Thesiss

The United States may be losing the war against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The past five years have seen an increase in sophistication and scale of terrorist attacks and the group’s ideological message remains persuasive for many disenfranchised Yemenis. Terrorism…

New technologies accompany each war. The submarine dove during The Civil War, tanks rolled through World War I, the atom bomb was dropped in World War II and Agent Orange was diffused in Vietnam. Media often refer to today's conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan as "Obama's Dron…

This thesis explores UK news discourse on counterterrorism. News discourse on counterterrorism involves representations of history, space and identities in order to frame risks, threats and responses. To gain analytical purchase on this, this research considers the forms of cosm…

Employing critical race theory as a theoretical and analytical framework, this thesis explores the nature, structure and purpose of Islamophobic discourse, and offers two central contributions to the scholarly debate on Islamophobia. First, it contributes to the literature on th…

According to conventional wisdom winning hearts and minds is one of the most important goals for defeating terrorism. However, despite repeated claims about U.S. efforts to build popular support as part of the war on terror during the first seven years after 9/11, a steady strea…

What is an effective counterterrorism strategy? Using the case of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the case of the conflict between Israel and Palestine, this project tests the arguments of Paul Wilkinson and Peter Sederberg, concerning approaches to the threat of terrorism,…

In my dissertation, I investigate a largely unexplored question of differences in the scope and brutality of states' responses to terrorism using statistical analysis of 15 states, the former Soviet republics of the USSR (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhsta…

Rational choice theory has been one of the key theories used to explain the effectiveness of counterterrorism policies (Dugan, LaFree & Piquero, 2005; Enders & Sandler, 1993; 2003; Frey, 2004; LaFree, Dugan & Korte, 2009). These investigations have examined policies focused on i…

“Hollywood Counterterrorism: The Political Economy of Middle Eastern Violence and Protest in Action Feature Films” demonstrates how Western discourses of counterterrorism and the Middle East have shaped Hollywood cinematic productions through sourcing and collaboration with priv…

Most terrorist groups do not survive past their first few years of existence. All terrorist groups, even those that survive for decades, face a basic and constant existential threat: discovery of their activities, personnel, and plans by government law enforcement and intelligen…

Problem. The impact of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), with its emphasis on preemptive military force, is a matter of considerable debate. This dissertation uses a time series intervention approach to evaluate the extent to which the onset of the GWOT (beginning with the inv…

Why do some states' policies converge over time and not others? Why have some counter-terrorism policies in some states converged in the post-9/11 period and not others? Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, there has been an aggregate trend towards policy convergence in sta…

Deterrence theory predicts that an attack can be prevented if a defender communicates a clear, costly, and credible retaliatory threat that persuades an opponent that the costs of the attack outweigh possible benefits. While deterrence has received detailed treatment in inter-st…

Governments often use the allocation of foreign aid when seeking to gain cooperation from and to boost the capacity of recipient governments in a variety of policy realms. However, there is no consensus among political scientists and economists about whether aid is actually a pr…

This dissertation seeks to assess the degree of integration in the sector of security and defense of the European Union. The emphasis is brought on the Solana era, 1999-2009, as Mr. Solana was the first High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the EU. Hi…

A common view among scholars is that extended security threats "ratchet" up civil liberties violations and entrench them in a state's legal regime. This dissertation suggests that the opposite can occur. A prolonged threat may allow a society to incorporate civil liberties into …

Our war is not against Islam.....Our war is a war against evil... -President George W. Bush. Despite President Bush's rhetoric attempting to separate Muslims in general from terrorists who adhere to the Islamic faith, the policies of the War on Terror have generally focused on M…

Afghan National Police (ANP) and United States Special Operations Forces (USSOF) in Afghanistan have overlapping mandates that include the prosecution of terrorists, criminals, and insurgents. Although published literature acknowledges that this overlap creates jurisdictional pr…

War, like all human endeavors, is at some point of consideration a cultural event; understanding it fully requires an appreciation of war's events, its cultural context, and the interaction between them. In all wars there is a simultaneous and reciprocal process by which culture…

The purpose of this research is to explore the state of post-9/11 Muslim American philanthropy within The Greater Kansas City Area. Since 2001, the U.S. government has expanded its counterterrorism policies to target sources of terrorist funding and in particular the charitable …