This dissertation explores the role played by Kurdish theatre in the Kurdish national struggle in Iraq especially between 1975 and 1991. First, it traces the development of Kurdish theatre, within the socio-political context in Iraqi Kurdistan, from its emergence in the 1920s to the defeat of the Kurdish nationalist movement and the fall of the Kurdistan region under the direct Baath rule in 1975. It will then explore the Kurdish resistance theatre during the Baath rule and will analyse the representation of Kurdish nationalist identity in four dramas produced during the Baath rule between 1975 and 1991. By analysing the nationalist themes in the works of Ehmed Salar and Telet Saman, two prominent playwrights and directors of the late 1970s and the duration of the 1980s, I will argue that despite strict censorship during most of this period, theatre played a critical role in the Kurdish national struggle by staging Kurdish history, mythology, folklore, and re-enacting oppressed histories. Along with the thematic analysis of representative dramatic texts from the period and interviews with Kurdish theatre artists, this research draws on Kurdish theatre histories, historical documents, and journalistic accounts, to reveal how theatre participated in the Kurdish national struggle and how it responded to political changes in different historical periods.

This dissertation considers corruption and education in Iraqi Kurdistan. The sample comes from survey interviews conducted at nineteen universities in the three Kurdistan cities of Duhok, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. The survey was administered between May and July of 2017. The survey focuses on couple areas: students’ basic demographic information as well as characteristics associated with their personal education such as GPA and field of study; perceptions regarding the quality of education in Kurdistan, not only at the university level but in an individual’s schooling at lower levels; the quality of the Iraqi Kurdistan government, including the prevalence of different types of corruption; and students’ expectations for their future prospects, including their expectation of receiving a high ranking government job. 957 surveys were completed. In Chapter 1, we consider corruption in Iraqi Kurdistan from university students perspectives. We provide three sets of results. The first shows how perceptions of corruption differ across different demographic characteristics. A second set looks at how corruption differs based on one’s city. A final set of results considers how perceptions of corruption differ across political parties. Our results suggest that corruption perceptions do not vary across most individual characteristics as few strong associations are uncovered. Family income is an exception with higher income families reporting greater incidences of corruption. Students, however, living in different cities do report different levels of corruption. One possibility is that corruption is more prevalent in Duhok and so attention at diminishing corruption should focus there. We also find that students not belonging to any political party report lower levels of corruption. Chapter 2, we examine associations between corruption and measures of educational quality but take a different approach than do others in this literature. I use a sample of university students and examine how their views of corruption within society relate to their perceptions of the quality of education they have received. The quality of education (QEDUC) measure is constructed similarly to the quality of education component of the human capital index from World Economic Forum (2013). The quality of education has five criteria: internet access in schools, quality of the education system in meeting the needs of a competitive economy; quality of primary schools; quality of math and science education; and administrative quality of schools. I use this index since it encompasses a wide variety of characteristics of the education system. We found that Internet access is strongly associated with corruption. The other aspect of educational quality most strongly associated with corruption is the extent to which education prepares one for a competitive economy. Although students do not generally associate corruption with specific components of their education like math or primary school, they do believe that corruption is impacting how well they educational system is preparing them beyond their days as students. Finally, in chapter 3, we consider to what extent self-reported political affiliation matters for expectations of university students in Iraqi Kurdistan anticipating public sector employment. The sample data was gathered from students I interviewed at nineteen universities in the Kurdish cities of Duhok, Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. The survey was administered between May and July of 2017.The survey focuses on four areas: students’ basic demographic information as well as characteristics associated with their personal education such as GPA and field of study; perceptions regarding the quality of education in Kurdistan, not only at the university level but in an individual’s schooling at lower levels; the quality of the Iraqi Kurdistan government, including the prevalence of different types of corruption; and students’ expectations for their future prospects, including their expectation of receiving a high ranking government job. 957 surveys were completed. We find that party affiliation appears to influence one’s expectation of obtaining a good government job after graduating. As long as party affiliation does not correlate with attributes that increase productivity in public employment, then party affiliation is a characteristic not based on merit. the specific party to which one is affiliated does not seem to matter as much. The PDK is the largest party in the KRI but students in smaller parties such as the PKK are more likely to believe that they will find good public-sector jobs (although less can be said about members of the Goran Party). Nevertheless, we hope that these findings provide at least a first approach as to what extent party affiliation could matter in hiring.

My final project for the D.M.A. in composition consists of a Requiem Mass honoring the victims of the Iraqi war, a conflict that has stirred public debate since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is not meant as a political statement; rather, it is intended as a tribute in the broadest sense--not only for the combatants who lost their lives, but also for the innocent citizens caught in the cross-fire, all the families left in grief, and the returning soldiers whose lives were altered if not shattered by the experience of war. It speaks to the devastating toll war has on society in general. The Requiem lasts approximately 56 minutes. Except for the Sanctus, the seven movements of the work are all performed contiguously. It is scored for mixed chorus; SSAATBB, a solo, coloratura soprano, solo tenor and orchestra (3333 2431, 2 harps, percussion and strings). Mass for a Time of War reflects a broad array of stylistic impulses from the medieval through the present day, all the while transcending the boundaries of the various musical gestures and resources. These influences include: Schoenberg's signature hexachord pair (012569) (013478), the tone row from Webern's Op. 21 Symphony (1928), Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question (1906), Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles (1966), Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time (1941), Franz Liszt's Via Crucis (LW J33) and the Kyrie from Haydn's Mass in C major, Paukenmesse (Hob. XXII: 9). Techniques of contrafactum, serialism, including a section of total serialization as well as an aleatoric passage, are of structural importance in the work. Several new compositional methods developed for the Credo include the use of a matrix multiplier on rhythmic and tone rows to produce a new row--albeit a tonal one--and a procedure the author calls "rhythmic resonances." In Mass for a Time of War, texts and chants from the Missa pro defunctis [Mass for the Dead] are interwoven with Czeslaw Milosz's poem Meaning, and serve as structural scaffolding throughout. The choices of additional texts and what the author terms "musical subtexts" that surround the scaffolding of the Latin are selected and positioned to heighten the unfolding narrative. The texts from the Mass for the Dead anchors the Requiem, while the emotional thrust is guided by Milosz's Meaning. Although the Latin texts are deeply religious, they have been taken from their familiar context by aligning them with prose and poetry. It was not intended to remove their religious connotations, but to instead expand their significance to a metaphoric stature. Additional texts include Emily Dickinson's stark poem on death, LXXVI, several lines from Rainer Maria Rilke's The Ninth Duino Elegy, texts from Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, Dexter Filkin's The Forever War, texts in both the Ancient Greek and English translation of Homer's Iliad, Erich Maria Remarcque's All Quiet on the Western Front, several texts from The New York Times Magazine and New Yorker Magazine articles, as well as the names of victims on both sides of the war. The arrangement of the texts and subtexts are consciously meant to imitate "cut-up" poetry or fiction, also called découpage, a form that takes small sections of words from existing poems as well as additional texts, such as those from newspapers and magazines and rearranges them to create new poems or other texts. The dichotomy of tonal and atonal impulses, compositional constructs that informed other of my compositions, form some structural basis for the work. Choice of these and other musical procedures is not arbitrary. They are not reasons in themselves, or meant to form a new mode of expression or imitate a particular musical style. Rather they support a dramatic narrative with deep resonances and historical allusion, one that draws the listener into the emotional substance of the difficult, often brutal dilemmas of war that humankind has wrestled and struggled with since before the printed word. / Music Composition / Accompanied by one .doc Microsoft Word document: Mass For A Time of War (score).

This research project provides a geomorphological and geological analysis of ephemeral and relict river valley systems in the north part of the Iraqi Western Desert. The area surveyed covers approximately 30 000 km2 and is one of the remotest and least studied parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Part of the reason for the lack of research in this area in recent years has been the ongoing security problems and all fieldwork undertaken for this thesis was carried out with the support of armed guards and police. In addition much of the work on the geology and geomorphology of the region is in confidential files commissioned by oil companies, and in MSc and PhD theses held in Iraqi Universities. A significant part of this work and indeed many scientific papers, are only available in Arabic. Therefore a major element of the work for this thesis has been to translate this material and make the results available in English for the first time. The study demonstrates that the present surface of the Iraqi Western Desert overall forms an incised plateau developed during two phases of continental erosion and deposition during the Tertiary and Quaternary periods. The first phase started after Oligocene uplift formed an older plateau within the Oligocene Tayarat formation. This plateau is characterized by denudation processes associated with a semiarid climate, including the formation of subsurface hollows and caves. The second phase, which began after the last Alpine Orogenic movement, and includes the Pliocene and Quaternary periods, formed a younger plateau developed on the Zahra formation. This younger plateau is characterized by processes indicative of climatic fluctuations from wet to arid and semiarid, which induced denudation in places and deposition in others. However, in terms of the geomorphological landforms present in the Western Desert they can be broadly divided into: i) Structural and erosion-denudation forms ii) Accumulation forms Lithology landform in these two categories has resulted in the production of a new geomorphological map of the Iraqi Western Desert. A key component of this map uses the drainage networks. Four distinct drainage systems were identified: 1. The valleys which descend from west to east. These valley systems are located to the south and south east town of Rutba 2. The valleys which descend from south to north. These lie to the west and southwest of Rutba and are controlled by the north to south strike of exposed Palaeogene strata. 3. The valleys which descend from east south to north west, located north of the Garaa area like Ratga and Akash. 4. The valleys which descend from east to west. These valley systems are located to the south and south west town of Rutba, like Swab and Wallaj valleys. Investigation of these four networks established that they were relict systems that still carried ephemerally active misfit rivers and stream. The overall control on their form was the alternating sequences of variable strength rocks that were exposed and eroded as part of the uplift of an anticlinorium (Houran) and anticline (Garaa), associated with the Alpine Orogeny .However, the unclearing Structures were much older and can be traced back to Permian tectonic processes. The drainage of the Western Desert, therefore, is antecedent and controlled by Tertiary and Quaternary tectonics. The rivers appear to have active throughout the Pleistocene incising into the Western Desert plateaux. Highest incision rates probably occurred during more pluvial periods in the Pleistocene which may have been coincident with glacial marine in the Northern Hemisphere. The contemporary rivers are misfit within larger valleys although still subject to flash floods under the right metrological condition.

This dissertation addresses the relationship between modern art in Iraq and the region’s antique past, particularly as it was constituted through archaeological, artistic, museological, and critical developments within the context of Iraqi cultural nationalism. I argue that Iraqi modern artists in the last four decades of the twentieth century harnessed the iconographic, symbolic, and aesthetic tropes associated with ancient Mesopotamia in service to the larger project of participating in and contributing to a locally constructed modality of modern time. Although it is generally acknowledged that modern Iraqi artists drew from an adopted antiquity, the intellectual utilization of “Mesopotamia” as an aesthetic and historical category within the context of modern art formation and assertion has not been adequately explored for significance and meaning. In a series of three case studies, I explore the modern category of “Mesopotamia” as it was employed in the aesthetic, stylistic, and narratological practices of three Iraqi artists – Mohammed Ghani Hikmat (1929-2011), Dia al-Azzawi (b. 1939), and Faisel Laibi Sahi (b.1947). These artists – representing three successive generations – are emblematic of the primary ways Iraqi artists of the latter half of the twentieth century sought a relationship with an ancient past that not only exemplified provocative and enduring artforms, but also civilizational achievement and resilience. Furthermore, their practices point to a new understanding of modern time that was taking shape in the discursive structures of Iraqi art beginning in the 1960s. The artists that occupy the pages of this study engaged a vision of time that moved away from the linear models of European historicism and embraced a localized perception of temporality that was shaped by spatial paradigms of coexistence wherein civilizational categories operated on the coterminous plane of heterochronicity. This marks a shift wherein claims of contemporaneity, a self-conscious positioning of Iraqi modernism on a parallel trajectory with European modernism, gave way to an exploration of internal temporal relationships that allowed for synchronic interactions with history even within diachronic narratives of progress. Each case study operates within individual spheres of interpretation whilst also sharing broader characteristics of analysis. In the hands of my chosen artists, time became a medium of expression and antiquity became the formal and subjective substance of that expression. My study utilizes theories of time coupled with various methods of visual deconstruction to investigate this claim. Part One considers the career of sculptor Mohammed Ghani Hikmat by reading his relief sculptures and their preparatory sketches through the lens of narrative space-time, examining the artist’s techniques of visual storytelling to determine how his use of ancient sculptural models created heterochronic spaces of encounter. Part Two takes an archaeological and geological perspective of time, as one that is simultaneous, stratified, and rooted in the land, to think about the print works of Dia al-Azzawi within the intertwined contexts of art, antiquity, and oil. Part Three reflects on the affective artistic production of Faisel Laibi Sahi by identifying his use of ancient iconography as a mechanism whereby he heightens the emotive address of his paintings and drawings. In all three studies, I employ iconographic and semiotic methodologies to perform detailed visual analyses of a wide range of artworks. Additionally, I survey a cache of archival documents that elucidate various discursive spaces in the Iraqi modern intellectual milieu to ascertain attitudes toward antiquity and its role in contemporary cultural spheres. Thus, this dissertation pulls multiple strands of time, modernity, and visuality together to investigate the ways Iraqi modern artists transformed the notion of “Mesopotamia” into a viable aesthetic and a powerful representational model.

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In southeast Michigan, tens of thousands of Iraqi American transmigrants have made a home for themselves in metro Detroit in recent decades and they sustain most of their religious beliefs, social norms, cultural values, and national ties. At the same time, they have had to change their social life in sometimes radical ways as they adjust to American society. These changes have led them to build their own cultural and social identity which differs from both American and Iraqi identity and consists of a transnational Iraqi American identity. This study will explore the sociocultural identities that have emerged within the Iraqi-American community in Dearborn and Detroit. The study provides an illustration of the transnational networks, activities, patterns of living, and ideologies that recent migrants have created to span their homeland and host societies. The study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Dearborn and Warrendale in addition to social media, ethnographic discourse analysis, and study of the community social networks.

<p>Denna uppsats avhandlar 1st Marine Division och deras väg in i Irak under operation Iraqi Freedom. Syftet med uppsatsen är att verifiera om det var konceptet manöverkrigföring som 1st Marine Division använde sig av under invasionen? Det har sagts att amerikanerna använde sig av manöverkrigföring i denna operation. Jag ställer mig mer frågande om det verkligen var det konceptet som de använde sig av.</p><p>För att svara på frågeställningen har jag först beskrivit vad manöverkrigföring är, därefter har jag gjort en fallstudie på 1st Marine Division och deras agerande under invasionen av Irak 2003. Vi följer divisionen från utgångsgrupperingen i Kuwait tills divisionen är inne i Bagdad. Detta utspelar sig från 21 mars 2003 till 10 april 2003.</p><p>Resultatet som jag kom fram till visar att det finns tydliga tendenser som visar att konceptet manöverkrigföring användes. Men det finns även tendenser som pekar på motsatsen.</p> / <p>This report describes the incursion of the First Marine Division in Iraq under "Operation Iraqi Freedom". It has been claimed that "manoeuvre warfare" was the main strategy used by the Marines during this operation. I question if this was indeed the approach.</p><p>In my analysis I first describe what we mean by "manoeuvre warfare". I then analyse the activities of the First Marine Division during the invasion of Iraq from pre- attack assembly area in Kuwait on March 21st 2003 until their entrance in Bagdad in April 10th 2003.</p><p>The result of my analyses shows that there are clear indications of the use of "manoeuvre warfare". However there are also indications that show that the opposite is true.</p>

Denna uppsats avhandlar 1st Marine Division och deras väg in i Irak under operation Iraqi Freedom. Syftet med uppsatsen är att verifiera om det var konceptet manöverkrigföring som 1st Marine Division använde sig av under invasionen? Det har sagts att amerikanerna använde sig av manöverkrigföring i denna operation. Jag ställer mig mer frågande om det verkligen var det konceptet som de använde sig av. För att svara på frågeställningen har jag först beskrivit vad manöverkrigföring är, därefter har jag gjort en fallstudie på 1st Marine Division och deras agerande under invasionen av Irak 2003. Vi följer divisionen från utgångsgrupperingen i Kuwait tills divisionen är inne i Bagdad. Detta utspelar sig från 21 mars 2003 till 10 april 2003. Resultatet som jag kom fram till visar att det finns tydliga tendenser som visar att konceptet manöverkrigföring användes. Men det finns även tendenser som pekar på motsatsen. / This report describes the incursion of the First Marine Division in Iraq under "Operation Iraqi Freedom". It has been claimed that "manoeuvre warfare" was the main strategy used by the Marines during this operation. I question if this was indeed the approach. In my analysis I first describe what we mean by "manoeuvre warfare". I then analyse the activities of the First Marine Division during the invasion of Iraq from pre- attack assembly area in Kuwait on March 21st 2003 until their entrance in Bagdad in April 10th 2003. The result of my analyses shows that there are clear indications of the use of "manoeuvre warfare". However there are also indications that show that the opposite is true.

No description available.