The following documentary is a journalistic broadcast piece that presents human stories from the ongoing war in Syria. For about a year, the Northern part of the country has been under the control of the armed opposition. The proxy war in Syria gave rise to the most tragic human…
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The post-Cold war era marked the evolution in the changing nature of conflicts, transitioning from inter-state towards more complex intrastate encounters. This phenomenon consequently led to the increase of refugees and internally displaced persons which presented a set of key c…
Over the course of the third millennium BC, the human landscape of northern Mesopotamia transitioned from a period of small, dispersed settlements to one characterized by a more diverse network of villages, towns, and cities. This event was one component of a larger phenomenon t…
Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Syria and Iran have maintained a strategic alliance. Syria supported Iran throughout the Iran-Iraq war and Iran has been one of Syria’s strongest supporters in the conflict with Israel. Throughout this period, the alliance has endured attemp…
The ongoing war in Syria is reaching its fourth year, and over 1.5 million people have been forced to leave their homes into surrounding countries. This thesis looks at the Syrian refugees that have traveled to neighboring Jordan, and how religion has kept them stable in diaspor…
Human bone is considered one of the most direct and insightful sources of information on peoples of the past. As a result, curation protocols have been developed to ensure that the integrity of human skeletal collections is maintained. Although collections are generally consider…
The thesis evaluates Middle Eastern foreign policy of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations in the Syrian civil war and the utilization of chemical weapons in August 2013. The United States' response to the chemical attack on Damascus highlights an inability to deal with …
The dissertation investigates the relationship between a polity ruled by the sharifs of Mecca, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and the expansionist Mamluk Sultanate, which ruled Egypt and Syria from 1260-1517. The dissertation argues that, during the first half of the fifte…
In this dissertation, I study a critical transition in the urban development of Tell es-Sweyhat, a large site in Syria occupied from c. 3000-1900 BCE. In the middle of the third millennium, Sweyhat was an open town centered on a fortress. It was ringed with cemeteries and had a …
Since the 1800s, the United States has sought to advance its interests in what currently exists as the Lebanese Republic. This assessment will look at the shape that policy has taken since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in the context of historical relations. After doing so, thre…
In contemporary Damascus, the modern oboe and an instrument known as its predecessor, the zurna, are heard on a daily basis as they continue to be employed in Syrian popular and folk music practices. After observing the pervasiveness of the sounds of these instruments in Syria, …
In early 2010, 11 Muslim college students were arrested for shouting down Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at the University of California – Irvine in protest of what they saw as Israel's unjust treatment of Palestinians. A year later, the students would be charged with plotting …
Unable to enact change through the existing political institutions of their authoritarian regimes, and consistently repressed by state security forces (the mukhabarat ), activists in Egypt and Syria relied on street activism to challenge their conditions. This study analyzes the…
This thesis is an analysis of performance, linguistic repetition, and silence in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's March 30, 2011 speech to the People's Assembly given 2 weeks after riots erupted in the Syrian province of Deraa on March 15, 2011. Various types of repetition inc…
This paper looks at small arms transfers to non-state actors in the Syrian conflict as an under analyzed aspect of intervention in intrastate war that is both globalized and potentially destabilizing. I challenge the dominant narrative that the international community has failed…
Why and under what conditions have the Kurds become agents of change in the Middle East in terms of democratization? Why did the Kurds' role as democratic agents become particularly visible in the 1990s? How does the Kurdish movement's turn to democratic discourse affect the pol…
Numerous art historians and anthropologists such as Rudolf Wittkower, Michael Baxandal and Alfred Gell have addressed the question of how art reflected the people by and for whom it was produced in the context of different cultures and periods. In my dissertation, I intend to co…
The history of modern Syria is often divided into brief periods, relating to a specific topic, such as authoritarianism in the early years of independence, the emergence of nationalism after the end of World War I, and so on. This thesis is the end result of a careful reading an…
While the origin of the Arab Spring is well documented in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria, the role of press photography in presenting these conflicts is not. Images taken during a conflict often follow a particular narrative that comes to define how we remember a conflict. Cons…