<p>Jeddah, the second largest city in Saudi Arabia, is located on the west coast of the Red Sea in the Hijaz region. Lying between the two holy mosques, Makkah and Madinah, Jeddah is a more liberal and open-minded city compared to the rest of the conservative Sunni Islamic country. As the only stop along the religious tour with easy access by plane and car, Jeddah and its culture, food, architecture, and lifestyle have been greatly impacted due to the trade route and the religious tourism. Importantly, Al- Balad, the historic city center of Jeddah, is architecturally significant, housing numerous traditional Hijazi homes. With the discovery of oil, local attitudes changed and devalued the culture and the history. And these traditional structures took on a precarious position in the developing city: swimming against the current of Western aesthetics, stereotypes, and political influence, the traditional Hijazi home fell out of fashion, and many structures were left neglected. Due to these changing dynamics and the architectural changes it wrought, this doctoral dissertation endeavors to the architecture of the traditional homes of Al-Balad by investigating the complex interaction of cultural identity and space. </p><p> In analyzing the architectural details of these residential spaces, deciphering the meaning behind the aesthetics and construction of each architectural element, and considering women&rsquo;s agency and readings about their traditional lifestyles, religion, and beliefs, this work reveals the hidden gender dynamics within the home, dynamics that are too often ignored or misunderstood, particularly in the West. I argue that the traditional Hijazi home stands as proof of an empowered Saudi woman&mdash;but empowered according to a different definition of empowerment, one that challenges Western gender constructs and, instead, incorporates the unique social, religious, and historical context of Jeddah specifically and Saudi Arabia more broadly. Moreover, this dissertation offers a model and methodology for documenting the historic structures in the Hijazi region and promotes the appreciation Saudi culture and history. It fills a gap in current preservation practices for the nation; it aims to provide a foundation for architectural preservation curriculum for schools across Saudi Arabia; it offers a template for documentation practices in order to support, preserve, and understand the history and design of the 19th century Hijazi domestic architecture. </p><p> There is a valid need for this work. Currently, a poor archival system, a dearth of literature analyzing Saudi residential architecture, and restrictions and regulations imposed by the Saudi government have led to unique challenges. If this dissertation at times seems to avoid politically charged questions, especially within the context of feminist politics, it does so out of respect to Saudi authorities. Despite such challenges, this dissertation, by returning to Jeddah and deciphering and recording what&rsquo;s left of its traditional, historic buildings, hopes to initiate a more extensive and unified archiving system and more robust scholarship before an important aspect of Saudi history is lost. </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> The world is becoming more interdependent. Governments and diplomats negotiate across cultures every day. Some argue that negotiators are professionals and share the common diplomatic culture, therefore their cultural backgrounds are irrelevant to international negotiation and in result culture has no significant influence on the process. The author argues that culture does matter and it could influence the different negotiation elements: individuals, process, and outcome &mdash; the larger the cultural gap between the parties, the larger the cultural influence. To substantiate his argument, the author uses a case-study analysis of the Jordanian-Israeli peace negotiation that led to the 1994 peace treaty. The author conducted eight semi-structured interviews with negotiators from the two countries who actively participated in the negotiation &mdash; including the heads of the two delegations. From this work, the author concludes that culture in the Jordanian-Israeli negotiation was manifested, and influenced the negotiators, the process, and the outcome in six different ways &mdash; culture was an enabler.</p>

This thesis examines the work of the missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the rise of a Protestant community in Ottoman Syria, from the commencement of the missionary station at Beirut in 1823, to the dissolution of the community in 1860. The primary goals of this thesis are to investigate the history of this missionary encounter and the culture of the new community. This analysis is guided by the theoretical framework of Practice Theory and employs gender as a lens to explore the development of the Protestant identity. It argues that the Protestant community in Ottoman Syria emerged within the expanding port-city of Beirut and was situated within both the American and Ottoman historical contexts. The social structures that defined this community reflect the centrality of the ABCFM missionaries within the community and reveals a latent hierarchy based upon racial difference. However, tensions within the community and subversions to the missionaries’ definition of Protestantism persisted throughout the period under review, which eventually led to the fragmentation of the community in 1860. The contribution of this thesis lies in its investigation onto the activities of women and their delineation of Protestant womanhood and motherhood, as an important manifestation of Protestant culture. This work demonstrates the centrality of women to the development of the Protestant community in Ottoman Syria and reveals the complex interpersonal relationships that defined this missionary encounter.

China has become an increasingly important economic, and more recently, political force in the Middle East. Coupled with the perceived reduction in American power, this has caused Middle East states closely tied to the US to hedge in response to increased strategic ambiguity. Their strategies are characterized by simultaneous attempts to capture the economic and political gains of cooperation with China, while minimizing the risk of a continued dependence for their security on a US perceived to be disengaging from the region. This has resulted in a self-reinforcing regional dynamic of ambiguity that has incentivized these states to draw closer to China and thereby increase Chinese influence in the region. To test this theory, this paper examines the case of Saudi Arabia before discussing the effects of this strategy on the region’s dynamics. Hedging can create a self- fulfilling prophecy that reduces the power of the established hegemon, increases the power of a rising state, and increases the probability of a new systemic structure emerging.

<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>

Book Summary: This work is the fourth Small Wars Journal anthology focusing on radical Sunni Islamic terrorists and insurgent groups. It covers this professional journals writings for 2016 and is a compliment to the earlier Global Radical Islamist Insurgency anthologies that were produced as Vol. I: 2007-2011 (published in 2015) and Vol. II: 2012-2014 (published in 2016) and Jihadi Terrorism, Insurgency, and the Islamic State spanning 2015 (published in 2017). This anthology, which offers well over 900 pages of focused analysis, follows the same general conceptual breakdown as the earlier works and is divided into two major thematic sectionsone focusing on Al Qaeda and Islamic state activities in 2016 and the other focusing on US-Allied policies and counterinsurgent strategies.

Book Summary: This work is the fourth Small Wars Journal anthology focusing on radical Sunni Islamic terrorists and insurgent groups. It covers this professional journals writings for 2016 and is a compliment to the earlier Global Radical Islamist Insurgency anthologies that were produced as Vol. I: 2007-2011 (published in 2015) and Vol. II: 2012-2014 (published in 2016) and Jihadi Terrorism, Insurgency, and the Islamic State spanning 2015 (published in 2017). This anthology, which offers well over 900 pages of focused analysis, follows the same general conceptual breakdown as the earlier works and is divided into two major thematic sectionsone focusing on Al Qaeda and Islamic state activities in 2016 and the other focusing on US-Allied policies and counterinsurgent strategies.

Book Summary: This work is the fourth Small Wars Journal anthology focusing on radical Sunni Islamic terrorists and insurgent groups. It covers this professional journals writings for 2016 and is a compliment to the earlier Global Radical Islamist Insurgency anthologies that were produced as Vol. I: 2007-2011 (published in 2015) and Vol. II: 2012-2014 (published in 2016) and Jihadi Terrorism, Insurgency, and the Islamic State spanning 2015 (published in 2017). This anthology, which offers well over 900 pages of focused analysis, follows the same general conceptual breakdown as the earlier works and is divided into two major thematic sectionsone focusing on Al Qaeda and Islamic state activities in 2016 and the other focusing on US-Allied policies and counterinsurgent strategies.

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