Thesis advisor: Ali Kadivar / Determining the empirical causes of recruitment to nationalist militant organizations is a pertinent topic, given the global rise in neo-nationalist attitudes. In this article, I seek to explore one prospective cause through a case study of the Kurds in Iran. The Kurdish population within Iran has witnessed rising levels of insurgency into militant nationalist organizations. These organizations routinely conduct armed operations against Iranian forces in historically Kurdish regions within Iran, with the goal of reclaiming territory and halting perceived inequitable treatment of the Kurdish minority by the Iranian government. My research intends to explore the root causes of this rise in violence and whether historical political mobilization within Kurdish-dominated regions of Iran has resulted in the increased Kurdish insurgency efforts. I employ an original database and three models to test the relationship between an area's mobilization history and its subsequent insurgency recruitment levels. Ultimately, my results point to contextual variables as the driving factor behind insurgency recruitment compared to the aforementioned historical variables. My research provides a foundation for future exploration into the historical causes of Kurdish insurgency in Iran. A more sophisticated approach to data collection may generate a wider pool of data from which further analysis may be conducted. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Sociology.

This ethnography of interreligious dialogue in Rome is concerned with how interfaith encounters and social transformation are dialectically constructed and enacted. The network of Roman interfaith organizations is placed in a Durkheimian framework as a moral community with distinct rituals and sacred objects, referred to as the "interfaith society." The interfaith society described here is distinctly shaped by its location in Rome: the neighboring Vatican, engrained cultural Catholicism, and-through global migratory patterns distinct to the late 20th century-the inundation of non-Catholic religions into Italy. This research analyzed the differences that exist between elite institutional events and informal grassroots (di base) gatherings, noting the way third sector nonprofits form a "hinge" between the two. In-depth examination of the publishing cooperative and program office Confronti shows the evolution of Catholic ecumenical efforts into today's interfaith society. It also shows the value of creative dialogue as a form of interfaith engagement. This exploration is based upon interviews with 52 participants across these settings, participant-observation of interfaith practices, and interviews with 17 Romans who do not practice dialogue. Interfaith encounters and interviews with 25 dialoguers in Israel and Palestine illustrate the difference geographical and sociopolitical context can make in the practice of dialogue, and demonstrate that dialogue is framed in both settings as a method to disrupt historical patterns of stereotyping and objectification. This study finds that interfaith dialogue can best be understood by examining its processes and asking what they mean for participants, rather than looking for "metrics." Encounters across religious difference are found to require intention, leadership, and repetition in order to establish a "safe haven." Participants speak of their goals in terms of "humanizing" the other and striving for "mutual recognition." Each of these discursive goals is explored through the narrative data gathered. They are found to be best understood not by measurement of their "success," but as shared sacred values that bind together the interfaith society. The repeated, communal invocation of these sacred values signifies to the members of the community that they belong to the collective, solidifying also awareness of who is not in their group.

Opened in 2008, the Lebanon Mountain Trail (LMT) links Lebanon’s North to its South through 470 km of paths and a network of Muslim, Druze, and Christian homestays. Although similar heritage trails exist elsewhere the world, the LMT runs through a landscape fractured by sectarian division and scarred by war. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019 that included walking alongside Lebanese and international hikers over the trail’s 1,100+ km length, this dissertation explores how the practice of long-distance hiking creates and mediates feelings of national and cultural belonging– feelings of territorial, social and national attachment – under fraught circumstances. This research found that Lebanese hikers developed a new and heightened sense of belonging to Lebanon as nation and to regions of the country where they had previously felt unwelcome. These attachments were produced by bonding experiences along the trail that created a shared ritual frame in which hikers perceived Lebanon as if it were unified and acted as if sectarian differences were not a divisive category. By walking the trail together, hikers constructed and inhabited their own fleeting dreams of Lebanon as they would have wished it to be. They imbued this as if Lebanon with a variety of different personalized meanings, ones that enabled hikers to resolve ambiguities in their own lives. For most participants, these attachments were time delimited and could only be sustained by returning to the dream worlds they enacted on the trail through repeated trekking. For others the experience was so profound that they incorporated elements of the experience into their everyday live. While this research adds to the existing literature on the study of trekking and trails as engines for cultivating belonging, it breaks new ground by examining how this occurs in landscapes where evidence of past wars is ever present and sectarian divisions still unresolved. The ability of the LMT to produce such attachments for Lebanese hikers complicates our understanding of the relationship between walkers and the landscapes they encounter, giving the cultural landscape as much significance as the natural landscape.

This dissertation explores the changing organization of work in the transnational humanitarian aid sector. I specifically examine aid localization: a sector-wide strategy to increase the role of local labor in humanitarian aid projects. What does the aid sector’s localization look like in practice? What are the effects of localization on local labor? To answer these questions, I conducted a qualitative study of aid operations in Jordan, a major global aid hub. I find that localization creates a particular structure of work in which tasks, resources, and expectations are formally and informally organized and premised upon particular meanings associated with ‘the local’ as a category. This structure subsequently creates new forms of precarious labor and challenging work conditions for national employees under the framing of humanitarian aid, and also shapes how workers make sense of their own positions within the aid labor hierarchy. These effects are indicative of the tensions and contradictions embedded in conceptualizations of ‘the local’ in the aid sector. It is these tensions and ambiguities that subsequently become sources of productivity for aid employers: a space to generate new forms and relations of work that ensure successful project outcomes. I subsequently contend that localization ruptures and reinscribes Global North-Global South inequalities through ambivalent constructions of who local workers are, and how they should and can provide value to their organizations. / 2028-11-30

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Limited research has been done on adult immigrants with disabilities in Canada. Adopting a mixed-methodology, the thesis explores the intersection of immigrant status and disability from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Previous research on immigrants with disabilities has primarily focused on parents with disabled children. Little is therefore known about the lived experiences of adult immigrant with disabilities and how these experiences are negotiated and can change across time and place. The quantitative section of the thesis utilized the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS) from 2006 to examine the receipt of and need for services based on gender, immigrant status, income, education, and age. Quantitative results identified that immigrant women as receiving the least amount of services compared to any group, potentially resulting in them being more vulnerable compared to any other group. The qualitative part of the research consisted of two studies. First, community leaders and disability activists from Middle Eastern and South Asian communities were interviewed to examine the understandings of disability within their communities. Building on key informant findings, the second part explored the lived experiences of physically disabled adult immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia through in-depth interviews. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative results it was identified that place, gender, culture, and policy significantly influence the lived experiences of immigrants with disabilities. Overall, the research highlighted the need for further research on larger service organizations and their provision of services to immigrants. The findings also identified the need for a greater understanding and provision of culturally appropriate services. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Limited research has been done on adult immigrants with disabilities in Canada. Adopting a mixed-methodology, the thesis explores the intersection of immigrant status and disability from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Quantitative methods examine and compare the receipt and need of support services between immigrants and the Canadian born population with disabilities. Building on the quantitative findings, the qualitative research adopts a feminist disability theory and an intersectional framework to explore the lived experience of immigrants with physical disabilities from the Middle East and South Asia, living in Canada. The qualitative chapter examines how different categories, for example disability, gender culture, religion, and immigrant status can intersect to create unique lived experiences that changes over time and place. The quantitative and qualitative findings were evaluated to further the knowledge of immigrants with disabilities and future research directions are suggested.

No / The tensions and pressures that mothers experience when they have to make decisions about combining the care of children with entry into the labour market are by now well established. Much of the research in this area, however, has focused on Europe or North America. In this article, the focus is on a society where women's employment and its relationship to childcare has seldom been explored: Iran. Iran has often been presented as a state that is not particularly women-friendly and as distinctly different from the seemingly more pluralistic and egalitarian states of Western Europe. The argument here is that mothers' employment in Iran should not be viewed through cliches of religion and patriarchy, rather that it is significantly affected, as in other countries, by care structures, the general acceptance of leaving one's children to a caregiver, the availability of employment opportunities and the general policy environment.

This thesis examines how Saudi Arabia responds to threats posed to its dynastic survival with specific emphasis on the current threat posed by Islamism. Saudi Arabia needs both religious legitimacy and state security in order to ensure the stability and continuity of the Kingdom. These needs produce a recurrent tension within the Saudi foreign policy framework because they pull in opposing directions. These tensions become particularly acute when the Kingdom is faced with a grave threat to either its religious legitimacy or its state security. Two cases studies are used to illustrate the Saudi Arabian response to threat. The Pan-Arab movement of the 1950s and 1960s threatened Saudi Arabia's religious legitimacy, and the 1991 Kuwait War threatened Saudi Arabia's state security. The Kingdom was able to endure these threats by balancing the resulting tensions. Historically, Saudi Arabia has only had to manage one type of threat at a time; however, Islamism represents an unprecedented threat because it simultaneously endangers Saudi Arabia's state security and religious legitimacy and to a greater degree than past threats. Islamism is qualitatively more intense because it combines dimensions that had previously been separate and manageable by the Kingdom. This thesis argues that since Islamism is confining the space for political maneuverability, Saudi Arabia faces its most serious threat to stable continuity--a danger which might undermine the Kingdom if a change to threat response is not made. / Master of Arts