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This study centers on the rise and fall of a major political-military force called the Bình Xuyên. At the end of World War II, members of the Saigon underworld, seeking to thwart French reoccupation, organized local toughs, farmers, laborers, fugitives, and military deserters into a confederation of armed bands. Between 1945 and 1955, the Bình Xuyên played a key military and political role on both sides of the First Indochina War—first as part of the communist-led Việt Minh insurgency, then as an anticommunist bulwark against it. In its latter role under the auspices of the French military, the Bình Xuyên fielded an army of over three thousand, gained command of the national police, cultivated a six-thousand-member political mass organization, and built a lucrative business portfolio—all in the heart of Saigon-Cholon. As insurgent and pacifier, the group harnessed its military capacity, economic resources, and patriotic reputation to vie for political power. In the process, these erstwhile criminals came to assume the mantle of nationalism and the guise of the state. Conventionally, the study of modern Vietnam has focused on elite politics and narratives of collaboration and resistance. This study in contrast decenters traditional protagonists, complicates familiar cleavages, and in turn reframes 20th century Vietnamese political history. I trace the unheralded rise of colonial-era violence entrepreneurs—anh chị, as they were called—who came to reconfigure political and state power in the postcolony. I foreground the convergence between the political and criminal milieux, as common criminals often mingled with nationalists of all stripes inside colonial prisons and beyond. This political-criminal nexus was one of the key legacies of French colonial power.This project aims to explain what made the Bình Xuyên’s path to power possible and how this new reality shaped political authority, governance, and war. The first part of the dissertation, comprising two chapters, examines the transformation of gangsters into insurgents. I show that links forged between nationalist activists and criminals in the face of colonial repression laid the foundation for the political-criminal nexus of the post-1945 period. The civil war between competing nationalists amplified the importance of violence specialists. I argue that pre-1945 relations with both communist and anticommunist activists played a significant role in the empowerment and legitimation of the Bình Xuyên as a nationalist force. The second part of the dissertation, made up of three chapters, tracks the Bình Xuyên’s partnership with the non-communist Vietnamese state and its French backers. As the group cleared the city and the countryside of insurgents, it grew rapidly in manpower, wealth, and influence through clever politicking and brute force. I show how the Bình Xuyên steadily encroached on and ultimately assumed key state functions as it exposed intrastate competition and elevated its own political profile.

This 2-study program of research has two objectives: 1) evaluate framing and thematic representations in newspaper articles about sex offenders, sex offense, cases, and sex offender policy; and 2) measure the role of similarly framed media exemplars and heuristics on individuals’ attitudes and social judgments regarding the social problem of sex crime. Drawing upon a theoretical basis in social psychology, political psychology, and critical race theory, this research seeks to examine the role of media framing and social identity in shaping people’s attitudes toward crime, crime policy, and those who are labeled as “criminals,” particularly with respect to the particular presentation of sex crimes.In Study 1, newspaper articles (N=43) about “sex offenses” and/or “sex offenders” in three major California newspapers were analyzed and coded for thematic frames. Analyses were informed by grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 1990) and coded accordingly. Independent coders established the validity of core themes, and inter-coder reliability was established using consensus agreement. In Study 2, video newscasts that vary in their framing of sex offender issues were shown to participants (N=183). Participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups based upon the independent variable they received (i.e., the video or combination of videos they watch). Participants watched either: Video A (a newscast about “sex offenders” that is similarly framed to the articles coded in Part One of this study); Video B (a newscast about “sex offenders” that eschews the types of frames found in Study 1); both Video A and Video B; or an unrelated (control) video. After the video, participants completed an 80-item questionnaire to measure their attitudes about crime generally, sex crimes, and sex offenders. Analyses of the dependent variable demonstrate that the variation in framing of the video stimuli affects the degree to which participants endorse the heuristic of the “sex predator” and the degree to which participants favored punishment of sex offenders. More specifically, participants who viewed the more sensational and fear generating news segment endorsed the “predator” characterization and favored punishment more than those who did not view this video. Results were statistically significant. Findings from these studies will have important practical and theoretical implications for understanding the role that the media plays in shaping attitudes about crime, offenders, and overall prison policy in the United States.

One of the most important questions concerning Soviet history is: how did the period widely known as the era of “stagnation” lead to the very opposite of stagnation, indeed to the most sudden and cataclysmic changes in the region since the Russian Revolution? Was the Brezhnev era (1964-1982) simply the calm before the storm, or was it in fact the culmination of a tempest that had been brewing for decades? I argue that it was during “stagnation,” when many citizens learned to articulate their frustrations with Soviet society and formulate demands and solutions. Those solutions drew heavily from images, ideas and promises made by agents of the Soviet state. By taking a closer look at the Brezhnev era, we can see that it was in fact the legitimacy of the state's claims, and the seriousness with which people took them in this period, that actually helped to precipitate its downfall. Nothing brings this to light better than a focus on crime. I analyze debates in Soviet society about crime and punishment as these problems became increasingly central to public life in the final decades of the Soviet Union's existence. I study the Soviet Union's first post-Stalin criminological research institute from its formation in 1963 through the height of its influence in the early 1970s, along with journalistic writing on crime and justice, films, and television programs from the thriving genre of crime fiction. I also access popular views on criminality through private and public letters and other writings. These sources show that in the Brezhnev era, an increase in scientific research on the causes of crime, coupled with a new focus on a Soviet “war on crime” in the media, opened up new possibilities for mass discussions of important political and ideological issues in multiple venues. Additionally, they show that alliances were formed between elite scholars and journalists on one hand, and ordinary citizens on the other, forcing many intellectuals to reformulate their ideas about the nature of criminality and the meaning of justice in the Soviet state. In these discussions, ordinary Soviet citizens made it clear that they had heard a good deal about the concept of justice, but witnessed only its opposite. For many, this contradiction did not discredit the ideals of Soviet justice as much as it made them all the more desirable, and the disillusionment with Soviet reality more acute. It turned out that the earlier campaigns to educate the public about crime and morality had a powerful effect on popular legal consciousness in the Soviet Union: they stoked a deep desire in people for promises of justice they never saw realized, and gave them the language to condemn the state and justice system on its own terms.

Brief poster presentation on the psychological and intellectual relationship of former members of the Black Liberation Army to the theoretical concepts of illegality, criminality, political resistance, and the revolutionary.