International Relations Commons^™

Taking Terrorists At Their Word: Testing The Co-Religionist Hypothesis In Islamic State Propaganda, Joel Elliott

Doctor of International Conflict Management Dissertations

This dissertation operates on the idea that, as conflict researchers, we can look to Islamic State’s (referred to from here on as ‘Daesh’) own recruitment propaganda to identify the best people to counter Daesh’s violent rhetoric. This project analyzes Daesh’s main print publication, Dabiq, to catalogue and classify the types of people and institutions Daesh targets most, and which types of arguments Daesh uses to attack those targets. It uses this information to test the Co-Religionist Hypothesis, which predicts that the most effective peaceful interveners in a religious conflict will be of the same religion as the belligerents. Conventional …

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 …