The history of Turkey since 2002 when it has been governed by Justice and Development Party (JDP) offers an interesting puzzle for the students of regime change. JDP, which has initially been hailed as the champion of democracy, is now criticized for its authoritarian tendencies. The trajectory of JDP creates problems for dominant theoretical perspectives that focuses on deep societal/structural changes or institutional learning. Both views are incompatible with a sudden reversal by the same actors. I argue that conceiving the dominance of the norm “democracy” on a global level as a key determinant enables us to understand both JDP’s transformation to a pro-democratic force in early 2000’s and the subsequent turn to a majoritarian form of democracy by reinterpreting the norms that it deployed earlier to connect to the global normative order. To show the importance of this link, I develop a dialogical discourse analysis that tracks the interaction between narratives produced by the JDP and Western actors.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-132).

This dissertation examines the American project in Iraq between 1991 and 2006. It studies the project's conceptual arc, shifting ontology, discourses, institutions, practices, and technologies in their interrelatedness to constitute a new Iraq. It is an ethnography of a thixotropic regime of law and order in translation; a circuit through various landscapes and temporalities to narrate the 1991 war, the institutionalization of sanctions and inspection regimes, material transformations within the American military, the 2003 war and finally the nation-building processes as a continuous and unitary project. The dissertation makes three central arguments: First, the 2003 war on Iraq was imagined through intricate and fluid spaces and temporalities. Transforming Iraq into a democratic regime has served as a catalyst for transforming the American military organization and the international legal system. Second, this project has reordered the spatialized time of Iraq by the imposition of models in translation, reconfigured and reimagined through a realm of violence. These models have created in Iraq a regime of differential mobility, which was enabled through an ensemble of experts, new institutions and calculative technologies. Third, this ensemble took Iraq as its object of knowledge and change rendering Iraq and Iraqis into a set of abstractions within the three spaces under examination: the space of American military institutions; the space of international legality within the United Nations; and, lastly, the material space of Baghdad. Part one examines the pre-invasion political, military, and legal practices that enabled the 2003 invasion and the so-called nation-building projects that ensued. In the American military space, the dissertation focuses on the 1991 and the 2003 military campaigns and operations and traces both campaigns in Iraq in terms of discourses of spatialization and temporalization to historicize the emergences of the so-called `revolution in military affairs' and its progression to a full-fledged theory of cyber-war renowned as network-centric warfare (NCW). In the UN space, this dissertation studies the forms of sovereignty that emerged through the political, legal, and military processes of the 1990s and early 2000s. The 1991 military campaign; post-1991 deployment of the United Nations' authority in order to establish, as an institution, the sanctions and inspection regimes; the 2003 invasion itself; and, finally, the re-siting of the Iraqi Archive: These events are the work of various technologies of violence and control which led to extensive asymmetrical movements of people and things in and about Iraq resituating the sovereignty of the state not within the territorial borders of Iraq but at the level of the globe. Part two studies the post-invasion regime of law and order imposed by the American occupation, its role in reconfiguring the architectural and social space of Baghdad, the identity of the city's population, and the persistent crisis in which the city was subsumed. The Iraqi legal system was flattened and remade with speed and intensity as a prerequisite for a new democratic Iraq creating a new set of laws to be administered by reorganized government institutions, and a new lexicon of political categories that has divided the city's population and mapped them onto the divided city-scape. In Bagdad's urban space, architectural barriers, empowered by new technologies of surveillance, targeting and identifications, have become a permanent element of the post-invasion system as spatial signifiers of law and order.

Dam construction has increased exponentially over the past century, primarily in temperate environments. While the impacts of dams in temperate regions have been well-documented, a parallel level of research on dam impacts has not been achieved in tropical environments. The overall objective of this research was to understand the hydrologic impacts of dams in Costa Rica, a representative case study in a tropical environment. To achieve this objective, the following specific objectives were developed: 1) examine the spatial and temporal trend of large dam development within the country; 2) assess large-scale hydrologic impacts (at the national scale); 3) analyze downstream flow of individual dams to determine regional impacts. Analysis of the spatial trend of dam development utilized a geographic information system. The spatial distribution showed no apparent relation to hydroclimate, and additional land-use analysis indicated that basins containing large dams are primarily covered by either forest or crop. Assessment of large-scale impacts used potential reservoir storage to represent the hydrologic impact. Results indicate that large dams in Costa Rica are having a relatively low impact on the surface water component of the hydrologic cycle compared to temperate regions. However, this analysis revealed that two dams, Arenal and Sandillal, are having a disproportionately significant impact on their individual basins. Analysis of flow regime for individual dams followed standard hydrologic analyses of comparing pre- and post-dam discharge data. Variables analyzed included mean, minimum, and peak flows. Results of these analyses revealed that the Arenal- Corobic-Sandillal dam project have resulted in severe disruption to downstream hydrology for all three dams. In contrast, downstream of Ventanas Dam changes in downstream discharge were smaller than those documented for dams in temperate regions. The results of this research indicate that dam impacts in the tropics may be very different from those documented in temperate environments. Consequently, theories developed for temperate areas regarding expected dam impacts may not apply to tropical regions. This has important implications for hydrology, geomorphology and ecology. This study should serve as a step toward development of a more generalized theory of dam impacts in the tropics.

Recent explorations of hierarchy in international relations have restricted their domain of inquiry to states as aggregate units. Although this has greatly enhanced our understanding of international politics, we know less about what the implications of hierarchy are for domestic politics in subordinate states. Because of the varieties of domestic political control - including violence - employed by great powers, opening up the black box of subordinate state politics can yield new insights into the operations and limits of international hierarchy. Here I outline a theory of political incentivization and link it to a discussion of foreign-imposed regime change, arguing that great powers stabilize politics in subordinate states directly by bolstering preferred regimes and indirectly by threatening to intervene and remove leaders who challenge the status quo. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duke University, 2007.

Thesis (M.A.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Political Science, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 43-44).

The dissertation deals with the phenomenon of hybrid regimes, specifically applied to the case of Kyrgyzstan. The main emphasis is placed on the 2005 Tulip Revolution and the regime of Kurmanbek Bakiyev installed by this event. Applying the theoretical concepts of hybrid regimes and regime change, the dissertation verifies the hypothesis that Kyrgyzstan's post-2005 political system retained its hybrid character and kept being neither a democracy nor an authoritarian regime. In this light, the Tulip Revolution brought about only a change of the leadership (as usual in coups d'état), not regime change (as might have been ushered by a democratic revolution).

The compressive sensing (CS) framework aims to ease the burden on analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) by exploiting inherent structure in natural and man-made signals. It has been demonstrated that structured signals can be acquired with just a small number of linear measurements, on the order of the signal complexity. In practice, this enables lower sampling rates that can be more easily achieved by current hardware designs. The primary bottleneck that limits ADC sampling rates is quantization, i.e., higher bit-depths impose lower sampling rates. Thus, the decreased sampling rates of CS ADCs accommodate the otherwise limiting quantizer of conventional ADCs. In this thesis, we consider a different approach to CS ADC by shifting towards lower quantizer bit-depths rather than lower sampling rates. We explore the extreme case where each measurement is quantized to just one bit, representing its sign. We develop a new theoretical framework to analyze this extreme case and develop new algorithms for signal reconstruction from such coarsely quantized measurements. The 1-bit CS framework leads us to scenarios where it may be more appropriate to reduce bit-depth instead of sampling rate. We find that there exist two distinct regimes of operation that correspond to high/low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In the measurement compression (MC) regime, a high SNR favors acquiring fewer measurements with more bits per measurement (as in conventional CS); in the quantization compression (QC) regime, a low SNR favors acquiring more measurements with fewer bits per measurement (as in this thesis). A surprise from our analysis and experiments is that in many practical applications it is better to operate in the QC regime, even acquiring as few as 1 bit per measurement. The above philosophy extends further to practical CS ADC system designs. We propose two new CS architectures, one of which takes advantage of the fact that the sampling and quantization operations are performed by two different hardware components. The former can be employed at high rates with minimal costs while the latter cannot. Thus, we develop a system that discretizes in time, performs CS preconditioning techniques, and then quantizes at a low rate.

Šiame magistro baigiamajame darbe nagrinėjama tema „Libijos ginkluoto konflikto (2011 – 2012) tarptautiniai teisiniai aspektai”. Baigiamojo darbo tikslas – įvertinti Libijos ginkluotą konfliktą pagal tarptautinės teisės normas. Pirmajame baigiamojo darbo skyriuje pateikiama Libijos konflikto faktų apžvalga. Analizuojamos Libijos konflikto priežastys bei nurodoma chronologinė įvykių eiga. Išryškinamas Libijos ginkluotųjų pajėgų siekis nuslopinti sukilimą žiauriomis priemonėmis, ypatingą dėmesį skiriant tarptautinės teisės pažeidimams. Antrajame skyriuje apžvelgiami atskiri Libijos konflikto etapai taikytinos teisės aspektu. Libijos konflikto transformacija analizuojama remiantis tarptautinės humanitarinės teisės normomis bei Tarptautinių teismų praktika. Analizės pagrindu pateikiamas atskirų konflikto etapų tarptautinis teisinis vertinimas. Akcentuojama trečiosios šalies intervencija į konfliktą bei šalių teisinio statuso pokyčiai. Trečiajame skyriuje aptariami humanitarinės intervencijos į Libiją probleminiai aspektai. Pateikiamas intervencijos vertinimas pagal Jungtinių Tautų Saugumo Tarybos rezoliucijas. Šiame skyriuje identifikuojamos pagrindinės humanitarinės intervencijos problemos bei nurodomi galimi jų sprendimo būdai. Ketvirtajame skyriuje analizuojami Libijos ginkluoto konflikto šalių padaryti tarptautiniai nusikaltimai. Tarptautiniai nusikaltimai vertinami pagal Tarptautinio baudžiamojo teismo statuto nuostatas. Šiame skyriuje taip pat išryškinamos tarptautinės... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Following master thesis analyses international legal aspects of the armed conflict in Libya (2011 – 2012). The goal of the graduation paper is to evaluate Libyan armed conflict in terms of international law. In the first chapter, the timeline of Libyan armed conflict is discussed. The main roots of conflict and the chronological events are also included into this chapter. Libyan armed conflict legal analysis emphasizes the suppression of the rebellion. The most important issue is stressed to be the violations of international law. Second chapter overviews the multifaceted progression of the Libyan armed conflict. The transformation of Libyan armed conflict is estimated according to international humanitarian law and case law. The applicability of international law norms is also the subject of this chapter. The third states intervention into existing armed conflict is prerequisite for the legal status changes of the parties. In the third chapter the main issues of humanitarian intervention are discussed. According to the legal analyses of the United Nations resolutions, the main problems of humanitarian intervention in Libya are identified and suggestions are presented. In the fourth chapter international crimes committed by parties are overviewed. International crimes committed by parties are estimated according to the Rome Statute of International Criminal Court. International criminal responsibility issues are also included into this chapter. The main sources, used in the... [to full text]