Political Science Commons^™

Introduction: Human Rights In The Middle East And North Africa (Mena), Raslan Ibrahim

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The wave of revolutions and popular uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) at the dawn of 2011 highlights the inescapable relevance and impact of human rights on the region’s politics and security. The Arab regimes’ violations of human rights and lack of respect to the human dignity of their citizens are in fact the seeds of the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia, the rebellion of the Egyptian people against Mubarak regime, as well as the ongoing uprisings across the rest of MENA. The women and men who are protesting in the streets of Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Yemen, …

The Abuse Of Child Domestic Workers: Petites Bonnes In Morocco, Joanna Miller

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The International Labor Organization (ILO) classifies child domestic labor as a “worst form of child labor” for a very good reason. Driven by dire poverty and lack of access to education, children are sent away from their homes, often moving to large and unfamiliar cities to work for wealthier families. Morocco has one of the worst child domestic labor problems in Northern Africa with an ILO estimated 66,000-88,000 children between the ages of 7 and 15, 70% of whom are under age 12, working in Morocco today (Rinehart 2007). Many of these child laborers are young girls working as maids, …

The Object Of Torture Is Torture: Extraordinary Renditions To Jordan And Human Rights In The War On Terror, Kat Mitchell

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Hassan Saleh bin Attash, a Yemeni national, was just seventeen at the time of his September 2002 arrest in Pakistan. The young man spent four days in a Karachi prison before being taken to a United States-run prison in Kabul, where he was held and allegedly tortured through the middle of September. He was then rendered to Jordan.

Persecution Of Coptic Christians In Modern Egypt, Alla Rubinstein

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The Christian community of Egypt dates back to the seventeenth century and comprises 12 per cent of the population today. As one of the oldest churches of the world, the Coptic Christian Church, first formed in Alexandria, has stood resilient and faithful to its traditions against intolerance, siege and persecutions. Having been present in most institutions of the state among the overwhelmingly Sunni-Muslim population, Copts are not new to the slow process of Islamization that Egypt has been undergoing for the last twenty years. What has been unique to the recent Coptic experience is the forced integration of Shari’a law …

Dying For Love: Homosexuality In The Middle East, Heather Simmons

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Today in the United States, the most frequent references to the Middle East are concerned with the War on Terrorism. However, there is another, hidden battle being waged: the war for human rights on the basis of sexuality. Homosexuality is a crime in many of the Middle Eastern states and is punishable by death in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iran (Ungar 2002). Chronic abuses and horrific incidences such as the 2009 systematic murders of hundreds of “gay” men in Iraq are seldom reported in the international media. Speculation as to why this population is hidden includes the …

Bedouin Women In The Naqab, Israel: Ongoing Transformation, Marcy M. Wells

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Since its inception in 1948, the state of Israel has based development plans on an agenda of nation-building that has systematically excluded Palestinian Arab citizens such as the indigenous Bedouin. Policies of relocation, resettlement, and restructuring have been imposed on the Bedouin, forcing them from their ancestral lands and lifestyle in the Naqab (or Negev, as it is called in Hebrew) desert of southern Israel. The rapid and involuntary transition from self-sufficient, semi-nomadic, pastoral life to sedentarization and modernization has resulted in dependency on a state that treats the Bedouin as minority outsiders through unjust social, political, and economic structures. …

Finding A Voice: Using The Internet For Free Speech And Expression In Iran, Chelsea Zimmerman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In July 2009, many Iranians took to the streets to protest the results of the presidential election in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won with a reported 62% of the vote. The protests, stemming from allegations of electoral fraud, quickly exposed the government's limited tolerance for dissent. In addition to street demonstrations, protestors utilized social networking websites to express their opposition to the election results. The world, following Internet feeds, witnessed the restrictive mechanisms Iran’s government placed on expression and speech. People throughout the world admonished Iran for the government's interference with cell phone and Internet networks. Iran’s free speech and expression …

Human Rights Education In Peace-Building: A Look At Where The Practice Has Come From, And Where It Needs To Head, Tracey Holland

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The world’s peace-building and development organizations increasingly are incorporating human-rights frameworks into the myriad of activities now under their purview. Slower to develop, however, are the capacity-building programs designed to impart knowledge about human rights to citizens and communities. Field-workers throughout the world indicate that the lack of such guidance-giving education hinders them when it comes to monitoring activities, helping to rebuild public institutions, setting up and organizing electoral politics, building an unfettered media, protecting human security, setting up transitional justice mechanisms, and the myriad of other peace-building activities and democratization challenges they face in post-conflict situations. This paper not …

Beyond The Brink: Somalia’S Health Crisis, Bryson Brown

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Somalia is approaching a daunting anniversary: in 2011, the country will begin its twentieth consecutive year without an effective centralized government. The fall of the Soviet supported Siad Barre government in 1991 created a power vacuum that was filled by warlords, clans and, most recently, Islamists. Fourteen interim governments have failed to supplant those forces. Health infrastructure and the general health of the population have been devastated as a result. Precious few organizations are still providing health-related services. Unfortunately, recent events suggest that this crisis is going to get worse before it gets better.

On Visibly Dangerous Silliness, Anthony Chase

Human Rights & Human Welfare

“Silly” is what Ramadan calls the Swiss minaret referendum. He urges, in response to its passage, that Swiss Muslims be more rather than less visible. Each point is worth reflection. How and why does silliness transform itself into danger? And how and why is visibility the correct response to such danger—even if it leads in directions Ramadan may not suspect?

Women's Leadership And Third-Wave Feminism, Kathleen P. Iannello

Political Science Faculty Publications

Leadership is a term that women strive to claim as their own. Whether in the halls of Congress, the corporate boardroom, or the privacy of the home, women’s leadership challenges traditional notions of the concept. Throughout the ages images of leadership feature men in uniform and men in positions of power, whether it be military, government, or market. The traditional view of leaders is imbued with male images of “heroes,” who issue orders, lead the troops—save the day. But leadership has another face. It is the face of Abigail Adams admonishing her husband to “Remember the Ladies” in the formation …

Campaigning In Judicial Elections: The Effects Of Candidate Status, Katelyn Marie Bries

Honors Program Theses

While campaigns for judicial elections in general have received more attention, relatively little research has been done regarding the differences in campaigning for open-seat and incumbent-challenger elections. Because they are the most common type of judicial election, incumbent-challenger races have been the focus of most research conducted thus far. Yet, open seat competitions are important as well. With the incumbent advantage absent in these elections, factors that would otherwise play only a minor role in determining who will be elected have the potential to be much more exaggerated than they do in incumbent-challenger races; consequently, it will be easier to …

Maladies Of Modernity: Scientism In Politics, David Nathan Whitney

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the complex relationship between science and politics. More specifically, it focuses on the problem of scientism. Features of scientism include the dogmatic faith in the methods of the natural sciences (and the accompanying assumption that those methods can be successfully imported into the social sciences), a materialistic worldview, the rejection of the bios theoretikos, the prohibition of philosophical questions, and an emphasis on immanent fulfillment through the power of science. I seek to demonstrate that scientism is intellectually impoverishing and politically dangerous. Given the lack of full-length studies on the subject, I trace the development of scientism …

Pliny's Defense Of Empire, Thomas Raymond Laehn

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for over half of a millennium Pliny has been considered little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshalling of his materials. It is my contention that Pliny’s encyclopedic text is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansion grounded in a sophisticated conception of man as the only being capable of passing …

Athens And Byzantium: Platonic Political Philosophy In Religious Empire, Jeremiah Heath Russell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

It is traditionally understood that there is a gap, which spans well over one thousand years, between Plato’s own political philosophy and its successor in medieval Islamic philosophy. A most likely bridge between Plato and these later philosophers is Neoplatonism. However, scholars argue that this philosophic school abandoned its predecessor’s emphasis on political philosophy. This dissertation challenges the traditional interpretation by reconstructing a political philosophy based on a Neoplatonic commentary on Plato’s Gorgias. The first two chapters place this commentary within its historical context, as well as its place within the larger Neoplatonic pedagogy. The remainder of the dissertation reconstructs …

An Abundance Of Violence And Scarcity Of Words (Book Review), Sandra F. Joireman

Political Science Faculty Publications

It is hard to avoid knowing something about the conflict in Darfur. There are divestment movements, student campaigns, actors raising awareness and the ‘genocide olympics’ to remind us of the ongoing conflict. There is also an increasingly ugly exchange in which two sides are talking and neither is listening. This exchange is not between the combatants, as one might expect, but among activists and scholars who disagree on the best way to portray the conflict. While it is difficult to avoid knowing something about the violence in Darfur, finding a deeper analysis that goes beyond the attempts to gain attention …

Governing Gambling In The United States, Maria E. Garcia

CMC Senior Theses

The role risk taking has played in American history has helped shape current legislation concerning gambling. This thesis attempts to explain the discrepancies in legislation regarding distinct forms of gambling. While casinos are heavily regulated by state and federal laws, most statutes dealing with lotteries strive to regulate the activities of other parties instead of those of the lottery institutions. Incidentally, lotteries are the only form of gambling completely managed by the government. It can be inferred that the United States government is more concerned with people exploiting gambling than with the actual practice of wagering.

In an effort to …

The Unintended Consequences Of Increased Transparency In American National Government, Abigail K. Woodruff

CMC Senior Theses

In the past century, there has been an increasing trend in American government toward opening government procedures to the general public. The intention of these reforms was to improve government accountability and responsiveness, increase public education and involvement in government, and prevent corruption and undue influence by special interests. Conventional wisdom about open government, however, does not take into consideration many of the repercussions of opening up congressional proceedings to the glare of public scrutiny. Reforms in the 1970’s opened the deliberative process and made members of Congress more vulnerable to constituent and interest group pressure. These effects have had …

Therapeutic Discourse And The American Public Philosophy: On American Liberalism's Troubled Relationship With Psychology, Clifford D. Vickrey

Honors Theses

I explore the main currents of postwar American liberalism. One, sociological, emerged in response to the danger of mass movements. Articulated primarily by political sociologists and psychologists and ascendant from the mid-fifties till the mid-seventies, it heralded the "end of ideology." It emphasized stability, elitism, positive science and pluralism; it recast normatively sound politics as logrolling and hard bargaining. I argue that these normative features, attractive when considered in isolation, taken together led to a vicious ad hominem style in accounting for views outside the postwar consensus. It used pseudo-scientific literature in labeling populists, Progressives, Taft conservatives, Goldwaterites, the New …

Family Ties: Mainstream Environmentalists' Understanding Of Radical Environmentalism In America, Zachary W. Ezor

Honors Theses

Environmentalism in the United States manifests itself in numerous ways. While American environmentalists have been grouped into broad camps over the years, observers have struggled to accurately classify the different components of the movement. Lately, environmentalists have been characterized based on their chosen modus operandi. Environmentalists who employ typical interest group tactics of policy advocacy and accept the notion of political compromise can generally be called 'mainstream.' Alternatively, those environmentalists who employ non-conventional strategies like direct action and take a no-compromise stance on environmental issues are typically described as 'radical.' Despite these distinctions, both radical and mainstream environmentalists are parts …