Thesis (M.S. in International Resource Planning and Management) Naval Postgraduate School, June 1997. / Thesis advisors, Maria Moyano, roger E. Evered. Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-196). Also available online.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Middle East, South Asia, Sub-Saharan))--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2010. / Thesis Advisor(s): Kapur, S. Paul ; Khan, Feroz Hassan. "March 2010." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 21, 2010. Author(s) subject terms: Baloch, Baluch, Balochi, Baluchi, Balochistan, Baluchistan, Pakistan, Islamabad, Insurgency, Afghanistan, India. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-86). Also available in print.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.S. in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy)--Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2006. / "25 May 2006." Electronic version of original print document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-72).

Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2006. / "June 2006." AD-A451 756. Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-59). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S. in Joint Campaign Planning and Strategy)--Joint Forces Staff College, Joint Advanced Warfighting School, 2007. / Title from report documentation page; viewed on July 9, 2007. Electronic version of original print document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-72).

Thesis (M.A. in National Security Affairs)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2007. / Title from title screen (viewed Feb. 19, 2008). Thesis Advisor(s): Looney, Robert. "September 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-83). Also available in print.

Large scale destruction and surfeit chaos that accompany civil wars have provided a platform to several insurgencies operating in the setting to compete in a struggle for increased power and territorial occupation against their depraved regimes and each other. It is during this power struggle that several insurgencies make a jump from a purely nationalistic agenda of the civil war to a larger religious goal by complying with jihadist organisations thriving in the region. Although the topic of civil war and religious radicalisation has been on the international agenda as well as the academic community for many years now, proselytizing and hijacking of national agenda of insurgencies by religious extremists is also of growing concern. Thus, this research will seek to find if jihadisation of insurgencies is a direct consequence of civil wars by using the Afghanistan and the Syrian Civil wars as case studies. The approach adopted here is to dwell into the factors behind the adoption of jihadist ideologies by insurgencies in war zones. These factors would then be applied to both the case studies. The paper will incorporate insights from previous qualitative studies conducted on geo-referenced terror, the role of religion, and ideologies in civil wars in the aforementioned countries to arrive at the...

Thesis advisor: Peter Krause / How do insurgent organizations form their strategies? Existing scholarship focuses on either strategic effectiveness or the exogenous conditions that produce specific strategies; there is significantly less work on how insurgents select between strategies or how those choices iterate into strategic change over time. The theory of insurgent organizational culture posits strategic preferences are produced by organizational culture. A significant body of scholarship analyzes the effect of organizational culture on state militaries and private businesses, but there has not yet been a systematic treatment of organizational culture’s effect on non-state militant organizations, i.e., insurgents. These organizations exist in a state of uncertainty, and their search for information is a powerful driving factor in the formation and evolution of their strategy. But there are a multitude of sources an organization can pull information from. Insurgent organizations differ in how they prioritize these different sources of information and how easily they are moved to change tact by new information; respectively, their embeddedness and reactivity. These two variable qualities comprise constitute insurgent organizational culture, which determines how insurgents convert information into strategy and strategic change. I use the Palestinian National Movement to develop this theory and weigh it against alternative explanations, comparing the organizational culture of Fatah, the PFLP, and Hamas. Analysis of primary sources and original interviews with key figures in Palestinian politics demonstrates these three organizations vary significantly in their organizational culture, leading to radically different approaches to strategy even under similar conditions and pursuing similar goals. Insurgent organizational culture theory shows that insurgent strategy is produced in an iterative process of rational updating rooted in organizational culture’s different prioritization of information and impetus for action under uncertainty; in so doing, it can explain variation in insurgent strategy more precisely than purely rationalist theories. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

The purpose of this thesis is to present some theoretical elements used in a comparative research that studies two guerrilla groups. The contexts of study, Angola and Colombia, in long internal conflicts during the second half of the twentieth century, witnessed the apparition of two guerrilla groups: the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional/National Army of Liberation, 1963) and the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola/Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, 1956). The goal is to provide an interpretation of the rise, transformations and uses of specific forms of historical representations. In the form of discourses and practices, the ELN and the MPLA constituted historical representations with the purpose of building new political imaginaries, in whose analysis it is possible to explain features such as the structures of power, knowledge and language, how they are constantly changing, and how guerrillas gain legitimacy within a society by using ideological paradigms. For instance, the research suggests that internal crises in the MPLA and the ELN promoted the change from a national liberation discourse, towards a more explicit use of Marxist-Leninist ideological principles. Also, such transformations are associated with the persistence of social distinctions—ethnolinguistic in Angola; rural/urban in Colombia— and their reflection in embryonic institutions that by the middle of the 1970s where supposed to constitute a revolutionary New Society in both Angola and Colombia. In a paradox, the embryonic institutions created by revolutionary groups let infer that they assume the role of a New Establishment because the deployment of power implies mechanism of control, coercion and discipline, rituals, ceremonies, practices and discourses that create truth, law, and language. / Master of Arts