Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2005. / Thesis Advisor(s): Maria Rasmussen. Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-74). Also available online.

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited / Since the early 20th century, persons across the Muslim world have attempted to move their society toward a more religious Islamic path. They have attempted to form political parties and participate in elections, only to be marginalized and repressed. Some have reacted violently, carrying out attacks against government officials and other targets. Typically a cycle of violence, repression and political exclusion transpires. Democratic reform is not uncomplicated. Both practical considerations and moral ones demand changes in the policies of both the United States and Egypt. The Egyptian government's electoral engineering and interference does not go unnoticed by the world and undermines the legitimacy of the government to its own citizens and the world community alike. Co-opting moderate Islamists may seem threatening to President Mubarak as well as to Western countries, whose public continues to embrace Orientalist ideas. This study maintains that when moderate Islamists are allowed to participate in politics, they will restrain their stances regarding strict interpretations of Islam, as have the New Islamists in Egypt. The alternative is the status quo, which aside from being immoral in terms of personal liberty is also not workable for those desiring stability in the Middle East. / Major, United States Air Force

The current study is aimed at investigating the puzzle of why FPI (Islamic Defenders' Front) has chosen to adopt violent strategies within the democratic context of Indonesia. Much of literature on social movements suggests that democracy is inherently nonviolent because it allows social movements to use a number of reasonable tactics to pursue their goals. On the contrary, authoritarianism is considered to be the cause of the emergence of violent movements. However, a violent movement is not necessarily absent in the context of democracy. Using the language of Islam, justice and democracy, FPI (Islamic Defender's Front) conspicuously committed at least 64 cases of violent collective actions from 1998 to 2010. Three levels of analysis are used in order to investigate this social puzzle, namely the level of organization, individual characters and FPI's violent actions. Combining these three levels of analysis, this study found that the making of the violent Islamist movement (FPI) is complex and interconnected. First, there are at least four social environments that have led FPI to the adoption of violent means. They are the historical context of Islamist movements in Indonesia (1945-1998), the timing of violence by FPI, social support for FPI's violent actions and low state capacity. Second, there are at least four factors that relate to individuals and organization of FPI. They are FPI's encounter with so-called justified violence, FPI's engagement in violence-prone activities, fundamentalism and FPI's framing of its violent actions. Combining these factors has made FPI's violence become more persistent in the new democratic context of Indonesia. Consequently, despite the fact that democracy inhibits political violence, democracy may also allow the use of violent means by social movements. In doing so, democracy opens an opportunity for people, especially elites, to support the cause of violence. Therefore, this can undermine the government's will to fully suppress the violent movement. In addition, there are other significant factors, other than state repression, that also facilitate violence, such as a movement's choice to engage in violence-prone activities, low state capacity, a good timing of violence (cultural resources) and a good framing of violence.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Will H. Moore, Florida State University, College of Social Sciences, Dept. of Political Science. Title and description from dissertation home page (June 18, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Defense Decision-Making and Planning))--Naval Postgraduate School, Sept. 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Anne Marie Baylouny. Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-105). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

My dissertation examines how mid-nineteenth century Spanish American letrados in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico –considered as exemplary case studies–, interpreted the unending violence present in their nations. They did so, I argue, by resorting to what I term “blood discourses”: overdetermined, shared, contested, and unstable textual and visual discourses, wide in connotations but mainly –not solely– coming from an inherited medical and religious tradition. These blood discourses were a direct response to a concrete reality which belied the promises of the independence process: surrounded by civil and international war, political polarization, and “caudillo” authoritarianism, letrados of varied ideological stances made use of and disputed these inherited, ready-made and ready-at-hand “blood discourses” to endow with meaning the national violence that surrounded them and establish foundational narratives. In doing so, they enacted three interconnected intellectual procedures, which I analyze distinctly, in the invigorated public sphere of the time. These three interconnected procedures or operation, in turn, were buttressed by a hemato-centric conception of rhetoric which guaranteed their efficacy: first, letrados developed “circulatory diagnoses”, assuming the role of the nation’s “physician-letrados”, a procedure which will be examined in Juan Manuel de Rosas’s Argentina; second, they engaged in what I term “work on martyrdom”, the elaboration of genealogical martyrdom narratives, as will be shown by analyzing the case of the Archbishop of Bogotá, Manuel José Mosquera; and finally, building upon the first two operations, they effected a “coagulation of memory” which enabled them, in their role as “historian-genealogists”, to construct a representation of national history based and substantiated by the shedding of blood. This last chapter will focus on the Mexican El libro rojo, a landmark work on the nation’s own representation of history. Through a heterogeneous archive of sources belonging to a wide ideological spectrum –newspapers, essays, novels, historical works, images, even monuments– my dissertation contends that these ubiquitous visual and textual discourses on violence lie at the core, as conditions of possibility, of how Spanish American letrados thought, wrote, and visualized the Nation. Additionally, by bringing together religion, political economy, and historiography, it allows blood discourses to bridge distinct realms of the period’s vast intellectual output. Lastly, by adopting an international, continental perspective, it overcomes the disproportionate presence of “national histories” showcasing instead similitudes and differences but also transferences and influences beyond national boundaries. Throughout the dissertation, the productive influence of philosophers, anthropologists, and historians – foremost among them Gil Anidjar, Reinhardt Koselleck, Adriana Cavarero, William Reddy, Hans Blumenberg, Elaine Scarry, Stephen Bann, and Thomas W. Laqueur– helped me frame my concepts and construct my own interpretative schemes. In short, by having an impact on the disciplines of Intellectual History, Religious Studies, and Nation-building, this dissertation hopes to shed new light on how the visual and textual interpretation of violence is inseparable from, and indeed made possible by, what I take to be “blood discourses” and the three intrinsically related operations they gave rise to.

This thesis examines Hezbollah’s transition from their violent forms of political expression after their founding in 1984, to their involvement in the Lebanese electoral system in 1992. Drawing on the instrumental and organizational approaches for studying group behavior, this thesis examines the external instrumental factors and internal organizational factors that contributed to the political evolution of Hezbollah from an organization focused primarily on violent forms of political expression to an organization that primarily uses the parliamentary process. Examining Hezbollah’s transition and using it as a point of reference, the thesis exposes weaknesses of conventional International Relations analytical approaches to studying terrorist organizations and provides a more objective approach to studying political violence. It argues that the pejorative nature of the term terrorism, combined with problems developing a consensus on defining terrorism, limit the term’s usefulness for academics attempting to objectively examine political violence.

From the early 1990s, and especially since September 11, 2001, numerous scholars, politicians and political analysts alike have characterized terrorism as global, religious, irrational and rising. The theory of the emergence of this "new terrorism" is well established and can be considered as conventional wisdom. The main characteristics of the "old terrorism", its political, local and rational character, are obsolete in accordance with this line of thinking. In particular, Al Qaeda is thought to be an enemy worth changing the National Security Strategy of the United States and even suspending some civil not to mention human rights. However, the decline or disappearance of many prominent terrorist figures or entire groups have been ironically overlooked, or selectively ignored as irrelevant to the "new" terrorism. This thesis challenges the aforementioned common knowledge and suggests that the "new terrorism" has very few if any differences from the "old" one. It remains a purely political, mainly local and definitely rational activity in a steady or declining stage.

This dissertation explores the notion of individual disengagement from political violence in Turkey by reconstructing the lives of 13 'formers' whom I call the Turkish Penitents. Its specific aim is to compare and contrast the experiences of those individuals who left various politically-motivated leftist/revolutionary groups and of those who desisted from an ethnic/separatist organization, the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party). In an effort to provide a more comprehensive understanding, this study focuses on the preceding and aftermath phases of Turkish Penitents' disengagement, i.e., "how and why they took part in violent actions in the first place" and "who they have become after desisting from political violence." There is currently a lack of conceptual framework in order to account for the notion of individual disengagement from political violence, largely due to the dearth of empirical and ethnographic studies on this notion. Therefore, by reconstructing the personal experiences of the Turkish Penitents through oral-history research, and combining methods and theory from political anthropology, criminal justice and political psychology, this study aims to make its largest contribution to the efforts of social theorizing on this relatively unexplored phenomenon.