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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Strategic Consequences: How Executive And Organizational Decision-Making Impacts The Outcome Of Unconventional Warfare, Joseph Osborne
Strategic Consequences: How Executive And Organizational Decision-Making Impacts The Outcome Of Unconventional Warfare, Joseph Osborne
Doctor of International Conflict Management Dissertations
Conventional academic discussion vis-à-vis America’s Special Operations Forces, is largely focused at the tactical and operational level of analysis. This means the emphasis on explaining outcomes is placed on personnel (recruiting, assessing, selecting, and training), cutting edge equipment, innovative tactics, or advanced command and control procedures. Addressing this long-standing trend, I argue that factors well beyond the widely accepted explanations for success or failure are in play. Additionally, these factors are understandable, are manageable, and may have as great or greater an impact on the outcome of a campaign as any tactical consideration. Using the narrowly defined and discrete special …
Taking Terrorists At Their Word: Testing The Co-Religionist Hypothesis In Islamic State Propaganda, Joel Elliott
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 …