Arab States

Why has legal and judicial reform in the Arab region failed in promoting the rule of law, ensuring judicial independence and safeguarding democratic values: prerequisites for economic, political, and social development? This dissertation attempts to address this failure in the c…

The United Nations has created an abundance of human rights treaties and declarations over the decades to promote a culture of human rights and to set normative provisions of human rights standards for all states to follow. This broad effort is supplemented by the work of region…

What explains alignment behavior in Syrian foreign policy? Structural realists argue that, like all states, authoritarian states pursue their national interests in an anarchic world by balancing power or threats, informed by the distribution of material capabilities. Hence allia…

Improving Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) is growing as an international priority, expressed through multiple research, policy initiatives, social intervention and advocacy. ECCE programs of high quality have the potential to improve the health and nutrition of young c…

The main objective of this dissertation is to show that the development of a polity can be explained through the study of the emergence of national identity not only as the product of elites' conscious actions, but as the outcome of negotiations (or lack thereof) between opposin…