I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Torsten Braun, head of the Computer Network and Distributed Systems group (RVS), for supervising this work and for his insightful advises. Prof. Dr. Torsten Braun encouraged and motivated me to publish my research results and he provided me the opportunity to present the work on various conferences, for which I thank him. I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Roger Wattenhofer, responsible for the Koreferat of this work. Also, Prof. Dr. Oscar Nierstrasz who was willing to be the co-examinator of this work deserves many thanks. Many thanks go to my colleagues of the RVS group and of the IAM for our various interesting discussions about all kinds of topics and for making the institute a very pleasant and friendly place to work at. Special thanks go to David Steiner, Marc Steinemann, Matthias Scheidegger, Florian Baumgartner, Ruy De Oliveira, and Attila Weyland. There are many students who worked with me and helped a lot in developing and implementing. Among them I especially thankful to Thomas Bernoulli,

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configurations, thus rendering it vulnerable for the dominant ethnic/racial group, the ethnocracy, to exact symbolically and materialistically punitive measures against minorities during periods of national crisis. I situate my discussion of dramatically changed social interactions in the postSeptember 11, 2001