Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 698-731). Print version also available. Mode of access : World Wide Web. System requirements : Adobe Acrobat reader required to view PDF document.

abstract: One in six children in the developing world is engaged in Child labor. Child labor is considered an issue that violates children's rights in many countries and Iraq is no exception. In 2004, Iraq had 1,300,000 children between the ages of eight and sixteen years engaged in work (UNICEF.com, 2004). This study identifies the major causes of child labor in Iraq and investigates the consequences of this issue. In this thesis I draw on the comparison of former regimes in Iraq and Egypt and how those regimes were mistreating their citizens by making them live under poverty and oppression while they were receiving support from the U.S. Poverty is the major cause behind Iraqi children engaging in work. I used the data I collected in Iraq, in the city of Nasiriyah, of 28 working children to explain the relationship between poverty, students drop out of school, family attitude towards education and the child engagement in work. At the end of the thesis I offer a list of recommendations to try to address the problem of child labor in Iraq. The recommendations and regulations are for Iraqi government and the NGOs to take into consideration in trying to resolve and regulate the issue of child labor to rescue the children in Iraq from more exploitation in the future. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Social Justice and Human Rights 2011

What contributes to sectarian conflict? Some existing literature essentializes sectarian identities and blames ancient hatred between different groups as the cause of conflict, this thesis argues that sectarian conflict occurs when sectarianism is politically employed by elite actors facing state weakness. The proposed theory suggests that a drop in state capacity regardless of the cause, can motivate political elite actors to instrumentalize the salience of sectarian identities as a form of either repression or cooptation targeting the sectarian outgroup for the purposes of regime survival. The theoretical claims in this study are examined using a qualitative comparative case study analysis of the Saddam Hussein and Nouri Al Maliki regimes in Iraq. The findings reveal that both Hussein and Maliki instrumentalized sectarian rhetoric and exploited divisions as a strategy of gaining or preserving political power during periods of increased state weakness. For example, Saddam's use of the Faith Campaign fueled the increased salience of sectarian identities in Iraq while Maliki's political purge campaigns marginalized the Sunnis. Furthermore, the approach of this study reveals variation in the forms of regimes that can successfully exploit and instrumentalize sectarian rhetoric, ranging from minority and majority sectarian coalitions to personalist autocratic and semi-democratic governments. The findings of this thesis can allow policymakers to identify the root causes of sectarian based conflicts more accurately. In addition, ethnic and sectarian identity groups can be influenced by politicians and potentially shaped by external actors under certain conditions outlined in the thesis.

The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) was a neoconservative Washington, D.C. foreign policy think tank, comprised of seasoned foreign policy stalwarts who had served multiple presidential administrations as well as outside-the-beltway defense contractors, that was founded in 1997 by William Kristol, editor of the conservative political magazine The Weekly Standard, and Robert Kagan, a foreign policy analyst and political commentator currently at the Brookings Institution. The PNAC would shut down its operations in 2006. Using The Weekly Standard as its mouthpiece, the PNAC helped foment support for the removal of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein beginning in 1998, citing Iraq’s noncooperation with UN weapons inspections. The PNAC became further emboldened in its urgency and rhetoric to quell the geopolitical risk posed by Hussein after the 9/11 terror attacks. The only justifiable response the George W. Bush Administration could play in thwarting Hussein, the PNAC argued, involved a military action. Keywords: The Project for the New American Century; Iraq War; Saddam Hussein; The Weekly Standard; The Vulcans; weapons of mass destruction

This collection of two short stories and one novella seeks to express and embody concepts of narrative form and technique developed over the course of this graduate program with regards to the formulation of believable, nonrealist fictional realities in an American idiom which can enter into the global critical conversation of similarly-purposed international literature.

No / This volume explores in close detail the events and factors leading up to the second Gulf War in 2003 and considers whether war with Iraq was inevitable. Nick Ritchie and Paul Rogers argue that after the election of George W. Bush, conflict between Iraq and the United States was probable, and that after 9/11 it became virtually inevitable. They begin by setting the story of Iraq, Bush and 9/11 within the broader context of the importance of the Persian Gulf to enduring US national security interests and go on to examine the intense politicking that surrounded the conflict and still reverberates today. The authors examine US policy towards Iraq at the end of the Clinton administration, the opposition in Congress and Washington's conservative think tanks to Clinton's strategy of containment, and the evolution of Iraq policy during the first eight months of the Bush presidency and the growing pressure for regime change. They also explore the immediate focus on Iraq after the attacks of September 11 that marked a watershed in US national security policy and chart the construction of the case against Iraq through 2002 and the administration's determination to end Saddam Hussein's regime at all costs. The Political Road to War with Iraq will be of great interest to all students and scholars of US foreign policy, war and peace studies and international relations.

No description available.

<p>Abstract</p><p>The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the way George W. Bush used moral metaphors to intensify the language in his statements on Operation Iraqi Freedom. Three moral metaphors are presented within two different models that are applied on the data.</p><p>The collected material for the metaphors is constituted of cognitive linguistic books from prominent linguists, such as George Lakoff, Alan Cruse and William Croft, and the data is collected from the official White House website. The scientific method used in this study has been qualitative text analysis where the hermeneutic approach has been an essential part of it.</p><p>The main question: In what way did George W. Bush use moral metaphors in his statements to justify Operation Iraqi Freedom?, resulted in use of moral metaphors that sermons people’s moral values, depict Saddam Hussein’s characteristics as immoral, activate people’s moral priorities to help the Iraqi people, and addresses both conservatives and liberals in America.</p><p>The conclusion of my study is that President Bush deliberately intensified the language in his statements through moral metaphors to justify Operation Iraqi Freedom.</p><p>Keywords: Cognitive Linguistics, Metaphor, Figurative Language, Operation Iraqi Freedom, War on Terror, George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, USA, Iraq, Qualitative Text Analysis, Hermeneutics.</p>

Thesis (B.A.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-205). Also available via the World Wide Web. http://www.pol.uiuc.edu/news/largio%5Fthesis.pdf

This thesis addresses the relationship between sectarianism and state-making and nation-building in Iraq. It argues that sectarianism has been an enduring feature of the state-making trajectory in Iraq due to the failure of the modern nation-state to resolve inherent tensions between primordial sectarian identities and concepts of unified statehood and uniform citizenry. After a theoretical excursus that recasts the notion of primordial identity as a socially constructed reality, I set out to explain the persistence of primordial sectarian affiliations in Iraq since the establishment of the modern nation-state in 1921. Looking at the primordial past showed that Sunni-Shicite interactions before the modern nation-state cultivated repositories of divergent collective memories and shaped dynamics of inclusion and exclusion favorable to the Sunni Arabs following the creation of Iraq. Drawing on primary and secondary sources and field interviews, this study proceeds to trace the accentuation of primordial sectarian solidarities despite the adoption of homogenizing policies in a deeply divided society along ethno-sectarian lines. It found that the uneven sectarian composition of the ruling elites nurtured feelings of political exclusion among marginalized sectarian groups, the Shicites before 2003 and the Sunnis in the post-2003 period, which hardened sectarian identities. The injection of hegemonic communal discourses into the educational curriculum was found to have provoked masked forms of resistance that contributed to the sharpening of sectarian consciousness. Hegemonic communal narratives embedded in the curriculum not only undermined the homogenizing utility of education but also implicated education in the accentuation of primordial sectarian identities. The study also found that, by camouflaging anti-Shicite sectarianism, the anti-Persian streak in the nation-state’s Pan-Arab ideology undermined Iraq’s national integration project. It explains that the slide from a totalizing Pan-Arab ideology in the pre-2003 period toward the atomistic impulse of the federalist debate in the post-2003 period is symptomatic of the ghettoization of identity in Iraq. This investigation of the interaction between primordial sectarian attachments and the trajectory of the making of the Iraqi nation-state is ensconced in the project of expanding the range and scope of social scientific applications of the nation-building and primordialism lines of analysis.