Thesis (M.A.)--Northern Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-133).

Software project development is increasingly becoming geographically distributed especially in today’s global business environment. In order to build quality software faster andat a lower cost, companies in industrialised countries are turning to globally distributed software development projects. Emerging countries such as India and Israel are known to have large pools of highly trained software engineers at relatively low cost. However, recent trends have shown that new locations are emerging as developmental sites. Examples of those locations in the Middle East include Oman, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. The main attraction of those countries is that they are close to the Arab market. However, distributed development also entails a number of risks and problems, for instance in terms of communication and knowledge transfer between sites, resulting in project failures. Being the project manager of a team that includes remote members has additional challenges compared to managing co-located team members. These projects face particular challenges that need careful managerial attention.This research aims to examine how globally distributed software development projects are managed in the Middle East. The main question to be answered was “How do companies in the Middle East successfully manage and organise software development in a globally distributed environment?”. We outline the factors that were perceived as important by project managers. We also look at how culture affects the operation of virtual teams in a globally distributed software development environment in the Middle East taking religion into consideration. To understand how these factors influence the success of globally distributed software development projects in the Middle East, we conducted a qualitative case study research involving three different companies operating in Dubai, Oman, Abu Dhabi, India and Pakistan. We used semi-structured interviews as the primary sources of information as these allow highly personalised data. This research outlines the following specific project management-related areas that need to be addressed to facilitate successful virtual team operation: Cross-cultural collaboration • Tools and technology used to facilitate GSD • An infrastructure that facilitates communication between virtual teams • Effective project management / Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

With water scarcity becoming a more critical problem for the world, water disputes and their remediation are increasingly vital for nations today. In regions like the Middle East especially, one would not expect to see cooperation regarding resources looking at the state of affairs going on now. By discussing the Johnston Plan, a mediation process by an envoy of the U.S. between Israel and the Arab League, however, this paper describes how cooperation was achieved between states in the Jordan River basin regarding water usage. An in-depth analysis of cooperation and mediation aid in outlining how Johnston and the U.S. achieved a successful agreement for the region’s water development. Mediation, or third party intervention, is an elusive concept in literature, as it depends on the dimensions related to the conflict’s context, actors and mediator. Looking at the Johnston Plan, however, one discovers that Johnston achieved his de facto success due to the many components related to water disputes, the involved nations and the status of the United States.

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This thesis draws on 34 months of participant observation in a working-class neighborhood of Amman, Jordan to ask whether and how gender, specifically femininity, can serve as a framework for ethical self-cultivation. It describes the relationships between morality, progress, and gender in contemporary Jordan, where progress is viewed as important and inevitable but also amoral, and morality is associated with the past, which is the opposite of progress. Women are uniquely affected by these oppositions because they are expected to both preserve the morality of the past and embody progress, defined as maximizing their own self-interest through consumption, education, employment, and participation in public life. In this confounding context, women must be deliberate about how they choose to define and inhabit proper femininity, and the work of defining and inhabiting demands creative and productive engagement on their part. They respond by participating in a bounded public that not everyone can enter, and by making and maintaining a distinct temporality inside their homes that is distinguished from the temporality of urban life outside the home. They observe and work on their bodies in a complex and highly elaborated way, differentiating intuitive knowledge (authentic) from social knowledge (instrumental) and biological (medicalized), and they approach friendship as an arena for establishing boundaries between oneself and others, and for dealing with the social ramifications of the individualized approach to self-cultivation that is available to them.

In 2010, the Arab Spring started in Tunisia and expanded to other countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East. In Syria, it led to one of the most severe conflicts nowadays which turned into an international struggle with several external actors involved. Whereas most of the European countries, the United States and the Gulf countries oppose the Syrian government, Russia has supported the Assad-regime since the outbreak of the conflict. This present master thesis investigates Russia's role and motivation in the Syrian crisis and the country's support of the current Assad-regime. Due to the current relevance of classical geopolitics in Russia, the author took this approach for the investigation, complemented by some concepts from a current geopolitician. There seems to be evidence that Russian foreign politics is influenced by classical geopolitics and the approach explains, at least in part, the drivers for Russia's Syria policy. The qualitative analysis used primary and secondary sources, such as Foreign Policy Concepts, Security Reports, reports from key conferences, political speeches, letters and statements. The analysis revealed evidence, that Russia's engagement is driven by security issues, channelled by its own domestic terrorist fears. Additionally, the country seems to be aiming for...

After World War II the United States, faced with the new Soviet threat of Communism, instituted the foreign policy known as “containment” in order to mitigate the threat to Western European states of Soviet expansionism. After the fall of Communism in the USSR in 1991 that policy was deemed, at once, a success and an anachronism. The power vacuum that the subsequent abandonment of that policy created was most notable in the Islamic states that had served as proxies in the Cold War against Communism. Both the backdrop of containment as well as the withdrawal of that policy served to lay the foundation for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world as a function of American hegemony after 1991.

The Middle East, as one of the most dynamic and troubling world regions, has a wide range of problems. However, in my view, the essential, if not the most essential, security issue here, is terrorism. It seems that the relative decline of terrorist groups, such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, has made us forget that there are indeed underlying problems that cause the emergence of these deadly organizations. This paper aims to identify these causes by analyzing Saudi and Iranian foreign policy towards U.S.-designated terrorist organizations: Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and Islamic State. In the process, the thesis will establish the general motives of these two states to support and fight terrorism, as well as their means of doing it. Furthermore, it will dive into the specifics of the policies that these two formulate towards every one of the previously stated groups. That will be done in order to prove arguments contending how Riyadh, in many ways, hinders U.S. counterterrorism efforts, while Iranians, contrary to popular belief, contribute to it. Acknowledging that there are many things on which these two states need to improve, the thesis will offer recommendations pointing to the need for Washington to take a more balanced approach to these two countries if it wishes to create a region where its...

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Water shortage is a salient issue in the Middle East commonly overshadowed by more sensational topics such as the oil crisis and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. There is a debate among scholars as to whether water shortages in the Middle East will destabilize the region into armed conflict. Realists argue that non sustainable water sources will be the catalyst which will inevitably lead states to fight one another in a zero-sum game over limited water resources. Liberal Functionalists argue that there are precedents for multilateral cooperation and a technical approach may hold the key to providing solutions to the current water crisis. This research will examine three case studies from the Middle East region: the Jordan River Basin, the Tigris and Euphrates River Basin, and the Disi Aquifer on the border of Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Limited to a specific geographic region, these cases are indicative of water shortages that have or will become potential geostrategic centers for the water crisis.