Through the analysis of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey with Islamist roots, this dissertation examines the relationship between “moderation” of religious political parties, i.e. moving towards programmatic positions compatible with liberal democracy and their ongoing mobilization practices. Based on data collected through fieldwork conducted in Turkey over 22 months, from September 2006 through June 2008, this study argues that the transformation of the Islamist party into a mass based center-right party in Turkey was possible to the extent that the AKP pursued “moderation” not only at the external level by moving towards a more accommodative stance vis-à-vis the other political actors and the regime, but also at the intra-party and grassroots levels. This transformation entailed re-drawing the boundaries between religion and politics through efforts to forge a “conservative democratic” party identity within the mass organizational network it has inherited from its predecessors and to develop multiple modes of linkages between the party and mass base moving away from religious mobilization, reconciling the principles of secularism, nationalism and liberal economic policies with its constituents religious sensibilities. AKP’s effort in developing a more inclusive and representative party involved structural transformation through new recruitment patterns, constructing a new party genealogy and diffusing a new symbolic and discursive structure through training and other intra-party activities as well as through the everyday practices of the local party units and municipalities. By continuing to rely on the diffuse Islamic networks for filling the important party positions, the AKP sought to retain its Islamic credentials while shedding Islamic insignia (except for the women’s headscarves), ending gender segregation, incorporating more women into the party’s administrative cadres. At the local level, through its grassroots organizing structure, the AKP has been able to continue to carry on its strong social embeddedness. The AKP’s base units working with the local municipality run by the party communicated the AKP government’s policy positions that dramatically differed from its predecessors without Islamic justification, but instead worked as a liaison between the state and the local constituency, delivering constituency-service effectively through its social service provision and cultural activities.

<p> This dissertation examines how transnationalism can affect Islamists&rsquo; moderation in both Egypt and Morocco. In this dissertation, I do an in-depth comparative case study analysis to assess the prospects of moderation of two Islamists political entities, the Muslim Brotherhood as a transnational social movement and the Morocco Party of Justice and Development (JDP), which has no transnational ties. Both the Muslim Brotherhood and PJD came to power after the Arab uprising in 2011 and were key players in the democratic transitions in both countries; however, the entities are not related. Further, the dissertation will explore the moderation level of the Muslim Brotherhood and PJD. Current literature on Islamists and moderation theory focuses on political inclusion, political learning and repression as factors that would affect the moderation of an Islamist group. Looking at Islamists as a transnational social movement is a new aspect in the study of Islamism. Recently, scholars have addressed the transnational aspect of Islamist social movements; however, these studies focused on radical Islamist groups such as Al Qaeda. To date, there has been no study to assess how transnationalism can affect the moderation level of Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. This dissertation attempts to fill that gap by assessing the moderation level of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco. Furthermore, extant studies have ignored transnational <i> identity</i> in conceptualizing &ldquo;Trans<i><u>national </u></i>ism&rdquo;. My dissertation corrects this gap by bringing this new element into consideration. In addition, most of the research conducted on the Muslim Brotherhood stops at 2012. My dissertation gives in-depth examination of the development of events up until February, 2015.</p>

<p> What explains variation over time in how states treat &ldquo;non-core groups&rdquo;? What are the reasons for co-opting, accommodating, or politically excluding them? Drawing on insights in ethnic politics and international relations, a recent body of literature claims that interstate relations and foreign policy ought to drive state decision making toward externally linked groups. Yet, I observe outcomes that suggest that when regimes perceive a higher threat to internal regime security than they do to their territorial borders, domestic politics is more important in driving regime decision making toward such groups. In such situations, even if non-core groups are supported by unfriendly external powers, I argue that regimes decide to accommodate, accommodate and co-opt, or politically exclude such groups based on their location in the architecture of the opposition&mdash;the numerical strength and diversity of identities in the opposition that threaten the regime in power. The causal mechanism for this relationship is the perception of proximate threats to regime security from political opposition, with larger, crosscutting oppositional configurations posing a bigger threat than smaller, homogenous opposition. I also argue that regimes prefer non-core groups to &ldquo;stay in their lane&rdquo;, that is, that they remain narrowly political in regards to pursuing goods from the state related to their identity.</p><p> This dissertation employs an in-depth, single case study of one group in the same country over time, testing the finding in a secondary country using a most similar systems approach. The case of Kuwait&rsquo;s treatment of its Shi&lsquo;a from 1963 through 2011 serves as the in-depth case study, and uses data gathered from seventy interviews during half a year of fieldwork in Kuwait City in 2013, in addition to documents from the British National Archives and Arabic media. I also briefly compare outcomes in policies toward the Shi&lsquo;a to policies toward the stateless residents and expatriates. Insights from the Kuwaiti case are tested on the secondary case of Bahrain to explain regime treatment of the Shi&lsquo;a from 1973 through 2011. I also suggest that the theory may be extrapolated to explain the variation in recent relations between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the non-core Kurds in Turkey. The findings crack open the black box of ethnic politics in semi-authoritarian regimes, helping to explain variation&mdash;and some counter-intuitive co-optation&mdash;in cases in which we might expect more exclusion in general.</p>

<p> The diplomatic impasse between the United States and Iran is officially broken after thirty-four years of mutual recriminations and mistrust. The need for a reinvigorated U.S. public diplomacy is essential to forge a new relationship based on respect, understanding, and shared political, social, and economic interests. "Gangnam Style" public diplomacy is a simultaneous multiplatform approach to information sharing and engagement that utilizes various programs to stimulate people-to-people connections based on culture, education, and business. By applying this strategy, the current rapprochement between the United States and Iran can be expanded to the benefit of both countries.</p>

<p> In the last decade, theorists in anthropology and other disciplines have vigorously critiqued commonplace distinctions between secularism and religion. Highlighting how secularism is a form of Western epistemology, such theorists have argued this distinction is deeply problematic because it obscures secularism&rsquo;s historical, political, and cultural particularity. </p><p> My dissertation argues Iran is well situated to engage in this debate because its political terrain brings into relief how discussions of secularity and religiosity often fall back on an irresolvable dichotomy wherein secularism is defended without qualification or religious authoritarianism is ignored altogether. In an effort to move out of this impasse, my dissertation critiques the presumed neutrality of secularism without defending a thoroughly undemocratic Islamic Republic.</p><p> Through an examination of three sites within Iranian politics since 1979, I show how alternatives to both secularism and undemocratic forms of Islam are already present in Iran. The first site that I explore is the contemporary Iranian women&rsquo;s movement, specifically the One Million Signatures Campaign, which seeks full gender equality within the laws of the Islamic Republic. I argue that the internal logic of rights and a specific set of socio-political conditions that arose out of the revolution in 1979 made the newly fostered cooperation between Islamic and secular feminists within this campaign possible. Utilizing critiques of rights by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminists, I arrive at a critical endorsement of women&rsquo;s rights in Iran that calls for nurturing more radical political imaginaries by not treating rights jurisprudence as the apex of social justice struggles.</p><p> My second site focuses on the politics of time and its role in the 2009 post-election uprising as a further example of the porous boundary between secularism and religion in Iran. After surveying the history of Iran&rsquo;s three dominant calendars and the forty-day mourning cycle of Shi&rsquo;ite Islam in the last century, I argue the Islamic Republic is founded on temporal simultaneity, a non-secular organization of time wherein past, present, and future are enfolded into one dynamic moment. I conclude that during the 2009 uprising, protesters initiated a crisis of legitimacy for the regime by reconfiguring temporal markers that comprise this symbolic foundation of the contemporary Iranian state.</p><p> My final site is the visual culture in the Islamic Republic as well as Western understandings and depictions of it. I argue such analyses of artistic production in Iran by Western observers rely on a particular understanding of the state, religion, and art as discrete categories wholly separate from one another. This argument is twofold, the first part of which is a historical survey that shows how the relationship between art and the state in Iran over the last sixty years has been co-constitutive. On the basis of this history, I then explore contemporary Iranian street art, both sanctioned and illicit, to show how this convergence of art and the state has continued to unfold in the Islamic Republic. I show how the boundaries between culture and the state have not calcified under the current regime but remain dynamically in flux, albeit different ways than in the previous historical epoch.</p><p> Lastly, I trace how the politics of secularism and religion both consolidates and frays the public/private divide within these three sites. Given this fact, the question of what to do with secularism and religion in Iran is ultimately a question of what to do about the divide between the private and public spheres. Taking up the issue of the double-bind structuring the public/private divide, I conclude my dissertation by surveying the ethical-politico limitations and possibilities of these alternative political imaginaries in Iran.</p>

<p> This dissertation analyses how a youth-led, technologically driven social movement led a collective political struggle for change in Egypt that revolved around the legitimacy of the existing system and demanded rights to expression and participation. It seeks to understand the political impact of new ICTs, namely blogs and networked social media, in authoritarian contexts through the use of Egypt as a case study and by employing new methods of ethnographic inquiry that link the online and the off-line in recognition that they are mutually constituted. </p><p> I propose that focusing on the micropolitics of practices and discourse, with due consideration of structural and institutional dynamics, reveals how epistemological and ontological changes take place when a distributional shift in the primary modes of communication occurs, and thus helps us better understand how ICTs are implicated in processes of political change. </p><p> I argue that Egypt's young cyberactivists, and particularly citizen journalists, radically shifted the informational status quo by witnessing, putting on record and imbuing political meaning to symbolic struggles to define quotidian struggles against social injustice, harassment and censorship as part of a broader movement for political reform. A central contention in this dissertation, therefore, is that blogging and social media reconfigure the potentiality for expression and participation, but that it is the particular concatenations of technologically-inflected repertoires of contention that transform potentiality into actuality. This analysis reveals the mechanisms by which the potentiality of the Internet and social media is transformed into concrete instantiations of political struggle through activism, news making practices, and collective action. Throughout the dissertation I analyze specific episodes of contention to explain how ICTs facilitated collective identity formation, organization, mobilization and advocacy, with far fewer organizational and logistical barriers, rendering the dynamics of contentious politics in this case distinctive from other revolutionary periods. This new youth movement created innovative repertoires of contention, which they developed and adapted very quickly, constrained less by structural factors such as economics and distance, which the properties of ICTs help overcome, than they would have been in the past. </p><p> I argue that it is not sufficient to explore only moments of collective action, because this does not explain how the "maker of claims" came to identify themselves as such, nor how they build consensus around their claims. This is of particular interest in the new communications environment of the post-millennial period, and therefore I also focus on the phenomenological lifeworlds of these cyberactivists to show how networked social media gave opposition and subaltern groups, such as liberal secularists or the Muslim Brotherhood, new tools for individual and collective identity creation and enabled freedom of expression and opinion. </p><p> The empirical focus of the article is Egypt but I argue that the mechanisms and dynamics identified have a much wider domain of application. I propose several new mechanisms including <i>asabiyah</i>, <i>ijma' </i>, and <i>isnad</i> to explain movement dynamics and to account for the technological aspect of cyberactivists' repertoires of contention, and propose revising the concept of amplification and certification to account for the fact that the algorithmic properties of ICTs now play a role in contentious repertoires.</p>

<p> This study is an examination of how ethnicity and religion affect political behavior of Kurds of Turkey. Despite the presence of some predisposing factors (violent conflict, high ethnic polarization, and significant population size), a substantial portion of Kurds prefer non-ethnic political parties (specifically the ruling Islamist party, the Justice and Development Party) to the pro-Kurdish political parties that have struggled for certain ethnic political and cultural rights. This dissertation systematically and comparatively investigates the ethnicity-based demands (political and cultural) and ethnic identity perceptions of the Kurds who subscribe to either ethnic or non-ethnic political parties. To this end, I have developed a model based on a significant conceptual distinction, derived from the relevant literature, between ethnic category and ethnic group. I demonstrate that membership in the Kurdish ethnic category does not necessarily imply membership in the Kurdish ethnic groups constructed and led by Kurdish political entrepreneurs. More specifically, my argument in this study is two-fold: First, while Kurds generally support ethnic cultural demands, they differ significantly in terms of their political demands. That is, while the overwhelming majority of those who support the pro-Kurdish political parties constitute the Kurdish ethnic groups by sharing the political demands raised by their ethnic entrepreneurs, the majority of those who support non-ethnic political parties do not support these political demands. Second, I argue that there are two forms of Kurdish ethnic identity perception in relation to Islam: secular and non-secular/religious. The Kurds who support the pro-Kurdish political parties as ethnic political groups are more likely to adopt a secular form of Kurdish identity that has been constructed and promoted by the Kurdish political elites, while those Kurds who support the ruling Islamist party (JDP/AKP) are more likely to display a non-secular form of Kurdish identity. </p><p>

<p> Libya is a country in transition. By the official start date of the transition process on October 23, 2011, Libya was essentially devoid of the institutional capacities required to operate a functioning state in the traditional Weberian sense. The weak central state Qadhafi left behind has led some observers to anticipate the transition to democracy doomed, but this factor has in some sense facilitated a clearer break away from authoritarianism. Freedom from engrained institutional constraints has in many respects allowed Libya the unique opportunity to state-build from a tabula rasa; there are no preconceptions as to how that democratic state should be or the sequencing and methods it should employ to achieve it. It is precisely the combination of high uncertainty in the democratic experiment with institutional deficiencies at the state level that require flexibility in the manner in which the new Libya is to be created and its transition assessed. Taking into consideration its institutional weakness and the steps that the country's transitional bodies have taken thus far toward establishing a post-Qadhafi state, is Libya on a trajectory towards a successful transition to democracy? Is democracy even possible?</p>

<p> This framing analysis was conducted to study how <i> Time</i> portrayed Iran and Iranians during the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 and the Green Movement uprising of 2009. In this study, particular attention was given to how the magazine framed the leaders of Iran and their opposition during these times, as well as to any correlation between <i> Time</i>'s portrayal and the United States government's positions on these events. The analysis shows that magazine adhered to the United States' strong defense of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ("the Shah"), providing frames that depicted him as the only capable leader in Iran. <i>Time</i> framed the Islamic Revolution as violent, anti-modern, and lacking legitimate grievance, which also correlated with the U.S. government's position. Conversely, the latter period's data showed that <i>Time</i> used negative frames to discuss the Islamic Republic of Iran, depicting the administration as paranoid and out of touch with reality. The uprising of the Green Movement, which threatened the Islamic Republic's stability, received positive frames from <i>Time </i>. The frames on the Green Movement supported the White House's position on Iran, as in the earlier period. This study's findings demonstrate the U.S. media's conformity to official government frames on international events, specifically those depicting Iran.</p>

<p> The human rights industry today generates and organizes knowledge about the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iranians. The cultural archive it produces has been used to advance the global North's geopolitical interests and the accumulation of capital and power that leads to human rights abuses in the first place. Use of the human rights framework as a political strategy among Iranian&ndash;Americans and other allies acting from across geographic, political, economic, religious and other boundaries is therefore risky. The dangers it introduces should be examined alongside its tactical uses.</p><p> This dissertation presents a close analysis of certain observables that make visible "human rights" discourse or activity related to the Islamic Republic of Iran today. It presents an examination of a series of texts that give "human rights" its shape: from academic and journalistic accounts to online data aggregators, film, social media, and related policies. It traces its use by competing actors: from activists and politicians to business leaders and academics. In so doing, the dissertation reveals important political, emotional, intellectual, and socio-economic contestations that arise through use of the human rights framework.</p><p> The dissertation sheds light on the motivations and methods of entities that take up the human rights framework as a political strategy. It narrates the relations between observables, revealing the architecture of a human rights "industry" that consumes and produces knowledge about Iranians and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In so doing, this dissertation reveals the vulnerability of the human rights discourse and activities to other projects and finds that the human rights industry motors a form of (neo)Orientalism that should be interrupted if the network of actors around the world that are set up to address violations of "human rights" are to be effective at helping to maintain or uphold the dignity and freedom of Iranians in a sustainable way.</p>