captured the interest of some scholars, such as Claudio Guillén, Cintio Vitier and Alexander Roselló Selimov, the conflict that the analysis of non-literary texts poses has prevented further research in this field. Therefore, I propose a systematic method of analysis encompassing but not limited to evaluating letters based on their purpose, intent, interpretation, and temporal and spatial composition; analyzing the perspective and function of epistolary entities, and examining the textual signs that distinguish the epistolary forms from the literary forms. With this analytical tool, I examine a selection of letters of Gómez de Avellaneda and demonstrate that the writer displaces her identify from the autobiographic self to the epistolary self, in order to manipulate the perspective of her addressee. Caught between the Neoclassical way of thinking and the Romantic aesthetics, her assertive discourse, also reflected in her epistolary work, contributed to the incursion of women writers into the social and professional life of the nineteen century. Following the same method of investigation, an analysis of letters written by Borrero proves that, by building a world of delusion, hallucination and fantasy the writer brings to prose what first generation of female modernistas had done in poetry. In both cases, my focus is on the strategies that turn these letters into instruments of power, process that transformed the love-letter paradigm and forever renovated the women epistolary genre. This dissertation further explores the possibility of initiating a cycle in the study of personal letters to uncover a forgotten genre, mission that might build a bridge to embrace the new forms of written communication that scholars have already begun to explore in contemporary literature.

A comprehensive assessment of self -report experiences of adoptive parents of special needs children in Florida

Adoption of special needs children is now seen as a life long event whereby the adoptive child and family have unique needs. The need for postplacement resources throughout the life cycle of the adoption process is evident. This exploratory-descriptive research employed a random stratified cross-sectional design. The purpose of the study was to describe, identify, examine, and assess the relative influence of identified empirically and conceptually relevant variables of self-report experiences of adoptive parents of special needs children. Primary areas of exploration included: (1) adoptive children and families' characteristics, (2) postplacement service needs, utilization and satisfaction, and (3) adoptive parents' perceptions of their adoption experiences. A proportionate stratified random mail survey was used to obtain 474 families who had adopted special needs children from the 15 geographic districts which make up the state adoption social service agency in Florida. A 144-item survey questionnaire was used to collect basic information on demographic data, service provision, and adoption experiences. Four research questions were analyzed to test the effect the predictor variables had on willingness to adopt another special needs child, successful adoption, satisfying experience, and realism about problems. All four research questions revealed that the full model and the child's antecedent and the adoptive parents' intervening variable blocks were significant in explaining the variance in the dependent variables. The child's intervening variables alone were only significant in explaining the variance for one of the dependent variables. The results of the statistical analysis on the fifth research question and the three hypotheses determined that (1) only one postplacement service, crisis intervention, had a statistically significant impact on the adoptive parents' perceived level of satisfaction with the adoption experience; (2) adoptive parents who rate their adoption as successful are more likely to express a desire to adopt another special needs child; (3) the more adequate information on the child the adoptive parents perceived that they had prior to placement, the more they perceived they were realistic about the problems they would encounter; and (4) six specific postplacement services were found to be significant in predicting successful adoptions--crisis intervention, outpatient drug/alcohol treatment, maintenance subsidy, physical therapy, special medical equipment, and family counseling. Implications for the social work field and future research are discussed. ^

Background traffic modeling for large-scale network simulation

Network simulation is an indispensable tool for studying Internet-scale networks due to the heterogeneous structure, immense size and changing properties. It is crucial for network simulators to generate representative traffic, which is necessary for effectively evaluating next-generation network protocols and applications. With network simulation, we can make a distinction between foreground traffic, which is generated by the target applications the researchers intend to study and therefore must be simulated with high fidelity, and background traffic, which represents the network traffic that is generated by other applications and does not require significant accuracy. The background traffic has a significant impact on the foreground traffic, since it competes with the foreground traffic for network resources and therefore can drastically affect the behavior of the applications that produce the foreground traffic. This dissertation aims to provide a solution to meaningfully generate background traffic in three aspects. First is realism. Realistic traffic characterization plays an important role in determining the correct outcome of the simulation studies. This work starts from enhancing an existing fluid background traffic model by removing its two unrealistic assumptions. The improved model can correctly reflect the network conditions in the reverse direction of the data traffic and can reproduce the traffic burstiness observed from measurements. Second is scalability. The trade-off between accuracy and scalability is a constant theme in background traffic modeling. This work presents a fast rate-based TCP (RTCP) traffic model, which originally used analytical models to represent TCP congestion control behavior. This model outperforms other existing traffic models in that it can correctly capture the overall TCP behavior and achieve a speedup of more than two orders of magnitude over the corresponding packet-oriented simulation. Third is network-wide traffic generation. Regardless of how detailed or scalable the models are, they mainly focus on how to generate traffic on one single link, which cannot be extended easily to studies of more complicated network scenarios. This work presents a cluster-based spatio-temporal background traffic generation model that considers spatial and temporal traffic characteristics as well as their correlations. The resulting model can be used effectively for the evaluation work in network studies.

Blotto in the Lifeboat

Blotto in the Lifeboat is a book of poems that investigates natural processes and idiosyncrasies of human societies. Ranging from the absurd to the scientific in tone, the poems in Blotto in the Lifeboat situate themselves on the blurry-line between fact and imagination, employing a style that Thomas Lux describes as “imaginative realism.” The middle of three sections is comprised solely of the long poem, “A Compendium of the True and Wondrous,” which collages remarkable facts and anecdotes to highlight the strange realities of the world and the rapidity of change. The first and third sections contain shorter, narrative poems in which the surreal or comic is often employed. The language of the poems in BLOTTO IN THE LIFEBOAT reflects a similar desire to affix the fantastic to the familiar. Metaphors in the tradition of Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Simic rely on wild leaps of imagination to illuminate the real world.

Out of View: Stories

OUT OF VIEW is a collection of stories set in the American Southwest about people coping with loss—the death of parents, children, ideals, innocence. The characters in this collection reap or resist lessons of life as they struggle to find their place in the world. In “First Rain,” 15-year-old Tessie struggles with the loss of her father and the demands of her mother as she navigates the rocky terrain of adolescence. In “Monsters,” middle-aged Maury has to choose between a new relationship and protecting the well-being of his 4-year-old ‘daughter.’ The stories are influenced by the Western realism of Maile Meloy and the playful plotting of Ron Carlson. These stories are inspired both by the Sonoran Desert—expansive, sun-soaked, unrepentant—and by the people who live, love, and lose in the interstices between Manifest Destiny and the Reconquista.

Background Traffic Modeling for Large-Scale Network Simulation

Network simulation is an indispensable tool for studying Internet-scale networks due to the heterogeneous structure, immense size and changing properties. It is crucial for network simulators to generate representative traffic, which is necessary for effectively evaluating next-generation network protocols and applications. With network simulation, we can make a distinction between foreground traffic, which is generated by the target applications the researchers intend to study and therefore must be simulated with high fidelity, and background traffic, which represents the network traffic that is generated by other applications and does not require significant accuracy. The background traffic has a significant impact on the foreground traffic, since it competes with the foreground traffic for network resources and therefore can drastically affect the behavior of the applications that produce the foreground traffic. This dissertation aims to provide a solution to meaningfully generate background traffic in three aspects. First is realism. Realistic traffic characterization plays an important role in determining the correct outcome of the simulation studies. This work starts from enhancing an existing fluid background traffic model by removing its two unrealistic assumptions. The improved model can correctly reflect the network conditions in the reverse direction of the data traffic and can reproduce the traffic burstiness observed from measurements. Second is scalability. The trade-off between accuracy and scalability is a constant theme in background traffic modeling. This work presents a fast rate-based TCP (RTCP) traffic model, which originally used analytical models to represent TCP congestion control behavior. This model outperforms other existing traffic models in that it can correctly capture the overall TCP behavior and achieve a speedup of more than two orders of magnitude over the corresponding packet-oriented simulation. Third is network-wide traffic generation. Regardless of how detailed or scalable the models are, they mainly focus on how to generate traffic on one single link, which cannot be extended easily to studies of more complicated network scenarios. This work presents a cluster-based spatio-temporal background traffic generation model that considers spatial and temporal traffic characteristics as well as their correlations. The resulting model can be used effectively for the evaluation work in network studies.