This thesis examines recent explanations of racial violence in the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, the Oldham Riots of 2001, the French Riots of 2005, and the racial violence of 1992 in Germany. In each case I outline traditional theories claiming that racial violence is caused by competition between ethnic groups for housing, jobs, and cultural identity. These theories may benefit from consideration of the historical elements that have institutionalized racial discrimination in the systematic processes of integration. In conclusion, I argue that the governmental mechanisms of integration; including citizenship models, context of state formation, immigration policy, and nationalist ideology, suggest that the framework of racial prejudice and ethnocentrism may predispose a society to racial conflict.

From 1974-1990, more than thirty of the world's authoritarian regimes transitioned to democracy in what Samuel Huntington terms the third wave. Sixteen years following the conclusion of the third wave of democratization, the Castro regime remains the official government of the Cuban state. I examine what factors led to the continued existence of the Castro administration. Several factors account for the prolonged tenure of the Castro administration. Fidel was able to increase his political power through the monopolization of information. The ability of the Castro regime to maintain authority was further exacerbated as a result of the country's dependence on Soviet financing, the repositioning of a weakened Catholic Church, contradictory foreign policies of external actors such as the United States, and a powerless civil society.

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Timothy Steigenga, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences. Using the United States and Spain as case studies, this thesis argues that increasingly restrictive immigration policies instituted by receiving countries have little to no effect on the net inflow of immigration, nor do they promote a higher rate of assimilation for those immigrants already present within the host country. An analysis of the net inflow of immigrants, their social and economic status, and their rate of assimilation in the U.S. and Spain suggests that restrictive policies only further the social and economic exclusion of immigrants from the host society. Restrictive immigration policies are more effective at keeping immigrants outside of the host country's society than its borders.

In the last 15 to 20 years, the failure of Communism as a viable revolutionary project has turned many on the Left to its historical rival: Anarchism. Merging with environmental discourses like deep ecology and the struggle for indigenous rights, Anarcho-Primitivism models its utopian discourse on ethnographic descriptions of hunter gatherer societies and mythologized notions of the "Noble Savage." Furthermore, its adherents retain high rates of visibility in the burgeoning antiglobalization movement, notorious for their black uniform and tactics of property destruction. My paper critically and pragmatically engages their attempts to invoke "the Primitive" as a metaphor for resisting the ascendance of global capitalism in the twenty-first century.

Anthropologists like George Foster have argued over the origin of Latin American hot-cold medicine since the 1950s. Some argue that it originated within the indigenous populations of Latin America while others argue that hot-cold medicine originated from European humoral medicine. In this paper, I take another look at this debate, focusing on how its practice varies from community to community and relating the debate to changes that have occurred in the discipline of anthropology in recent years. I also look at other lines of evidence, such as the linguistics used in association with hot-cold medicine and the nearly universal existence of the hot-cold dichotomy, in order to support the theory that hot-cold medicine originated within the indigenous groups of Latin America.

Spectral decomposition is a method of expressing functions as a harmonic series, and can be used for the simplification of complicated physical problems. This type of analysis requires knowledge of the function at all points on a circle or sphere. In problems where the function is known only at discreet points, regular intervals in a rectangular grid, for example, numerical methods must be employed to compute approximate coefficients for the harmonic expansion. In this paper, we investigate numerical methods for computing Fourier coefficients of a two dimensional function at a fixed radius, and spherical harmonic coefficients in three dimensions on a sphere of fixed radius.

The presidential election of 2000 was not the first United States presidential election to end with uncertainty. The contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore was not the first to introduce Americans to disputed vote tallies in crucial swing states, to the possibility of separate and competing slates of potential electors, or even to the notion that one person's vote really might matter after all. History had already born witness to many of those prospects during the 1877 presidential race between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, which Hayes ultimately won. The 2000 election was novel, however, in the sense that it inspired a series of legal battles that culminated in a landmark United States Supreme Court case. Bush v. Gore (531 U.S. 98) provoked questions concerning the legal meaning of equality, the nature of federalism, and the role the Supreme Court should play in determining how state courts should interpret state laws.

From before its independence to the present day, Haiti has had exogenous development schemes imposed upon it. These schemes stem from the development theories of Western political-economic thinkers that Western powers and Haitian elites have implemented. Yet Haiti is today the most impoverished nation of the Western hemisphere. What has gone wrong? In reply, I examine a key power-based explanation for the failure. I then examine the culturally-based practices, identity formations, and development aspirations of Haiti's popular class, and contrast these with exogenous development theory, praxis and outcomes. I show the profound "misfit" between the two and highlight conflicts that have arisen because of them. In Haiti, exogenous development forms will inevitably go awry because their starting points are and remain fundamentally flawed. An endogenous development form based upon the Haitian majority's culturally-based preferences and identities stands the best chance of bringing social justice and long-term stability to the nation.