The main goal of this study was to achieve a qualitative understanding of the use and influence of Twitter communication during the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. By charting the physical map of the information-spreading that occurred through the Twitter platform during the protests, …
While the notion that civil society organizations can democratize authoritarian regimes from below has become an article of faith among many policy makers and democracy promoters, some area experts warn that practitioners and advocates should not overestimate civil society's dem…
The European Union speaks of promotion of human rights, liberal democratic values and its influence in the world. Yet, by investigating the EU's foreign policy, we can find significant discrepancies between what is rhetorically stated in official statements and how the Union's r…
In depth study of Western media's coverage of the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Not only using key events between the West/ United States and the Middle East over the last 40 years to show how …
Libya is in a state of transition following the Arab Spring revolution of 2011. Because Muammar Al-Gaddafi’s dictatorship imposed structural violence, direct violence, and cultural violence, causing many injustices and human rights violations, as well as the violent nature of th…
The 2010-2011 Jasmine Revolution brought many Tunisians who had lived their entire lives under authoritarian regime out onto the streets for the first time in protest. Tunisians of all ages and social backgrounds participated, demanding the ousting of then-dictator Zine el Abidi…
Technological developments in information and communication systems, particularly the emergence of the Internet, have radically changed social movement concepts and created a new form of social movements, which is digital activism. While it is sometimes an extremely innocent way…
The Arab Spring marked a new age of international political participation and support, facilitated by the wide circulation of imagery via social and mass media. Many in the West found themselves in ideological agreement with the political efforts of the protests, upholding the U…
The situation in Egypt and elsewhere in parts of the Arab world is to some extent reminiscent of the situation that prevailed before 1914 in Europe, where a motley array of unharnessed popular micronationalisms (today, instrumentalized religious fervor) combined with big power p…
This paper analyzes contemporary Russian Foreign Policy toward the Middle East. Six factors are identified as most critical to Russian foreign policy in the region: Islamic terrorism, arms transfers, natural resources, influence over former Soviet Spaces, general trade, and grea…
In the wake of the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, political figures in Iran have offered competing claims of inspiration for the protests now spreading through the broader MENA region. This paper aims to compare the discourse of regime leaders to that of opposition act…
Today there exists a legal norm that declares the existence of a global responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities. Previous doctrines of non-intervention and permissibility were inadequate and demonstrated the need for a new outlook. From a commission proposal to …
Why did Hosni Mubarak's rule in Egypt last thirty years, and why did it fall in a mere eighteen days? This dissertation uses Mubarak's Egypt as a case study for understanding how autocratic regimes can use formally democratic institutions, such as multiparty elections, to "trap"…
This study examines the interplay of narrative and other factors in the rise and fall of the Muslim Brotherhood during the Egyptian Revolution. I hypothesize that narrative played a major role in the Muslim Brotherhoods rise to power, and that failure to adapt their narrative in…
I am submitting two manuscripts for my creative dissertation, In What Array That They Were In and Participating Godlike Food. The former is a sequence of odes followed by a brief epic, followed by a cycle of verse dramas, with an ode epilogue. The latter is a book-length excerpt…
Within recent years, Web 2.0 Social Media tools such as social networking websites, video-sharing platforms, and micro-blogs have proliferated across the world at an exponential rate. While the spread and effects of such technologies have been well-documented in democratic socie…
This study examines Al-Ḥirāk Al-Shabābī Al-ʾUrdunī (the Jordanian Youth Movement), from now on the HSU, and aims to be a first scholarly attempt at mapping the organisation, strategy, challenges, and significance of this youth-led and youth-organised social movement. Taking an i…
The purpose of this study is to identify necessary and sufficient conditions in regime collapse that are shared cross-regionally by the Color Revolutions of the post-Soviet region and the Arab Spring uprisings of the Arab region by utilizing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative ana…