Cloud computing emerged as an alternative to traditional in-house data centers that businesses can leverage to increase the operation agility and employees' productivity. IT solution architects are tasked with presenting to IT managers some analysis reflecting cloud computing adoption critical barriers and challenges. This quantitative correlational study established an enhanced technology acceptance model (TAM) with four external variables: perceived security (PeS), perceived privacy (PeP), perceived connectedness (PeN), and perceived complexity (PeC) as antecedents of perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEoU) in a cloud computing context. Data collected from 125 participants, who responded to the invitation through an online survey focusing on Afghanistan's main cities Kabul, Mazar, and Herat. The analysis showed that PEoU was a predictor of the behavioral intention of cloud computing adoption, which is consistent with the TAM; PEoU with an R2 = .15 had a stronger influence than PU with an R2 = .023 on cloud computing behavior intention of adoption and use. PeN, PeS, and PeP significantly influenced the behavioral intentions of IT architects to adopt and use the technology. This study showed that PeC was not a significant barrier to cloud computing adoption in Afghanistan. By adopting cloud services, employees can have access to various tools that can help increase business productivity and contribute to improving the work environment. Cloud services, as an alternative solution to home data centers, can help businesses reduce power consumption and consecutively decrease in carbon dioxide emissions due to less power demand.

Using a quasi-experimental approach, this study analyses the effects of a specific exogenous shock on ethnic discrimination in Sweden by treating the terror attacks of 2015 in Paris as a natural experiment. Our research is based on cross-sectional survey data published by the European Social Survey (ESS). Slightly deviating from the traditional analytical approach, we observe individuals’ perception of being discriminated against rather than factual discrimination, thus contributing by analysing a common topic from a different perspective. We find that immigrants generally have a higher probability of perceiving themselves as discriminated against compared to natives. Subsequently, the probability increases further for Middle Eastern immigrants, females and for those who have experienced unemployment for at least three months.  When implementing a Difference-in-Difference method we find that average differences in perceived discrimination between immigrants and natives, but also between males and females, had increased after the terror attacks in Paris. Contrary to our expectations, our results indicate that Middle Eastern immigrants did not feel more discriminated after the terror attacks. However, the perception of being discriminated against is indicated to have increased for men. Nonetheless, in absence of statistically significant treatment effects we cannot conclude a relationship between the changes in average differences and the exogenous shock, suggesting that that the changes might be attributed to other factors.

This literature study investigates the link between gender, religion, and honour related violence with a focus on the intersection of rumours. Rumours as an intersection of honour will help to find out the answers to the research questions. The literature study concentrates on two honour killings cases, Fadime ’s and Sorya M. The research questions, therefore, will focus on three themes, religion and honour, gender, and honour and rumours and the side effects onMuslim women. At the end of the 20th century lots of families moved to Sweden; from different regions from the Middle East such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt; due to conflict. Those families like many other migrants brought their traditions and beliefs. Some of them successfully integrated into Swedish society while others; refused to integrate, holding their beliefs hard and ignoring some Swedish law and policy. The concept of honour killings was brought from theMiddle East, a term which will be explained further in the paper. Three Arabic migrant women interviewed in this study in order to discover the meaning of rumours and how it relates to honour killings. The results show that gender differences existed in Fadime and Soraya ’s case. Rumoursas honour intersection could cause to honour killings and violence. However, the term rumours were not discussed in previous literature was not mentioned in other papers.Honour killings exist in the Swedish society and the Middle Eastern society, but it is not related to the Islamic religion, rather than a tradition, therefore, the old Middle Eastern societies were based on power rather than gender equality and justice. Keywords: Honour killings, Religion, Gender, Rumours, Middle East, Islam.

The main aim of this master thesis is analyze role of UNRWA in the Middle East in 1950- 2010 based on the collected data. The main focus is on the population growth tendencies which are often criticized as the result of the UNRWA politics and which might be prolonging the conflict in the area. Second part of this thesis focuses on the elementary and preparatory education at UNRWA schools. Based on the research done, it was concluded that UNRWA isn't responsible of Palestinian refugee growth as it is the result of population growth in region and the result of foreign events. In question of elementary and preparatory education, the decreasing percentage tendencies in attendance at UNRWA run schools have been observed despite multiplication of the refugee population. This might be a result of failing to accommodate to the needs of Palestinian refugees.

In the years following World War II, Iran became one of the closest allies of United States of America in the Middle East. The era of friendship was replaced by hostilities and mutual mistrust after the 1979 Iranian revolution. In order to understand the current situation the analysis of American foreign policy towards Iran during the reign of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi has been done. The author of the thesis The Making of a Special Relationship: Iran in the Foreign Policy of the United States, 1953 - 1979 questions what kind of policy the United States adopted towards Iran that inevitably led to such dramatic end? What kind of rule Washington pursued towards Tehran that Revolution arose with anti-American spirit? The research has been performed in a constructivist framework. American foreign policy with its specific values, norms, beliefs, culture and language towards other states creates, according to constructivist scholars, three different types of rule: hegemony, hierarchy and heteronomy. The analysis of U.S. foreign policy and declassified primary documents showed that U.S.-Iranian relations operated in heteronomic structures. United States created rules that determined Iran to be dependent on it. The country under Shah's rule became more developed and powerful, but not independent. Thanks to...

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential of travel blogs, as a form of popular new media travel writing, to renegotiate conventional discourses about the ‘Middle East’. By conducting a critical discourse analysis on six travel blogs authored by female writers from both the US and the ‘Middle East’, this thesis examines representational practices found in travel narratives, discloses their discursive tendencies, and interprets those in a sociocultural context. Thereby, the analysis draws on a twofold theoretical approach. Postcolonial theory, on the one hand, allows to relate the findings of the analysis critically to the colonial heritage that is inseparable from the genre of travel writing and that informs the discourse about the Oriental ‘other’. Affordance theory, on the other hand, makes it possible to examine how blogging can be seen as a tool that allows disrupting common practices of ‘othering’ in travel writing. The analysis shows that travel blogging has transformative potential and can, mainly through the affordances of self- representation and innovative expression, challenge long-established discourses about the ‘Middle East’. Limiting factors of this potential are mostly arising from neo-imperialistic structures that carry traces of the colonial past. Essentially, the results of this thesis imply that the genre of travel writing is evolving in new media and that it expands the discursive framework of media representations, making it a promising site for future research seeking to explore transcultural encounters and the societal implications of such.

The Premier Technical College of Qatar (PTC-Q) has seen high failure rates among students taking a college statistics course. The students are English as a foreign language (EFL) learners in business studies and health sciences. Course delivery has involved conventional content/curriculum-centered instruction with minimal to no interactive components. The purpose of this quasi-experimental study was to assess the effectiveness of an interactive approach to teaching and learning statistics used in North America and the United Kingdom when used with EFL students in the Middle East. Guided by von Glasersfeld's constructivist framework, this study compared conceptual understanding between a convenience sample of 42 students whose learning experience included a hands-on, interactive component and 38 students whose learning experience did not. ANCOVA was used to analyze posttest scores on the Comprehensive Assessment of Outcomes in Statistics (CAOS) as the dependent variable, the course placement (hands-on versus no hands-on component) as the independent variable, and the pretest score on CAOS as the covariate. Students who were exposed to the hands-on learning demonstrated greater conceptual understanding than students who were not. Based on these results, a 3-day workshop was designed to create a learning community to enable statistics instructors to address the problem of high failure, to introduce delivery methods that involve place-based examples, and to devise hands-on activities designed to reflect authentic research. This study has implications for positive social change in Qatar, in that application of the findings may result in producing trained graduates capable of filling the shortage of qualified researchers, thereby supporting the nation's goal of being a leader in research as stated in the Qatar National Vision 2030.

Although human trafficking continues to be a growing problem around the world, there are scarce quantitative methodologies for evidence-based research because it is hard to gather reliable and comparable data on human trafficking. It is also difficult to track patterns in human trafficking on a regional or global scale because the victims are a vulnerable population. Using Datta and Bales conceptualization of modern slavery as the theoretical foundation, the primary purpose of this study was to establish a baseline measurement of trafficking predictors in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) as well as understand the statistical relationship between measurements of corruption, democracy, state of peace, and terrorism on the prevalence of contemporary slavery in the MENA region. Data were collected from the 2016 Global Terrorism Index, 2016 Democracy Index, 2016 Corruption Perception Index, 2016 Global Slavery Index, and the 2016 Global Peace Index and analyzed using multiple linear regression. The results of the study showed that corruption (p=.017) and state of peace (p=.039) were significant predictors for contemporary slavery in the MENA region. Whereas, terrorism and democracy were not significant predictors. The positive social change implications of this study include recommendations to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to create a central repository for the archival of human trafficking data. The creation of this archive will promote a more accurate accounting of a vulnerable population such as victims of trafficking, thereby increasing awareness of contemporary slavery among law enforcement, policy makers, and scholars.

Interreligious peacebuilding is one of the oldest methods used in peacebuilding around the world, as religion is often one key factor in war and used both to fuel conflicts or to promote peace and co-existence. However, the use of interreligious dialogue in post-conflict societies is still not fully understood and researcher has still not encapsulated its different components. The purpose of this study was therefore to provide understanding of the use of interreligious dia-logue in a highly sectarian societies as contemporary Lebanon is. Therefore, to explore and contribute to this research field, I conducted semi-structured interviewees with a local peace-building organisation in Lebanon. The findings were analysis with an analytical framework, based on intergroup contact theory and research methods on religious dialogue. This study il-lustrated the challenges and opportunities Lebanese peacebuilders face when conducting dia-logues in a very religiously divided society. The findings presented that the affective and cog-nitive effects from interreligious dialogue do varies between individuals depending on their own view on being a majority or minority religion and their own prejudice against other beliefs. Therefore, this paper contributes to new insight on the effects of contact theories relevance in sectarian societies and could be utilised to enhance the peacebuilding efforts in Lebanon.