The association of Kazakhstan to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a regional organization with a strong human rights component, could not induce the oil-rich Central Asian country, long since criticized for its poor human rights record, to change i…
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This thesis examines the turn to conflict in Syria during 2011 to see if it is revolutionary in nature and if so, why has it not succeeded? This thesis aims to analyze the anatomy of Syria's "revolution" in order to determine the causes behind the initial popular mobilization an…
This dissertation is a study of the New Order (Nizam-i Cedid ) army and the opposition it triggered during the reign of Selim III (1789-1807). It aims to present an alternative perspective on the Ottoman military reform and its implications for the course of the imperial transfo…
Authoritarian elections present a dilemma for opposition political parties. Should the opposition participate in elections that are largely unfair? Should the opposition boycott the elections or resort to extra-electoral means? What explains the choice of strategy among key oppo…
Does resource wealth make for weak states? Do boom-bust cycles in the global oil market destabilize governments in exporting states? The most common answer to both of these questions has been yes. I argue that this conclusion provides limited analytic purchase on the ways in whi…
Drawing on insights from social psychological literature on identity formation, and on social movement and contentious politics literature, this research focuses on elite strategies to gain from or survive a crisis. The research specifically looks at strategies to foster popular…
In this dissertation in the field of lexical semantics, the researcher investigated the lexical relations of synonymy, antonymy, complementarity, and converseness in Kuwaiti Arabic and compared the data with corresponding utterances from American English. The analysis was conduc…
After predicting a wave of Middle East democratization that never happened, comparative scholars now face hard questions about the resilience of authoritarianism in this region. Among the most demanding puzzles is why, during the post-colonial era, autocratic states in the Middl…