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Nicholas Adams (1993) suggests that the destruction of the built environment and architecture of a city during war is an effective way of demoralizing and even eradicating the enemy. Goonewardena and Kipfer (2007) suggest that the built environment helps establish not only the common shared spaces in which individuals live their lives, but a sense of place and community identity. When buildings and public spaces are anthropomorphized, their destruction affects every aspect of a community. Urbicide as a tactic of urban warfare has changed the look and feel of many places such as the Balkans, Germany in World War II, and The Gaza Strip. The many faces of war have changed the landscape and homogeneity of the areas affected. Long-term, continual bombardment, precision attacks, and incursions by armies have in many cases all but destroyed the pre-existing physical environment. In its stead, is created a non-permanent built environment on the verge of destruction or change by non-civil forces. This investigation uses The Gaza Strip as a case study and looks into the impermanence of the built environment. The continual violence of change has greatly affected the resident Palestinian population. I will also examine how the temporary nature of the built environment and constant threats of change and destruction have affected everyday spaces. Although the population understands the potentially transitory nature of the structures, this does not deter them from rebuilding, when materials are available. Using data obtained from different nongovernmental organisations and aid agencies, this paper examines how repeated bombardment, precision attacks, and incursions reconfigure space, buildings and the functionality of the built environment in The Gaza Strip. Changes in the form and functionality are conceptualized as continuous processes that produce constant rounds of rebuilding. The shape and composition of the built environment is evaluated after specific bombardments, attacks and incursions in order to assess the extent and form of rebuilding. The results show that each round of destruction is followed by differing degrees of reconstruction that again restructure the look of the built environment. / Geography

In the aftermath of recent major events in the Muslim world, the Sunni Muslim jurists, hereafter referred to as the “ʿulamā’,” turn to the classic Muslim tradition in search of answers to questions arising from these events. After the Arab Spring and the 2013 military coup in Egypt and the ensuing revolt of the youth, influential ʿulamā’ deferred to authoritative rulings which declare that the “Ḥākim al-Mutaghallib” (the Usurper Leader) is to be obeyed. However, those ʿulamā’ ignore the difference between the early context in which these rulings emerged and developed and the context in which the modern state employs them today. The ‘ulamā’ treat these rulings as regularized, binding decrees that must be followed by all Muslims – neglecting the fact that they have always been uncertain, controversial rulings. Thus, this paper attempts to compare the two contexts, the classical and the modern state context, to illustrate the problems encountered in the recalling of these rulings. Moreover, it traces the circumstances in which the rulings emerged and how they were legitimized and regularized over the course of Muslim history. This paper attempts to demonstrate that these classical rulings are not immutable and applicable in all times and in all places, as they were developed in response to particular events and in a relatively narrow context. Rather, the rulings should be revisited and reevaluated for applicability in the current time and context. / Religion

<p>Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between Black Americans and Palestinians. I trace the historical relationship between Black Americans and Israel/Palestine in order to show how Black Americans move from large, overwhelming support for Israel to solidarity with Palestine and the Palestinian people. This thesis tracks the relationship between Black Americans and Jews (both domestically and abroad), Black leaders who opposed the state of Israel prior to 1967, the large shift in Black American support for Palestine that occurs after the Six Day War of 1967, the relationship between Black Americans and Arab Americans, and the current day Ferguson to Palestine movement.

This thesis develops a potential strategy for carrying out humanitarian intervention in Syria using the legal justification and policy framework of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine.

<p> The purpose of this descriptive and comparative study was to identify Information and Technology Communication (ICT) tools used by Saudi faculty and United States faculty, and to investigate relationships between their perceptions of ICT applications and ICT use. A questionnaire was sent to 292 Saudi faculty from six Saudi universities and 253 US faculty from five universities. The questionnaire gathered information about the use of and attitudes toward ICT applications. Results found that 65% of the United States faculty taught part or all of a course online as compared to only 26% of Saudi faculty. Saudi faculty used Social Media applications significantly more often than US faculty. Saudi faculty also reported using Google Documents, Photos and Website links significantly more often than US faculty while US faculty used podcasts and text documents significantly more often. Results from a path analysis of the relationships between ICT attitudes and actual ICT use based on Davis' (1993) TAM framework found that for Saudi faculty, system was the only variable significantly related to actual ICT Use. Ease of Use was significantly related to Perceived Value while Perceived Value was significantly related to Attitude Toward ICT Use. For US faculty, again, system was the only variable to have a significant relationship with Actual ICT use. Perceived Value was found to have a significant effect on Attitude Toward Use of ICT tools. The larger relationship between system use and actual ICT tool use for US faculty suggests that they had more access thus more experience using ICT tools than Saudi faculty. In addition, differences in attitudes toward ICT between Saudi and US faculty may be due Saudi faculty's primary use of social media and email applications as compared to US faculty's use a variety of more complex ICT applications including Audio. Overall results from this study suggest that Saudi faculty would benefit from training in the use of a variety of ICT application in addition to social media and email within the context of Learning Management Systems while US faculty would benefit from training in the use of social media applications as an instructional tool.</p>

<p> Online business in Saudi Arabia is almost certain to grow because a large proportion of the population is younger than 25, tech perceptive, and global in their perspectives toward product buying in their everyday lives. The purpose of this research was to suggest leadership theories, tactics, and techniques that Saudi Arabian business owners can utilize to pursue online business strategies of growth and success today and in the future. An online instrument surveyed 142 Saudi Arabian citizens to identify factors affecting online business in Saudi Arabia and to identify the necessary skill sets a leader must have to lead an online business in Saudi Arabia. An important limitation of this study was that the history of Saudi Arabian online business was difficult to research and find. Another limitation is that clarifying problems in the Saudi Arabian social, economic, legal, and political environments were a very sensitive, touchy undertaking for certain facts and information. After getting the approval from this study's committee and getting approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Pepperdine University, findings from 142 participants (Saudi Arabian citizens) who took the online survey were analyzed, and based on these findings, the researcher generated implications and recommendations. Some of the findings were that the majority of the respondents preferred responding in Arabic. Most of the respondents were male (75.4%). Only a small percentage was younger than 21 and older than 50. The majority were people with bachelor's and master's degrees. Business owners accounted only 44.4% of the total number of respondents. The growth of online business was attributed to passage of time and likelihood of young people using more online services. The respondents thought that the government did not provide enough infrastructure support for online businesses. According to the findings, the most important leadership traits a leader must have to lead an online business in Saudi Arabia are honesty and integrity.</p>

<p>This project examines narrative encounters in space identified as “harem,” produced by authors with biographical ties to the vanguard of the American Suffrage Movement. I regard these feminists’ circulations East, to the domestic space of the Other, as a hitherto unstudied, yet critical component of transnationalism in the history of U.S. Suffrage. This literary record also crucially reveals the extent to which sentimentality was plotted as a potential force for the reform of other cultures. An urge to sympathize denied in the space of the harem illustrates the colonial anxieties that subtended sentimentality’s prospective deployment beyond national borders. In five chapters on the work of Anna Leonowens, Susan Elston Wallace, Demetra Vaka Brown, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton, I examine how Suffrage-minded authors writing the harem strategically abandon an activist praxis of fellow feeling. Such a reluctance to transform sentimental literature into a colonial literature consequently informs that genre’s postbellum decline. The sentiments that run dry for American feminists in the harem additionally foreground the costly failures of Wilsonian Idealism, a doctrine that appropriated a discourse of sentimentality in order to script the United States’ expanded involvement in global affairs.</p> / Dissertation