Recursive Parameter Estimation Using Polynomial Chaos Theory Applied to Vehicle Mass Estimation for Rough Terrain

This dissertation explores the repression of social protests in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa with thirteen months of fieldwork among Liberian refugees living in the camp and archival research from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

I use this case to analyze the nature of humanitarian authority, identifying a form of rule that I call compassionate authoritarianism.

This authority is compassionate in that refugees and authorities believe that authorities are striving to relieve the suffering of refugees.

It is authoritarian in that refugees have little or no access to grievance procedures and authorities face little or no accountability for political failures In analyzing the consequences of compassionate authoritarianism, this project maps a direct trajectory from compassionate politics to repression. <br /> <br /> Why did people living in the refugee camp believe that UNHCR was compassionate even when acting in authoritarian ways?

Camp politics fostered such faith by passing blame for authoritarian acts onto the host government and by obscuring the coerciveness of some types of care-based control employed by the UNHCR.

Camp administration became defined by a subjective division of authority that placed UNHCR care-based control on one side and Ghanaian harm-based control on the other, even when in practice the UNHCR intervened in physical coercion and Ghanaian authorities intervened in care-giving.

I call this division of authority, bifurcated governmentality: a system in which authorities who control through the threat of harm stand apart from authorities who control through the promise to protect life. <br /> <br /> How could the UNHCR act in authoritarian ways given their compassionate mandate?

This mandate combined with a faith in humanitarian expertise to make grievance procedures seem an unnecessary, inferior means of assessment.

The UNHCR approached refugees as political children, people who needed to weaned from aid, but also nurtured to grow into democratic citizens when you go home to Liberia.

This assessment of refugees as citizens-for-the-future (not for now) lead the UNHCR to interpret refugee political engagement as unruliness or immaturity rather than rights claims, and in the absence of effective grievance practices, refugee dissent became a social problem rather than civic debate.