This dissertation evaluates the applicability of Elinor Ostrom's theory of the commons to other forms of collective action by mapping it on a case study of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia and its efforts to overcome the vast disparities that have long structured the global coffee commodity chain (the "Coffee Paradox"). The conclusions I draw are the following. While Ostrom's theory has serious omissions, it also sheds much needed light on the struggles of Ethiopia's coffee farmers to overcome their poverty. Both the design principles that Ostrom identifies for governance rules and her list of predictors for successful common property resource management institutions suggest that Ethiopia's coffee cooperatives could be in peril. However, by expanding Ostrom's governance framework to incorporate a broader enabling role for governments as well as supportive roles for civic organizations, NGOs, and social movements, we see greater potential for the success of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union.

In binyan hitpa'el, the reflexive and reciprocal verbal conjugation in Modern Hebrew, the /t/ of the /hit-/ prefix categorically metathesizes with a following sibilant (/s/, /z/, /∫/, or /t⁀s/), giving forms like [histakel] instead of expected forms like *[hitsakel]. It has been theorized that this metathesis may be perceptual, serving to place the /-t-/ in prevocalic position where it can be better perceived by listeners, the direction of metathesis being the more common sibilant + stop sequence in Modern Hebrew (Hume 2004), or that it may be auditory, based on a tendency for the sibilant noise to decouple from the rest of the speech stream, resulting in listener confusion about the place of the sibilant within the word (Blevins & Garrett 2004). Based on data from a speech perception experiment using English speakers, who listened to masked stimuli similar to hitpa'el verbs, I argue that Blevins & Garrett (2004)'s account is correct, with English speaking listeners evincing a tendency to misperceive stop + sibilant sequences as sibilant + stop sequences, despite the higher frequency of stop + sibilant sequences in English.

This dissertation examines women's representations in the Algerian print media. Different methods were used to explore these representations: a questionnaire-based survey, in-depth interviews and a content analysis of data collected from press clippings published between 1996--2006, a period which witnessed major social and political upheavals that impacted women as well as the media. The research was based on hypotheses from the literature on the topic, notably that the media ignore and trivialize women. This study concludes that sexist terms, meanings and processes and sexist assumptions concerning gender roles are pervasive. Masculine generics---exclusionary of women---are dominant. Sexism is not always intended as journalists consider the use of masculine generics normative. Women are also invisible both as objects of news and as news sources This study revealed that sexism in the media and its power in shaping attitudes and views about women continue to elude media professionals. More than half of all respondents disagreed with survey statements related to sexism in the media. This study shows that sexist content is more common in the Arabophone press. But, ironically, the number of Arabophone journalists who disagreed with statements about sexism in the media is higher than the number of Francophone journalists. As a whole, media representations project a patriarchal model of ideal womanhood. Women are portrayed in reductionist restrictive roles and overrepresented as 'helpless victims'. In contrast, women's social and political struggles for full citizenship rights are often overlooked if not ridiculed. While these representations reflect the power structure in society, their repeated playing out 'naturalizes' unequal power relations. Very few journalists challenge dominant representations as ideological positions. The media redeploy the slogans of groups competing for power which made of women their primary battleground. Even the more liberal Francophone press affirms elements of the hegemonic discourse. The oppositional discourse of the women's movement does not pose a significant threat to the dominant discourse because of the differential of power and widespread antagonism against feminism. Part of the Arabophone press adopted the anti-legal reform arguments used by the nationalists against the 1959 French reform and resurrected by the Islamists to suggest that reform efforts were a neo-colonial attack on national identity. These arguments resonate with part of the public because the language of feminism was used in the attack on the Algerian identity and culture. The study shows that journalists are unaware of the involvement of language in setting subject identities, and power relations and of the role they play in passing down and reinforcing the dominant gender ideology. The stronger presence of women in newsrooms has not significantly changed media content with respect to approaches to news stories on 'women's issues'. Women have internalized the masculine-privileging ethos of the newsroom and see the male definition of news as professional practice. Journalists are wary of gender issues and consider that they have other priorities such as fighting for better social and professional conditions, legal protection from government interference and public access to the media. Women who tend to be dominated in the private as well as in the public realm are not seen as being part of 'the public'. A stronger partnership between all those interested in a better future for Algeria can enhance efforts to raise awareness among journalists about gender issues and transform the media from a tool in the hands of the powerful to a tool that enlightens the public and provide citizens with the opportunity to engage in democratic public debate about important issues, including those related to gender. This study is a contribution to these efforts and to the emerging scholarship on gender in the Arab region / acase@tulane.edu

Under what conditions do Islamists accept the principles of democracy and perceive democracy as "the only game in town"? Current literature which emphasizes institutions, political learning and repression fail to give a satisfying answer to this question. This thesis argues that it is important to study the internal divisions within the Islamist movements and the balance of power among them if we are to understand why and when they embrace ideological moderation. Along these lines, I suggest that factors which disturb the balance of power to the favor of the moderate Islamists are critical to understand the causes of moderation. The support that different factions garner from the constituency is a determining factor in the course of political Islam. This support for moderates or hardliners in return depends on the interests of different groups that make up the Islamist coalition. Studying the empirical puzzle posed by the experiences of Turkish and Egyptian Islamists I argue that economic reform programs in these countries redefine the interests of the components of the Islamist coalition while redistributing power among them. As a result of this process a devout bourgeoisie ready to ally with the moderates emerge in Turkey while lower middle classes with ideological dispositions dominate the Islamist constituency in Egypt and support the hardliners. That is why Turkish Islamists succeeded in carrying out a large-scale moderation which led to the marginalization of the radicals while their Egyptian counterparts failed and became marginalized themselves.

Turkey's most controversial religious figure is the Muslim cleric and author Fethullah Gülen, whose followers have established around one thousand schools in 135 countries. Since 2003, the Gülen-affiliated educational non-profit TÜRKÇEDER has organized the International Turkish Olympiad, a competition for children enrolled in the Gülen schools. The showpiece of this event is its song contest, in which students perform well-known Turkish songs before live audiences of thousands in cities all over Turkey and reach millions more via television broadcasts and the Internet. While the contest resembles American Idol in its focus on individual singers and Eurovision in its nationalistic overtones, the fact that the singers are performing songs associated with a nationality not their own raises intriguing questions about the intended message of the competition as well as about its publics. To answer these questions, I analyzed YouTube videos of the competition and examined YouTube comments, popular websites, and newspaper opinion columns. I conclude that the performers themselves are meant to feel an affinity with Turkish culture and values, while Turkish audiences receive a demonstration that Gülen's brand of Islam is compatible with Turkish nationalism. Moreover, the competition reaches a multiplicity of publics both within and beyond Turkey. While some of these can be characterized as essentially oppositional counterpublics, I find that, in the case of the Turkish Olympiad, the dichotomy between rational public and emotional or irrational counterpublic established collectively by such theorists of publics as Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner begins to break down.

Rābi'a al-'Adawiyya and Dhū'n-Nūn are among the founding saints in the Ṣūfītradition; however, these figures are more legend than fact. Their narratives in Western scholarship have been constructed from numerous sources, a process which has stripped them of their original contexts. This work addresses this issue by examining these characters' stories in the context of three of the major works containing collections of their stories: Sulamī's Dhikr and Ṭabaqāt, Qushayrī's Risala, and 'Aṭṭār's Tadhkirat, in order to see which themes the original compilers of these stories emphasized. This approach will demonstrate that these authors were primarily focused on two issues in these works: the role of gender in the practitioner's relationship with God, and the problem of how to discuss advanced states along the Ṣūfīpath such that they do not distract novice Ṣūfīs lacking the spiritual maturity to handle these stages. Recontextualizing these stories in this way opens the door to further questions regarding the way that Western scholars approach the stories of other Ṣūfīsaints and the history of early Sufism as a whole.

The cultural productions of Katherine Anne Porter, Anita Brenner, Tina Modotti, Maria Izquierdo, and Juanita Guccione represent a distinctive interweaving of gender and class consciousness, national identification and political resistance, as represented in their artistic work. These five women became transnational carriers of a radical realist and modernist thought, culture, and ideology that became transported through their art when their gendered and classed bodies were left otherwise silenced and boundaried. These women, their cultural productions, and the ways in which their art generates a counter discourse to the dominant and institutionalized conceptions of transculturalism, aesthetics, and re-production, are vital to understanding the co-construction of nationhood as well as the self-determined creation of the individual self. From this overarching framework, I will explore how these women negotiated political conceptions of nationhood, artistic genres such as realism and modernism, and then created their own feminist, transcultural and working-class aesthetics to counter otherwise limited conceptions of individual agency.

No description available.

The political economic pressures of development contribute to unsustainable environmental practices in developing countries, and marginalize civil society participation. This dissertation looks at the following countries where policymakers are faced with strong incentives to foster rapid economic growth. In Jamaica, the bauxite industry demands mining rights in sensitive mountainous ecosystems. In Mexico, the tourist industry demands access to construct in vulnerable coastal environments in the southeast. In inland Mexico, unregulated agriculture threatens ecosystems in the Yucatán Peninsula. Finally, tourist and energy industries in Egypt demand access for infrastructure in sensitive ecosystems in the Red Sea region. In all of the cases, the preferences of these sectors threaten to displace local communities, while creating unsustainable pressures on the environment. At the same time, the projected revenues from these sectors justify continued environmental exploitation. In response, transnational networks of environmental advocates and epistemic communities mobilized throughout the 1990s, lobbying the Global Environment Facility for conservationist projects in each country, and then lobbying governments to effectively implement the projects. This research finds that three conditions were necessary for transnational networks to influence policies associated with project implementation. First, networks must generate an internal scientific agreement on the dimensions of the environmental problem. By doing so, they can delegitimate competing arguments, strengthening their own claims. Second, networks must build social ties with policymakers in powerful agencies. Social ties increase the likelihood that policymakers will adopt the norms of the network. Third, networks must reframe the discourse on environmental management. At present, policymakers and industry argue that environmental management should be assessed by its contribution to economic development, validating only those policies that lead to sustained revenue generation. By reframing environmental management as an issue impacting the wellbeing of domestic populations, networks can argue for the greater participation of actors marginalized by the dominance of privileged productive sectors in resource management. Moreover, by linking sustainable resource use to the interests of domestic populations, networks can generate political capital to oppose the most unsustainable environmental practices. This research thus builds on the epistemic communities approach by highlighting the importance of democracy in knowledge-building and environmental governance.

This project takes popular organizations in mid-twentieth century Lebanon as its focus. These socio-political groupings were organized at the grassroots, made up of young men, and included scout organizations, social justice movements, student clubs and workers' associations. Employing a cultural history approach, the dissertation examines the cultural productions of these types of groups, ranging from group anthems to uniforms, letters of the rank and file to speeches of leaders. With these primary sources, it captures the cultures that took shape around five main actors in the field of street politics: the Lebanese Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Kata'ib Party, the Najjadeh Party and the Progressive Socialist Party. And as these groups condoned and committed acts of sectarian violence in the 1958 War and the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, this dissertation also investigates the distinct cultures that formed around these groups during wartime. In the end, I argue that both inside and outside of moments of conflict, popular organizations cultivate and mobilize multiple, interactive identities to make sense of their actions, sectarian or otherwise. Moreover, I find that a critical site to explore these complex processes is their routine practices grounded in duty, strength and honor. Part I of the dissertation examines identity formation within these five groups, and the physical and symbolic spaces they produced in Beirut during the 1920s-1950s. Informed by Pierre Bourdieu's theories on social life, this historical background shows how organizational attempts to project uniqueness, win over recruits, and make partisan, often sectarian, claims over the whole Lebanese nation created boundaries between these groups. Also, the lives of individuals within these groups, regardless of the group's distinct vision for Lebanon, were colored by cultures of discipline and defense, working to normalize practices linked to violence. In Part II the dissertation takes up the two historical events of social mobilization and conflict in which these groups participated: the 1958 War (where the Kata'ib, once a nationalist scout group, serves as the focus for the investment in sectarianism) and the Two-Year War of 1975-1976 (where the Lebanese National Movement - specifically the Lebanese Communist Party, once a workers' association, and the Progressive Socialist Party, once a social justice movement - serve as the focus for the investment in anti-sectarian frames). First, through investigating the changing positions of these popular organizations throughout these two wars, the dissertation argues that these groups are active agents in producing sectarian violence, adding nuance to past characterizations of conflict in Lebanon. Second, by capturing the quite seamless shift towards practices of violence, it finds that the quotidian and routine also lay at the center of violence. Finally, by analyzing the textual and visual productions of these groups leading up to and during war, the dissertation finds that multiple and interacting identities, such as national, populist (i.e., fulfilling the needs of people and winning their support in a particular locality) and sect are mobilized to perform violence. Accordingly, sectarian violence, as it emerged in the mid-twentieth century, is sectarian because these groups defined it in sectarian (and antisectarian) terms, not because the violence was rooted in immutable sectarian differences. Collectively, “Winning Lebanon: Popular Organizations, Street Politics and the Emergence of Sectarian Violence in the Mid-Twentieth Century” seeks to bring the local level and the cultural into the study of conflict, and add nuance to the understanding of sectarianism and sectarian violence in Lebanon and the broader Middle East.