The 1854 Speech by Chief siaʔɬ (Seattle) is surrounded by controversy. There are many versions of this speech available online and in print, but which one is the most true to who Chief siaʔɬ was? How can we find out what Chief siaʔɬ said when the speech was given in Lushootseed, translated to Chinook Jargon, and then published for the first time in English, 30 years after the speech was given? Today, even Chief siaʔɬ's tribal descendants have differing versions of the speech on their official tribal websites. To answer these questions, I conducted semi-structured individual interviews with tribal members from each of Chief siaʔɬ's descendant tribes, the Duwamish, the Suquamish, and the Muckleshoot. Within these interviews, I chose to use the "Think Aloud" method to structure how the participants read the versions of the speech presented. This allowed me to code their comments on the speech into specific categories in order to analyze how each participants felt about the speech, about Chief siaʔɬ's character, and about their own knowledge and their tribe's own knowledge about the speech and speaker. This research provides a brand new and comprehensive perspective on this aged speech that is surrounded by mystery. It gives these tribal members the opportunity to set the record straight on what Chief siaʔɬ might have actually said.

American Samoa’s unique relationship with the U.S. today escalated throughout the 19th century and reached its official turning point when it became a U.S. territory in 1900. This archipelago comprises the eastern islands of the greater Samoan islands within the South Pacific, approximately 2,500 miles southwest of the U.S. state of Hawai’i. This study examines and analyzes the imperial history of the United States and participating actors attempting to dismantle Samoan cultural practices in food, labor, and politics. The U.S. also tries to associate a false narrative of primitiveness and ignorance with the Indigenous Samoan people. However, I will analyze white travelers' accounts and documentaries about American Samoa to chronicle Americans’ perspectives on the imperial project in American Samoa by reading against the grain. I will analyze the actions of the Samoans filmed and discussed to put forward an alternative reading of this history, highlighting their use of cultural resistance tactics to defy American imperialism. I will also use evidence from my and my family’s history in American Samoa to continue to bring an Indigenous perspective to this history and show the importance of Pacific Islanders' historical experiences in academia. With this project, I will share the importance of studying imperial histories between the U.S. and the Pacific and, ultimately, bringing an indigenous perspective to the histories that Western ideas have silenced. The preliminary results I hope to get from this study, is to contribute a literary source to academia for a history that is only transmitted through oral trdaitions. I also hope to raise awareness about the need for the study of Pacific Islander history within the academy, which is not currently offered at 4-year institutions in the U.S. today.

Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) is a hybrid regime, with common law legal systems inherited from its time as a British colony and simultaneously under the direct rule of the communist People's Republic of China (PRC). The HKSAR has a high level of autonomy from the PRC, enjoying many personal freedoms unknown to the rest of China: universal suffrage, the right to privacy, and an open internet. These values are encoded in its mini-constitution called the Basic Law which is modeled on the parliamentarian democracies of the Commonwealth nations. Since the United Kingdom handed over Hong Kong to the PRC in 1997, there has been a steady erosion of this autonomy and individual rights. These restrictions such as those on universal suffrage in selecting legislators and the Chief Executive implemented via PRC fiat culminated in the passing of a highly unpopular National Security Law (NSL) in 2020. The NSL criminalizes broad definitions of threats to national security, including supporting successionist movements whether “by force or threat of force” leading to the targeting of pro-democracy groups by the police. This research seeks to reveal the extent of the HKSAR government’s censorship of the internet and digital surveillance of its citizens since the passing of the NSL. By analyzing legal documents, news articles, cybersecurity reports, and academic sources this research has uncovered the legal and technical mechanisms that the HKSAR government has been utilizing to enforce the NSL. The report’s findings indicate that amendments to the data privacy ordinance, crowd-funding regulations, blocking of websites by internet providers, coercing of social media companies, and implementation of novel surveillance technologies have greatly reduced internet freedoms. These developments present a dilemma to the paradoxical socio-political structure of the city whose foundations are rooted in liberal legal traditions but face increasing interference in its governance by the PRC.

The UN Truth Commission tasked with accounting for El Salvador’s armed conflict described it as a war in which “nobody won” (“nadie ganaba”). Between 1980 and 1992, the small Central American country was devastated by a civil war that claimed the lives of more than 70,000 and exposed its people to gross human rights violations committed, overwhelmingly, at the hands of state security forces. This project asks how the armed conflict in El Salvador existed within a broader ecosystem of right-wing state terror by examining one particularly crucial relationship: that between El Salvador and Argentina in the period immediately before the outbreak of war (1978-1980). I argue that the military regimes in El Salvador and Argentina took on a consultatory relationship during the late 1970s in which Argentina passed its “successful” model of repression onto key Salvadoran military officials. As El Salvador barreled toward war in late 1979 and early 1980, those very same Salvadoran officials came to occupy the highest positions of power, paving the way for an urban war campaign that looked eerily like Argentina’s “dirty war.” By pairing archival research conducted at the Historical Archive of the Chancellery (Archivo Histórico de la Cancillería) in Buenos Aires with existing scholarship on Argentine involvement in Central America, I trace the rise of Argentine influence in El Salvador from a few well-placed offers of aid to the minds of four of El Salvador’s top-ranking wartime officials. In doing so, I look beyond the Cold War in Latin America as a phenomenon imposed from above by the United States and instead interrogate the middle layer, in which Latin American states, driven by politics, culture, and their own will to survive, reproduced the Cold War along more local and regional lines.

Why does human rights law fall short in protecting people from human rights abuses made by governments acting in the name of self-sovereignty? In this project, I analyze these questions in the context of human rights abuses, such as extrajudicial killings, false imprisonments, rapes committed by law enforcement officers, and forced disappearances in Panjab, India. To do so, I use official reports from non-governmental organizations, an original interview I conducted with a survivor of Operation Blue Star, which was an attack on one of the holiest shrines for Sikhs, process-tracing, and human rights legal analysis. After developing the political and legal framework, I present my research in the form of three narrative case studies. I argue that the acts orchestrated by the Indian government and the tactics they employed to eradicate Sikhs constitute genocide under human rights law. Nonetheless, Sikhs struggle in gaining recognition due to extreme efforts by the Indian Government to cover-up and malign the names of Sikhs through their own governmental groups, and an international political environment that discourages foreign governments from condemning Indian government actions. With the research conducted in this project, links between other human rights violation in India can be found. The lack of accountability of the Indian government in multiple cases can be uncovered, which will prove how even with the existence of human rights law, governments have the most power.

While much has been done to understand rape as an act of genocide and as a war tactic, little scholarly work has focused on how the intentional wartime spread of HIV/AIDS in the Rwanda genocide led to a slow genocide of the Batutsi. This work argues that the spread of HIV/AIDS resulting from the rapes that occurred during the Rwandan Genocide has led to the continuation of the slow genocide against the Batutsi people. I analyzed seventeen semi structured interviews of rape survivors that were conducted between 2007 and 2008. These interviews were published in Sandra Chu et. al. The Men Who Killed Me Rwandan: Survivors of Sexual Violence. By using thematic coding, my analysis of the interviews concluded that Tutsi women were intentionally infected with HIV by the Interahamwe so that the women themselves would be turned into biological weapons of genocide that could be used to inflict a delayed death-sentence on another Tutsi. Roughly 80% of the women who survived the Rwanda Genocide were raped, and of those women, 70% contracted HIV. With the lack of medical treatment in Rwanda for HIV/AIDS, those who test positive for the disease have 7-15 years to live before they will die a slow death. The intentional viral spread of HIV and the subsequent deaths from AIDS is a direct result of sexual violence committed as a tactic in the 1994 genocide. Despite being purposefully killed due to their ethnicity, women who died of HIV-related illness in Rwanda are not calculated in the death toll for the genocide against the Batutsi in 1994. This work expands our conception of the long-term effects of the rape campaign led by Hutu militias that intended to inflict death upon survivors of the initial violence from April to July 1994 in Rwanda.