Thesis (S.T.L.)--Catholic University of America, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-125).

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This is a study of democratization in Egypt through the lens of labor organization in the period following the fall of Hosni Mubarak. As a vehicle for collective action that is perpendicular to the Islamist-secular divide, labor organization produced cross-cutting cleavages that transcended intractable identity-based divisions. The suspension of prior constraints on political mobilization opened up spaces for the construction of autonomous working class organizations. An important subset of democratization theory has emphasized the role of working class organizations and political conflict over resource allocation in the institutionalization of democratic orders. The double-negative of the non-emergence of an autonomous organization of the working class and the failure of democratic transition in Egypt steers this study away from a macro-level assessment of the impact of labor autonomy on democratization towards an expository account of the forms of political action undertaken in the pursuit of political autonomy. Taking the assembly of political actors as projects, I examine how various groups sought to mobilize available resources in those projects. In consecutive chapters I consider the impact of available tools, and gravitational constraints of economic legacies, institutional vestiges, the media environment and the legal apparatus on the failures and success of these efforts. What remains of these projects should impact future efforts to construct autonomous political actors, which in this study are defined as political subjects capable of a destructive withdrawal from alliances, the credible threat of which institutionalizes the vulnerability of a governing regime.

Under what conditions do rebel organizations control territory during civil war? How do civilians influence the distribution of territorial control? Why do rebels invest in governance, and why do they target civilians with violence, in some locations but not others? This dissertation advances a political accountability theory to explain how civilians influence the distribution of territorial control and governance during civil war. Existing research explaining variation in rebel territorial control and behavior have emphasized structural and organizational factors, identity politics, economic conditions, and geography. However, the classic insurgency literature and recent counterinsurgency doctrine emphasize the importance of securing civilian support and protecting the population to achieving military objectives in civil war. If true, civilians retain at least some power over rebel personnel. The accountability theory of rebel conduct provides a unified framework linking inter-related conflict processes associated with rebel groups’ territorial control, governance, and strategic use of violence during civil war. It argues that community collective action capacity, the ease with which communities facilitate collective action to pursue common interests, influences the distribution territorial control and belligerent conduct during civil war. The empirical strategy draws upon complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to test the accountability against plausible alternatives using village-level data from the communist insurgency in the Philippines. The results provide robust support for the accountability theory over plausible alternatives, and yield policy implications for peace-building and economic development in conflict-affected states.

This dissertation traces the emergence of a State-sponsored revolutionary culture in Mexico during the late 1920s and early 1930s through an eminently literary corpus of works. The analysis opens by highlighting the role played by literature in the formation of a politically and culturally homogeneous national identity in the years that followed the Revolution. An identity that was politically construed by the nationalist discourse of the Revolution, socially imagined as rural and peasant, and culturally characterized by machismo, secularism, and political unawareness. In this way, the dissertation argues that the consolidation of a national identity and political hegemony in those terms entailed the removal of marginal subjectivities and spaces: like the urban space of Mexico City and its inhabitants, the villista revolutionaries, the Cristero rebels and communist militants from the body politic because those subjectivities problematized the horizontality of Mexican identity, a process I call the Excisions from the National. In order to problematize these Excisions, I examine the representation of some of those marginal subjectivities and antagonistic identitary positions namely those found in key works of urban revolutionary, Villista, Cristero, and communist literatures. The dissertation traces how these subjectivities challenged revolutionary culture’s narrative of identity and of the nation itself and them moves on to construe what I call the Sutures of the National, a term I have coined to designate the manner in which these marginal subjectivities were later reincorporated to the body politic of the nation in a neutralized way once the revolutionary regime had stabilized during the 1940s and 50s. My analysis concludes by examining how the process of re-incorporating these subjectivities into the symbolic order of national identity led to certain unintended paradoxical binarisms of Mexican culture.

The focus of this paper will be revolutions as a Third World phenomena. It will try to analyse what are the conditions and challenges faced by Third World states; and what are the functions that those states perform, or fail to perform. In other words, what are the conditions likely to lead to a revolution within Third World nation-states? / Of course, every Third World state possesses its particular circumstances and, therefore, different factors will influence the occurrence of a revolution in each case. It would be presumptuous of me to attempt to address all of these issues which have been raised. My task is indeed more modest. Since it is very unlikely to elaborate a single theory that will fit all cases, this paper will rather consider a theoretical framework and assess its applicability and its explanatory potential of one Third World revolution, the Nicaraguan revolution. / What this paper will also do is to examine what happens when a successful revolution has taken place. How is the new regime constructed? How is the power of the revolutionary government employed? Can we assess the relative success of a revolution? / The use of a single case study, Nicaragua, can be explained by the richness of this particular example. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This research examines the revolution of 2010 in Tunisia due to the paucity of empirical research on the subject and to resolve analytical problems that plague research on similar events. The research is based in both the cultural turn in social movement research and the state constructionist theory of revolutions. The methodology employed is a case study which combines a content analysis of an Al Jazeera news program called Al Hassad Al Maghrebi with data from two public opinion surveys conducted in Tunisia shortly after the revolution, and pre-existing academic research. The findings indicate that Al Jazeera did play a role in increasing mobilization against the Ben Ali regime by broadcasting the spread of protests and regime concessions. This was facilitated by the censorship practices of the Ben Ali regime which caused a popular news channel like Al Jazeera to rely purely on opposition sources for its broadcasts.

Akademisk avhandling--Stockholm. / Extra t.p., with thesis statement, inserted. Bibliography: p. [198]-203.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1994. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 782-816).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-162). Also available on the Internet.