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David Versus Goliath: The Power Of Weakness In Asymmetric Warfare—Lessons From History, Nicholas K. Petaludis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Under what conditions do violent nonstate actors (VNA) succeed against states? Why does David sometimes beat Goliath? Since at least the time of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian Wars, the realist narrative in international relations measures power primarily in relative, coercive, and deterrent terms. Strong states should accordingly face fewer constraints and enjoy more options while pursuing their national interests. Unconventional warfare, and its subsets of terrorism and insurgency, should—given these circumstances, end in VNA failure. Sometimes, however, VNAs find success. By comparing the literature on historical and current case studies, I propose that a set of preconditions and two mechanisms …

Building Baghdad: The Construction Of Urban Space In Iraq, 1921–1963, Andrew S. Alger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the production of space in Baghdad during the monarchical and early republican eras (1921 – 1963). As the capital of the new nation of Iraq following the First World War, Baghdad expanded along the banks of the Tigris River into new residential and commercial spaces, establishing schools, boutique stores, sporting venues, electricity and running water that transformed how Iraqis conceived of the mundane activities associated with daily life. Employing a theoretical framework drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, I argue that participation in the creation of new neighborhoods and streets was uneven across differences of class, …

Closing The Chasm: Al-Fārābī On Islam And Politics, Onur F. Muftugil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Much Islamic history evinces a separation between religious and political registers of thought and action. To be sure, these two registers always remained, to some extent, mutually intertwined since the origins of Islam. However, in about two hundred years into Islamic history, or, in other words, in the 9th century, the political register based on coercion began to mark itself off from the moral concerns associated with the religious register. Political authority acquired an increasingly absolute character. It focused more on ensuring the obedience of its subjects than the moral/religious purpose of creating a just society where even the weakest …

An Analysis Of Women And Terrorism: Perpetrators, Victims, Both?, Elizabeth Lauren Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will analyze women’s participation in terrorism under groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. It will research the use of violence within terrorist organizations, perpetrated by female participants. What leads women to join groups like the Islamic State? There will be an analysis of the factors that attract women to joining terrorist organizations, in addition to the practices of recruitment that aid in their radicalization. There is a misconception that women who join the Islamic State lack education, which is seen as the sole reasoning for their radicalization or involvement. In reality, several reasons exist leading to their …

Paper House: The Revolution, The Disappeared, And The Historicity Of Lebanon, Elsa Saade

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis will be an attempt to reenact events in relation to the disappeared and the Lebanese civil war, with the help of newspaper cuts, oral history, theories on historical writing, memories, and books on Lebanon. As a prospective historian, the writer will be tapping into the internal event of thought processes and meaning of the past, as advised by R. G. Collingwood in The Idea of History. (Collingwood, 1946 ) That critical inquiry will only be at the service of understanding the present from the lens of a self-reflecting inquisitor that has faced many silences in a past …

Whose War Is It Anyway? How Afghanistan Became A Battlefield Over Global Hegemony During The Cold War, Kathryn Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traditional scholarship depicts the Cold War, which began immediately after World War Two and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as a battle of freedom and democracy over communism and authoritarian control. Cold War propaganda cartoons often show an Uncle Sam figure facing off against the Soviet Union, or a Soviet Bear reaching out to grab and control Western Europe. While this may have been popular Cold War discourse, a close look at internal documents from the United States Government at the time reveals that the United States was more interested in protecting resources and their …

The U.S. Approach To Peacebuilding In Afghanistan: A Comparative Analysis Of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, And Donald Trump Administration Policies In Afghanistan, Mohammad Rasouli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research paper addresses the efforts of the U.S. to achieve some level of reconciliation with the Taliban after more than 18 years of war in Afghanistan. It deals with the history of U.S.-Taliban negotiations and the U.S. initiatives to engage with the Taliban, as well as outlining the challenges to these initiatives and determining how effective they have been. In addition, the prospects of the U.S.-Taliban peace talks are assessed.

Since the 2001 U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, the first two U.S. administrations under consideration—those of George W. Bush and Barack Obama—justified intrusive interventions into the political, economic, and social …

Sedimenting Territory: A Political Geology Of Oil, Earth, And Spatial Politics In Turkey, Zeynep Oguz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building on the recent turn to the material and earthly aspects of resources and political power in environmental anthropology and political geography, this work historically and ethnographically examines the kinds of territorial politics that oil’s materiality, geological qualities, and infrastructures have generated in Turkey. Despite being surrounded by oil-rich neighbors in the Middle East, Turkey’s domestic oil reserves supply only 7 percent of the country’s oil, all of which has been drilled in the Kurdish provinces of Batman, Diyarbakır, and Adıyaman in Turkey’s southeast, where the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) has been fighting the Turkish state since 1984 for cultural …

Death Of The Caliphate: Reconfiguring Ali Abd Al-Raziq’S Ideas And Legacy, Arooj Alam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The demise of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924 generated vigorous debates throughout the Muslim world regarding the political future of the Ummah. While several prominent Muslim thinkers contributed to this “Caliphate debate,” none left as contested a legacy as the Egyptian intellectual, ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq(1888-1966). In his scholarly publication, Islam and Foundations of Governance,Abd al-Raziq argued against the revival and resurrection of the Caliphate by redefining it as coercive, monarchal, and as the antithesis of the community first established by Prophet Muhammad. While Abd al-Raziq’s book attracted tremendous criticisms in 1925, numerous scholars today have commended and …

Conceptions Of Modern Egyptian Childhood During The Period Of The “Liberal Experiment” In Egypt, 1922–1952: A Comparative Study Of Taha Hussein’S, “An Egyptian Childhood,” And Sayyid Qutb’S, “A Child From The Village”, Nora Elgabalawy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Counter to French social historian Philippe Aries’ argument, the concept of an Egyptian childhood has its own traceable history, separate from the modern Western European concept of childhood. As shown, with the presence of language on childhood, in a number of pre-modern Arabic/Islamic literature, notions of childhood had a rich history outside of modern Western Europe. But, depictions of an Egyptian childhood in modern Egyptian literature, specifically two childhood autobiographies/memoirs, Taha Hussein’s An Egyptian Childhood and Sayyid Qutb’s A Child from the Village, do not emerge seamlessly from these early pre-modern depictions of childhood. Both Hussein and Qutb wrote …

The Post-9/11 Lgbtq Human Rights Struggle In Egypt, Donna K. Huaman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the struggle for LGBTQ human rights has become a leading standard that depicts whether or not a state can be considered modern and progressive. Yet, while this new criterion seems to be supported by Global North states, other nations in other regions, like Egypt from the Middle East, North Africa (MENA) has criticized the international pressure to implement this standard as neo-imperialist and inauthentic to its Muslim-Arab culture. Egypt claims to be the universal Arab-Muslim voice for the MENA region and has become one of the greatest challengers to the international campaign for …

The Difficulties Of Filming Syrian Refugee Populations Living In Jordan: Obstacles To Objectivity And Accuracy In Reporting, Thaddeus E. Decaprio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to explain and address the challenges inherent in filming and documenting Syrian refugee populations in Jordan. This project will take the form of a narrative research paper in conjunction with a video component comprised of the first-hand accounts of several refugees who consented to sharing their stories on camera. I went, along with my brother Louis (a filmmaker), to Jordan to document firsthand the stories of Syrian refugees in their own words. We were invited to film for the Women ASPIRE project of an organization called ASPIRE (Advancing Solutions in Policy, Implementation, Research, and Engagement for Refugees), …

The Jihadist Marketplace: Understanding Competition Between Al Qaeda And Isis, Hristo Voynov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ISIS and al Qaeda are the world’s preeminent transnational jihadist organizations. Following a public schism, the two started competing, even though they previous cooperated to accomplish their shared goals. This split divided the movement, which was previously united under the leadership of al Qaeda. Now the two must compete with one another for the limited resources of the global jihadist movement as the loser of the competition risks losing their standing within the movement, which may lead to irrelevancy, or even organizational demise, for the loser. This competition requires study because it is necessary to explain why the two would …

Corporate Urbanization: Between The Future And Survival In Lebanon, Deen S. Sharp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than …

The Dictators’ Dilemma: Repression Or Concessions In The Face Of Resistance, Chris Massaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Arab Spring revolts of late 2010 and 2011 were a profound moment in the history of a region troubled by decades of authoritarianism. Years of economic mismanagement and security force repression trammeled on the rights and aspirations of people striving for a better life. When social movements and anti-government protests erupted throughout the region, each country responded to the uprisings with different methodologies. This research closely examines why autocratic regimes of the region chose such divergent responses, with some opting to use violent repression, others attempting to make concessions and most combined repression with concessions. I will make the …

Performing El Rap El ʿArabi 2005-2015: Feeling Politics Amid Neoliberal Incursions In Ramallah, Amman, And Beirut, Rayya S. El Zein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is about politics in Arabic rap. Specifically, it is about affective dynamics and material negotiations during rap concerts in three cities in the Levant. I analyze Arab hip hop culture in the context of three different but related histories of cosmopolitan, middle class growth, and gentrification. Using an ethnomusicological framework rooted in participant observation and performance theory, I compare concert conditions, audience behavior, and accessibility of music production in Ramallah, Amman, and Beirut.

In Chapter One, I elaborate the discursive and theoretical frameworks that have pinned the political valences of Arab youth, Arab artists, and Arab rappers in …

Empowerment From Within: Supporting Palestinian Women’S Struggle Against Violence, Ortal Bensky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent reports by the United Nations and local non-governmental organizations present a troubling increase in incidents of violence against Palestinian women in Palestine. These are cases of domestic violence, where the attackers are Palestinians, and political violence, where the attackers are Israeli settlers and soldiers. These violent incidents include attacks on body and property. Most incidents are neither dealt with by the Palestinian authorities nor by the Israeli government and judicial system. There is not sufficient international pressure to enforce justice. The purpose of this study is to offer alternative ways to prevent violent crimes, enforce relevant laws, and provide …