No description available.

This study examines the decision making process in Washington which led to the current non-existence of political and economic relations between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States. The study examines the U.S.-Iran relationship at three levels-of-analysis: the individual, state, and system levels. From a geopolitical perspective, Iran and the United States have often been natural allies that pursued similar policy goals. After 9/11, the U.S. entered Afghanistan and Iraq which further necessitated the reengagement of Tehran. Iranian regional clout would play a vital role in stabilization of Iraq and Afghanistan and without Iran's assistance; peace will not likely be realized in those states. Amongst the most compelling reasons for Washington to engage in meaningful dialogue with Tehran are: terrorism, the war on drugs, the Iranian sponsorship of militant groups, and Tehran's pursuit of a nuclear program. The study concludes that rapprochement should occur in two phases. The first being cooperation in areas of mutual concern such as the war on drugs. The second phase promoting confidence building methods, which would lead to a strategic partnership based on mutual interests.

No description available.

Som ett resultat av attackerna mot USA den 11 september 2001 förklarade dåvarande president George W Bush krig mot terrorismen den 20 september samma år. Sex dagar senare undertecknade Bush ett direktiv vilket auktoriserade den civila amerikanska underrättelsetjänsten Central Intelligence Agency att utföra riktat dödande mot fördefinierade individer i syftet att förhindra nya attacker från terroristnätverket Al Qaeda, talibanerna och associerade styrkor. Bush initierade det amerikanska bruket av så kallade ”drone strikes” i anslutning till krigsförklaringen med intentionen att eliminera misstänkta terrorister utan möjlighet till en rättvis rättegång, Obama-administrationen har valt att fortsätta utöva policyn. Syftet med studien är att fastställa huruvida USA:s juridiska rättfärdigande och bruk av folkrätt i relation till genomförandet av riktat dödande och användandet av obemannade luftfarkoster i kriget mot terrorismen kan betraktas vara förenligt med doktrinen för just war theory och gällande internationell rätt. Vidare undersöker studien effekterna av det amerikanska bruket av folkrätten i relation till civilbefolkningen och den internationella humanitära rätten. Relevant lagtext och krigsetikens sedvanerättsliga principer jämförs med USA:s bruk av folkrätt för att fastställa agerandets legalitet. Vidare påvisar studien att programmet för riktat dödande inte kan anses vara förenligt med just war theory och gällande internationell lag och att bruket av drönare hamnar i konflikt med gällande internationell rätt i relation till hur de används under kriget mot terrorismen. / As a result of the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001 then President George W Bush declared a war on terror. Six days later, Bush signed a directive which authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to carry out targeted killings against predefined individuals with the purpose to prevent any future attacks from the terrorist network Al Qaeda, as well as the Taliban and associated forces. In conjunction with the declaration of war president Bush initiated the American practice of so-called "drone strikes" with the intention to eliminate suspected terrorists without access to a fair trial, the practice has continued under the mandate of the Obama-administration. The aim of this study is to examine whether the US legal justification for the use of targeted killings and unmanned aerial vehicles in the war against terrorism can be regarded as compatible with the doctrine of just war theory and applicable international law. Furthermore, the study examines the effects of the US practice on international humanitarian customary law in relation to the civilian population. The U.S. justification of targeted killing is compared with international law to determine the lawfulness from a legal perspective. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the practice is not compatible with the doctrine of just war theory and applicable international law. The use of drones violates international customary law in relation to how they are used under the current conflict.

The aim of this thesis is to answer the question whether the U.S. policy on targeted killings with combat drones is compatible with the legal doctrine of just war theory, applicable international law, and human rights law. Moreover, this paper intends to examine the legal issues arising from the U.S. practice of international law in relation to the justification of targeted killings. The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether the practice of targeted killings can be considered lawful and, if not, to provide knowledge about how the method violates applicable international law and the ethics of war. The focus is placed on relevant treaties and customary international law, and just war theory is used as a theoretical complement to explain the meaning and purpose of selected laws in order to determine their applicability to the research problem. Furthermore, this procedure has been conducted by using a legal method to identify the legal problem and interpret relevant sources of law in order to determine their applicability to the research problem. The thesis has determined that the U.S. policy on targeted killings with combat drones is not consistent with applicable international law and fundamental human rights law. In particular, the practice of targeted killings violates the principle of distinction.

This study examines the motivation factors that make some individuals (terrorists) confidential informants. The study is based on the assumptions of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theories. Accordingly, main assumption of the present study is that some individuals with unsatisfied needs in religion-abusing terrorist (RAT) networks choose to become confidential informants to satisfy their predominant needs. The main hypothesis for the purpose of this study is “The individuals’ decision-making processes to cooperate with law enforcement intelligence (LEI) as a confidential informant is affected by some motivation factors during recruitment process.” The present study tests 27 hypotheses in order to answer two main research questions. To meet its objectives the present study uses quantitative research methodology, constructs a cross-sectional research design, and employs secondary data analysis to test the hypotheses of the research questions. A dataset was formed based on official records of Turkish National Police by including all confidential informants within eight different RAT networks in Turkey. First, individual effect of each motivation factor on being a confidential informant is tested and discussed in detail. Then two group specific multivariate models for being an informant in Al-Qaeda and Turkish-Hezbollah are illustrated, compared and contrasted. Both bivariate and multivariate statistical analyses not only revealed the extent of individual effects of motivations among RAT groups, but also helped us to build fitting multivariate models that explain the probability of being informants in certain RAT networks. By doing so, the present study aims to make contributions to the literature and practice on this relatively unexplored phenomenon. Findings indicate that while some motivation factors are common among all RAT networks, the strength and direction of their effects vary among different RAT networks.

Guantánamo ist zum Symbol des Aufeinandertreffens verschiedener Wertesysteme geworden, bei dem die Frage nach den Rechten des Menschen im Mittelpunkt steht. In der Dissertation werden die komplexen Probleme dargestellt, mit denen das Völkerrecht durch die Herausforderungen des internationalen Terrorismus und speziell des Gefangenenlagers auf Kuba konfrontiert wird. Darüber hinaus wird die Frage untersucht, welche Rechte des Menschen fern der diplomatisch verhandelten internationalen Kodifikationen tatsächlich in den verschiedenen Kulturen der Welt anerkannt und gelebt werden. Zwar legen der Wortlaut und die Verbreitung der Menschenrechtsverträge die Vermutung nahe, dass in den Kulturen der Welt ein Konsens über die Rechte des Menschen zumindest im Kern existiert. Bei näherer Betrachtung zeigt sich aber, dass es verschiedene Menschenbilder - etwa freiheitlich-individualistische, kommunalistische und theozentrische - gibt, die zum Teil diametral zueinander stehen. Ein interkultureller Vergleich offenbart, dass häufig das jeweils andere Wertesystem abgewehrt und auch „die universellen Menschenrechte“ als westlich determinierte Werte mit Distanz betrachtet werden. Welche Begründungen für Menschenrechte in den Kulturen existent sind, welche Aufschlüsse die bisherigen Begründungsmodelle geben und inwieweit daraus ein Kern an Rechten dem Menschen überkulturell als angeboren begründet werden können, sind wichtige Fragen, die in dieser Dissertation behandelt werden. Es werden neue Ansätze untersucht, welche die Begründungsdefizite bisheriger Modelle womöglich auflösen und den rechtlichen Diskurs damit aktualisieren können. Denn kontroverse Menschenrechtslagen, wie die in Guantánamo, sind in Zukunft nur vermeidbar, wenn sich auf der Basis eines fortgeführten interkulturellen Dialoges eine gemeinsame Identität entwickelt und dadurch eine Gewalt zwischen den Kulturen verringert wird, die durch die Differenzen ihrer Werte entsteht. / Guantánamo has become a symbol for the clash of differing value systems. With widespread international concern and criticism of the treatment of the detainees - Islamic terror suspects - as grave violations of universal human rights. The dissertation illustrates the complex problems confronting international law by the aspects of international terrorism and especially the prison camp on Cuba. Furthermore, it examines the question, which rights beyond the international codifications are actually accepted within the cultures. The wording of the international human rights treaties and their dissemination assume a consensus on basic human rights. However differing and sometimes opposing cultural and religious conceptions exist. Some communities attach importance to a liberal and individual understanding, whilst others on the involvement and obligation of the individual into the community. Making it difficult to define and implement core human rights treaties, which can be applied universally regardless of cultural and religious beliefs. Therefore, the examination goes further than an analysis by means of international law. It discusses the question, which justifications of human rights are existing within the cultures, what the contents of the present paradigms of justification - to which also the international human rights refer - are, and how an inherence of a core of human rights can be derived beyond cultural relativity. Rights that would consider equal conditions of human interaction, and examine the correlation of identity, structural violence and the state of need of the human being. The actualization of the justification of human rights is vital in the legal discourse to assimilate the conceptions about the rights of man. Controversial human rights situations like Guantánamo can only be resolved and avoided in the future, with continued intercultural dialogue, understanding of a common human identity, and celebration instead of condemnation of the inherent richness of differing cultural and religious values.

Al Qaeda killings, posttraumatic stress, and the Gothic together triangulate a sizable space in recent American fiction that is still largely uncharted by critics. This thesis maps that shared territory in four novels written between 2005 and 2007 by writers who were born in America, and whose protagonists are the survivors in New York City after the World Trade Center falls. Published in the city of their tragedy and reviewed in its media, the novels surveyed here include Don DeLillo’s _Falling Man_ (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer’s _Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close_ (2005), Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s _The Writing on the Wall_ (2005), and Jess Walter’s _The Zero_ (2006). The thesis issues a challenge to the large number of negative and dismissive reviews of the novels under consideration, making a case that under different criteria, shaped by trauma theory and psychoanalysis, the novels succeed after all in making readers feel what it was to be alive in September 2001, enduring the posttraumatic stress for months and years later. The thesis asserts that 9/11 fiction is too commonly presented in popular journals and scholarly studies as an undifferentiated mass. In the same critical piece a journalist or an academic may evaluate narratives in which unfold a terrorist's point of view, a surviving or a dying New York City victim's perspective, and an outsider's reaction set thousands of miles away from Ground Zero. What this thesis argues for is a separation in study of the fictive strands that meditate on the burning towers, treating the New York City survivor story as a discrete body. Despite their being set in one of the most known cities of the Western world, and the terrorist attack that they depict being the most- watched catastrophe ever experienced in real-time before, these fictions have not yet been critically ordered. Charting the salient reappearing conflicts, unsettling descriptions, protagonist decay, and potent techniques for registering horror that resurface in this New York City 9/11 fiction, this thesis proposes and demonstrates how the peculiar and affecting Gothic tensions in the works can be further understood by trauma theory, a term coined by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996: 72). Though the thesis concentrates on developments in trauma theory from the mid 1990s to 2015, it also addresses its theoretical antecedents: from the earliest voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that linked mental illness to a trauma (Charcot, Janet, Breuer, Freud), to researchers from mid-twentieth century (Adler, Lindemann) who studied how catastrophe affects civilian minds not previously trained to either fight war or withstand cataclysm. Always keeping at the fore the ancient Greek double-meaning of trauma as both unhealing “wound” and “defeat,” the thesis surveys tenets of the trauma theorists from the very first of those who studied the effects on civilian survivors of disaster (of what is still the largest nightclub fire in U.S. history, which replaced front page coverage of World War II for a few days: the Cocoanut Grove blaze in Boston, 1942) up to those theorists writing in 2015. The concepts evolving behind trauma theory, this thesis demonstrates, provide a useful mechanism to discuss the surprising yearnings hiding behind the appearance of doppelgängers, possession ghosts, terrorists as monsters, empty coffins, and visitants that appear to feed on characters’ sorrow, guilt, and loneliness within the novels under discussion. This thesis reappraises the dominant idea in trauma studies of the mid-1990s, namely that trauma victims often cannot fully remember and articulate their physical and psychic wounds. The argument here is that, true to the theories of the Caruthian school, the victims in these novels may not remember and express their trauma completely and in a linear fashion. However, the victims figured in these novels do relate the horrors of their memory to a degree by letting their narration erupt with the unexpectedly Gothic images, tropes, visions, language, and typical contradictions, aporias, lacunae, and paradoxes. The Gothic, one might say, becomes the language in which trauma speaks and articulates itself, albeit not always in the most cogent of signs. One might easily dismiss these fleeting Gothic presences that characters conjure in the fictions under consideration as anomalous apparitions signalling nothing. However, this thesis interrogates these ghostly traces of Gothicism to find what secrets they hold. Working from the insights of psychoanalysis and its post-Freudian re-inventers and challengers, it aims to puzzle out the dimensions of characters’ mourning in its “traumagothic” reading of the texts. Characters’ use of the Gothic becomes their way of remembering, a coded language to the curious. This thesis holds that unexpressed grief and guilt are the large constant in this grouping of novels. Characters’ grief articulation and guilt release, or the desire for symbolic amnesia, take paths that the figures often were suspicious of before 9/11: a return to organized religion, a belief in spirits, a call for vengeance, psychotherapy, substance abuse, splitting with a partner, rampant sex with nearby strangers, torture of suspects, and killing. All the earnest attempts through the above means by the characters to express grief, vent rage, and alleviate survivor guilt do so without noticeable success. True closure towards their trauma is largely a myth. No reliable evidence surfaces from the close reading of the texts that those affected by trauma ever fully recover. However, as this thesis demonstrates, other forms of recompense come from these searches for elusive peace and the nostalgic longing for the America that has been lost to them.

The main purpose of this work is to investigate if the US ́s killing of Osama bin Laden on 2 May 2011 in Abbottabad in Pakistan was lawful. The background to the killing is what happened on 11 September 2001 when four US airplanes were hijacked and crashed into World Trade Center and Pentagon. Al Qaeda, a terrorist organisation led by Osama bin Laden, was immediately suspected for the attacks, which led to the starting point of the US ́s ‘global war on terror’. This work tries to give a short brief on ‘global war on terror’ and answer if there is a global war on terror and/or if a new category of war is needed. In order to get an answer to the main question of this work I had to investigate if US is in an international armed conflict or in a non-international armed conflict with Al Qaida. Another important question to investigate is if an armed conflict in one State can spill over to another State and still be consider as an armed conflict. Other important questions to answer are, if Osama bin Laden was a legitimate target under international humanitarian law, if he was a civilian or if he had a continuous combat function and what level of participation in hostilities he had? Not less important is also to investigate if human rights law is applicable when Osama bin Laden was killed, especially the fundamental right to life. Lastly I end my investigation with a quick review of the laws of jus ad bellum in order to get an answer if US had a right to resort to force in Pakistan. My conclusion is that the US was not involved in an armed conflict with al Qaeda in Pakistan where the killing took place. The conflict between the US and al Qaeda in Afghanistan is to be categorised as a non-international conflict. This conflict cannot be described as a conflict that has spilled over to Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden was killed. All people, including Osama bin Laden, has a right to life. Because of lack of information on what happened in Abbottabad when Osama bin Laden was killed it is impossible to give a clear legal answer if the US had the right to kill him. It could be lawful, but it could also be considered as a crime against international human rights law.

The diploma thesis deals with the terrorism and war, their meaning in the globalised world and with the possibility of ethical justification of violence. Theoretical part delineates terrorism, its terminology and political and social environment. It describes kinds and methods of terrorism, its history and some of the terrorist organizations with their goals. The thesis also compares terrorism and war in the parts where they intersect. In the next chapters it presents original ethical theories which would be supported by the moral assessment of violent enforcing of interests. There is explained the term of just war, its basic principles and obligatory attributes. Practical part characterize three chosen actual conflicts: the Al- Qaeda attacks on the United States from 11th September, 2001, Chechnya war for its autonomy and current factual occupation of Iraq by allied forces. Legitimate setting in the sense of ius ad bellum, the right to defend by the use of violence, was not mostly deconstructed. In the area of ius in bello, the right in the war, the hypothesis was not verified and the particular violent action did not fulfill some of the basic principles of just war.