Kean University

Doctrinal Alignment Between American Democratic Socialism and Marxist Communism: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Policy Positions and Their Anticipated Political, Economic, and Social Consequences

Public debate increasingly equates American democratic socialism with Marxist communism, yet this equation is rarely subjected to systematic, evidence-based measurement. This dissertation examines the degree to which the documented policy positions of the Democratic Socialists of...

Personal Names as Repositories of Communal History and Circumstance among the Igala People of Kogi State

Abstract Personal names among African communities function as durable instruments of memory, holding within a single word the conflict, migration, reconciliation and communal occurrence that shaped the moment of a child's birth; this premise underlies the paper, Personal Names as...

Correcting Misrepresentation: Igala Names as Evidence Against External Narratives of Negative Meaning

Abstract Names are never neutral; they carry the weight of a people's culture, history, and self-understanding, yet unfamiliar names are routinely misread, diminished, or dismissed by those standing outside the culture that produced them. It is this problem that motivates this pa...

Intergenerational Transmission of Igala Naming Practices amid Religious and Educational Change

Abstract Personal naming among the Igala people of Kogi State has long functioned as a repository of ancestral memory, theological conviction and linguistic artistry, yet this inheritance now confronts the twin pressures of religious conversion and Western-style schooling, a tens...

Correcting Misrepresentation: Igala Names as Evidence Against External Narratives of Negative Meaning

Abstract Names are never neutral; they carry the weight of a people's culture, history, and self-understanding, yet unfamiliar names are routinely misread, diminished, or dismissed by those standing outside the culture that produced them. It is this problem that motivates this pa...

Intergenerational Transmission of Igala Naming Practices amid Religious and Educational Change

Abstract Personal naming among the Igala people of Kogi State has long functioned as a repository of ancestral memory, theological conviction and linguistic artistry, yet this inheritance now confronts the twin pressures of religious conversion and Western-style schooling, a tens...

The Establishment of Communist Governments: A Comparative-Historical and Quantitative Analysis of Onset Mechanisms Across the Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Global South

This dissertation asks how communist governments were established across roughly thirty polities between 1917 and 1979, and why some of the resulting party-states endured for decades while others collapsed within a generation. Its organizing premise is that “communist takeover” i...

Personal Names as Repositories of Communal History and Circumstance among the Igala People of Kogi State

Abstract Personal names among African communities function as durable instruments of memory, holding within a single word the conflict, migration, reconciliation and communal occurrence that shaped the moment of a child's birth; this premise underlies the paper, Personal Names as...

The Establishment of Communist Governments: A Comparative-Historical and Quantitative Analysis of Onset Mechanisms Across the Former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Global South

This dissertation asks how communist governments were established across roughly thirty polities between 1917 and 1979, and why some of the resulting party-states endured for decades while others collapsed within a generation. Its organizing premise is that “communist takeover” i...

Sovereignty, Silence, and the Cycle of Violence: International Response, Intervention Failure, and Impunity Dynamics Across 16 Genocidal Regimes

For seventy-eight years the international community has repeated the promise of “never again,” yet genocide has recurred with grim regularity. This dissertation asks why the architecture of international accountability has expanded across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries...