Hovedopgave. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

Thesis--School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., 1991-92. / Title from title screen (viewed Oct. 28, 2003). "June 1993." Includes bibliographical references.

Many photographs of women published in the Iranian press during the Iran-Iraq War emphasized their roles as supportive and mourning mothers and sisters. By contrast, the often gruesome images that depicted women’s deaths in the war proved more difficult to categorize. The difficulty reflected ambivalence towards attaching the label of shahid, or martyr, to dead women’s images. These photographs, whether gruesomely depicting their bodies or portraits taken prior to death, oscillated between evoking shahadat (martyrdom), consistently applied to men, and depicting their deaths merely as national tragedy. The ambiguous approach to gendered depictions of martyrdom reflected attempts by the Iranian press to negotiate women’s roles during the war in newspaper photographs from the newly-established Islamic Republic. However, in the context of the 2009 Green Movement, Neda Agha-Soltan’s widely viewed death revealed a change in the ambiguity of women’s possible martyr status. In this project, I trace the depictions of women as possible martyrs during the Iran-Iraq War and pose it against the visual experiences during the Green Movement. I argue that while earlier representations reflected tenuousness and ambiguity on the part of Iranian periodicals, such as Ettela’at, Jomhuri-e eslami, and Imposed War, as they sought to grapple with the turmoil of war and a still emergent political system, the Iranian press’s clear denial of female martyrdom during the Green Movement side-by-side with reproductions of Agha-Soltan’s death images reflected a shift in the application of shahid. Although the Iranian press rejected her shahid status, agencies like Fars News attached photographs from Neda’s death video to articles thereby presenting an unclear message about Agha-Soltan’s potential for shahadat. This complicated viewing along with the multitude of examples of her “death” images made her agency in the frame possible, unlike women during the war. Agha-Soltan’s death images presented a possible shift in ownership of shahadat from the state-sponsored press’s hands to that of the people. Thus while the official press had solidified its approach to (not) applying the label of martyr to women, it did so at a moment in which it had lost its monopoly over the declaration and depiction of martyrdom. / text

This thesis considers the transformation of Iranian-Israeli ties following the 1979 Iranian Revolution from a Western-allied relationship to a covert, scandalous relationship, specifically in the context of the Iran-Iraq War. I also look at the Iranian and Israeli narratives and compare the religious, historical, ideological and psycho-political underpinnings that reveal significant similarities between these two superficially diametrically opposed states, and ultimately shaped the complex and misunderstood relationship between the two countries. / text

Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität, Berlin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-248).

Thesis (doctoral) - Freie Universität, Berlin, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-248).

<p dir="ltr">Violent death that violates the ontological dignity of the body and the disappeared corpse often results in a crisis of mourning for those left behind, with the matter made all the more complicated when it comes to instances of politically motivated violence in the context of war. What follows such death/disappearance are issues of identification, collection of remains and, ultimately, an inability to enact necessary death rituals such as washing, shrouding and burial, leading to a separation between the dislocated soul and the corporeal form on part of the dead and the issue of incomplete mourning on part of the bereaved. Both the living and the dead, thus, come to occupy a liminal space (<i>barzakh</i>) where the boundaries between past/present, human/non-human, and dead/alive fall away. This paper argues that this in-between state helps the mourner gain access to a radical state of bearing witness outside of the oppressive binaries of the modern world. This work makes use of Middle Eastern (Iraq, Palestine, Egypt) and South Asian (Kashmir) literatures dealing with dehumanization and violent death in the context of what Achille Mbembe refers to as “death-worlds,” inhabitants of which are deemed “living-dead.”</p>

In 1979, the socio-­political landscape of Iran was transformed beyond recognition. After years of conflict between the Shah and a myriad of political opposition groups, it seemed that the people had indeed triumphed over an authoritarian monarch. As is now widely known, their short lived victory transformed into a systematic programme of terror that turned back on and attacked those that the Islamic Republic deemed contrary to its values. The ‘bloody decade' of the 1980s saw thousands of executions and disappearances under the cloak of the war with neighbouring Iraq. The records of these massacres are still largely unreliable and/or incomplete. The programme of terror in question, that ensued and persists up to the present day, has instigated a sprawling transnational Diaspora with a familiar but rarely divulged public secret. My doctoral thesis comprises two main parts in relation to these events. They are connected by the running theme of alternative narratives of past violence, and a post-­traumatic political activism. This is an intimate ethnography that examines global processes (revolution, Diaspora, transnational activism) from the vantage point of local and particular histories of Lur, former Fadaiyan guerilla fighters in Oslo. In the second part of this work, these histories are located within the collective movement of the Iran Tribunal, a literal attempt to make secrets public and to bring together subjective experiences of violence into a truth-‐telling process. Opening up a new space for critical reflection, this study proposes an alternative lens of analysis of tumultuous historical processes. With regards to their actors, efforts are made to better understand how lives and narratives are ordered around the characteristic disorder of violence, fear and Diaspora itself, and how subjective traumas manifest into collective, and in this case transnational, movements. My ethnography of disordered and interrupted lives works to inform studies of such critical contemporary realities as well as to ethnographically introduce the Iranian Diasporas' public secret of violence for wider anthropological enquiry, and to contribute towards its critical analysis.

How do states perceive threats? Why are material forces sometimes more prominent in shaping threat perception, whereas ideational ones are key in other instances? This study aims to move beyond the task of determining whether material or ideational factors offer a more plausible explanation by arguing that threat perception is a function of the interplay between material factors and state identity, the influence of which can run both ways. Based on ‘analytical eclecticism’, I develop a two-layered conception of security as both physical and ontological, in which the interaction of ideational and material forces can be analysed. Ontological security is intimately connected with identity; its pursuit, therefore, requires distinctiveness and differentiation from the ‘Other’ as well as a coherent and consistent identity narrative at the domestic level. Physical security, on the other hand, involves the identification of threats that constitute a danger to the survival of the state. While ontological and physical security spheres have distinct dynamics and processes, they constitute two interrelated layers. Accordingly, I argue that states can suffer from ontological insecurity while their physical security remains intact, and vice versa. In some instances, physical security and its corresponding material forces condition identity narratives while in other instances the causal arrow points in the other direction. To illustrate these processes, I present a ‘structured, focused’ comparison of Syrian and Saudi threat perceptions during three major wars in the region: the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the 2006 Lebanon War, and the 2009 Gaza War. While providing novel insights for explaining the dynamics of threat perception in the Middle East, this study contributes to the broader IR literature by proposing a conceptual framework that links the literature on Self/Other relations, ontological security, and realism in IR theory. This study thus demonstrates the potential utility of bringing IR theory and the Middle East as an area study into closer dialogue.

[pt] O Golfo Pérsico é responsável por aproximadamente trinta por cento da produção mundial de petróleo e detém mais da metade das reservas petrolíferas mundiais. A concentração geográfica do principal recurso enérgico, que alimenta o atual padrão tecnológico mundial, eleva essa região a um ponto de passagem obrigatório nas opções de geopolítica de todos os países do Sistema Internacional. O Golfo Pérsico é uma região de grande instabilidade política, e em menos de trinta anos, enfrentou três guerras internacionais: nos anos oitenta a Guerra Irã- Iraque, nos anos noventa a Guerra do Golfo e, mais recentemente a Invasão Americana ao Iraque. Tais conflitos foram marcados pelo uso, ou pela ameaça de uso, de armas de destruição em massa, e pelas perdas de um contingente imenso das populações dos países em conflito. Esta dissertação analisa a participação americana nestes três conflitos, tomando como referenciais conceitos de geopolítica, uma vez que a especificidade da região exige a retomada dessa disciplina que anda esquecida nas análises internacionais. A geopolítica procura enfatizar o impacto da geografia sobre a política; desta forma, a presença do petróleo no território do Golfo Pérsico, entendido como o Coração Energético Mundial, vai influir decisivamente nas suas relações com os outros Estados do Sistema Internacional. Este estudo analisa as opções de geopolítica dos EUA para a região durante os três conflitos, uma vez que assegurar o acesso às fontes de suprimento energético do Golfo Pérsico é um interesse nacional vital americano. / [en] The Persian Gulf produces about thirty per cent of the world's oil, while holding more than a half of the world's crude oil reserves. The geographical concentration of the most important energy resource that holds the world's contemporary technological standard, puts this region in a very important place for the geopolitical options for all countries in the International System. However, the Persian Gulf is a political unstable region in the world, in less than thirty years was involved in three international wars: in the eighties The Iran-Iraq War, in the nineties The Gulf War and recently The American Invasion of Iraq. These conflicts were known by the use or by the threat of use weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and by the heavy casualties in the countries involved in the war. This dissertation analyses the American participation in these three conflicts taking as referential geopolitical concepts, once the specificity of the region demands the rebirth of this discipline that was so often forgotten in the international analyses. The geopolitics emphasize the geographical impact over politics, so the oil reserves in the territory of the Persian Gulf, the energy heartland, will influence the relationship with the others States in the International System. This study examines the American geopolitical options for the region, once a secure access to Persian Gulf is America's national vital interest.