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- All Subjects: International relations
- All Subjects: Afghanistan
- All Subjects: Development Economics
- Creators: Ashley, Richard K.
- Creators: Byrd, Denise
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Resource Type: Text
- Status: Published
Community-based development: scaling up the correct use of misoprostol at home births in Afghanistan
Description
Globally, more than 350 000 women die annually from complications during pregnancy and childbirth (UNFPA, 2011). Nearly 99% of these, according to World Health Organization (WHO) trends (2010) occur in the developing world outside of a hospital setting with limited resources including emergency care (WHO, 2012; UNFPA, 2011). The most prevalent cause of death is postpartum hemorrhage (PPH), accounting for 25% of deaths according to WHO statistics (2012). Conditions in Afghanistan are reflective of the scope and magnitude of the problem. In Afghanistan, maternal mortality is thought to be among the highest in the world. The Afghan Mortality Survey (AMS) data implies that one Afghan woman dies about every 2 hours from pregnancy-related causes (AMS, 2010). Lack of empowerment, education and access to health care resources increase a woman's risk of dying during pregnancy (AMS, 2010). This project aims to investigate the prospects of scaling-up the correct use of misoprostol, a prostaglandin E1 analogue, to treat PPH in developing countries where skilled assistance and resources are scant. As there has been little published on the lessons learned from programs already in place, this study is experience-driven, based on the knowledge of industry experts. This study employs a concurrent triangulation approach to synthesize quantitative data obtained from previous studies with qualitative information gathered through the testimonies of key personnel who participated in pilot programs involving misoprostol. There are many obstacles to scaling-up training initiatives in Afghanistan and other low-resource areas. The analysis concludes that the most crucial factors for scaling-up community-based programs include: more studies analyzing lessons learns from community driven approaches; stronger partnerships with community health care workers; overcoming barriers like association with abortion, misuse and product issues; and a heightened global and community awareness of the severity of PPH without treatment. These results have implications for those who actively work in Afghanistan to promote maternal health and other countries that may use Afghanistan's work as a blueprint for reducing maternal mortality through community-based approaches. Keywords: Afghanistan, community-based interventions, community-driven, maternal mortality, MDG5, misoprostol, postpartum hemorrhage, reproduction, scale-up
ContributorsCristy, Candice (Author) / Grossman, Gary (Thesis advisor) / Parmentier, Mary-Jane (Committee member) / Byrd, Denise (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Naming and naming practices take place at various sites associated with international politics. These sites include border crossings, migrations, diasporas, town halls, and offices of political parties representing minorities. This project is an investigation of these and other sites. It takes seriously questions of names and naming practices and particularly asks how people participate in these practices, often doing so with states and state authorities. It not only looks at and discusses how people proceed in these practices but also assesses the implications for people regarding how and when they can be at home as well as how and where they can move. Through an ethnography of Aegean Macedonians involving interviews, participant observation, and archival research, I find that naming practices occur well beyond the sites where they are expected. Names themselves are the result of negotiation and are controlled neither by their bearers nor those who would name. Similarity of demonyms with toponyms, do not ensure that bearers of such demonyms will be at home in the place that shares there name. Changes in names significance of names occur rapidly and these names turn home into abroad and hosts into guests.
ContributorsPout, Daniel (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Hjorleifur Jonsson (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This thesis examines why young Western Muslim women from the UK are drawn to join and support ISIS in its established territories in Syria and Iraq and identifies their role within these territories. The critical role of technology, specifically social media, in facilitating the recruitment, radicalization, and mobilization of young Muslim women online to join ISIS is also explored. Females emigrating from the UK appear equally drawn to ISIS's ideology and state-building mission as Muslim men. Claims from the media suggest women serve as 'fighters,' however this research finds that women are not permitted by ISIS to participate in fighting. Using Britain as a case study, this study analyzes the social media content of eight young British Muslim women, known as female migrants, for themes motivating them to mobilize. Themes, culled from the literature, include Muslim attitudes and perceptions in the UK regarding Islamophobia or religious discrimination, the erosion of multiculturalism, identity and belonging, and finding purpose in the ummah, and measures whether these variables influence women to mobilize. Excerpts from blog posts and original tweets from their Tumblr, Twitter, and ask.fm accounts provide the actual voices of British female migrants choosing to live within ISIS territory and offers insight on their role as female migrants. Research suggests that, for British Muslim women in the UK, Muslim identity and belonging, both individually and within the ummah, along with attitudes and perceptions of religious discrimination (Islamophobia) and the failing of multiculturalism are influencing them to join ISIS. Additional motives for migration found within the study are based on the following beliefs: that the ummah is under attack, a strong desire to help build a new society, their religious duty as a Muslim, and the opportunity to belong and find purpose in the new "caliphate sisterhood." The role of female migrants residing in ISIS territory is domestic in nature, where they primarily function as wives and mothers of jihadists, as well as serve in online roles as propagandists, proselytizers, and recruiters for ISIS. The strong online presence of women demands an effective counter narrative to deter prospective female migrants from emigrating.
ContributorsPooley, Elizabeth Garcia (Author) / Parmentier, Mary Jane (Thesis advisor) / Robinson, Rebecca (Committee member) / Byrd, Denise (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the role of bodies and bones and the politics of display at memorial sites, as well as the construction of space, I explore how practices of statecraft often rely on an exclusionary logic which renders certain lives politically qualified and others beyond the realm of qualified politics. I draw on the Derridean notion of hauntology to explore how the line between life and death itself is a political construction which sustains particular performances of statecraft. Utilizing ethnographic field work and discourse analysis, I trace the relationship between a logic of haunting and statecraft at sites of memory in three cases. Rwandan genocide memorialization is often centered on bodies and bones, displayed as evidence of the genocide. Yet, this display invokes the specter of genocide in order to legitimate specific policymaking. Memorialization of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border offers an opportunity to explore practices that grieve ungrievable lives, and how memorialization can posit a resistance to the bordering mechanisms of statecraft. 9/11 memorialization offers an interesting case because of the way in which bodies were vanished and spaces reconfigured. Using the question of vanishing as a frame, this final case explores how statecraft is dependent on vanishing: the making absent of something so as to render something else present. Several main conclusions and implications are drawn from the cases. First, labeling certain lives as politically unqualified can sustain certain conceptualizations of the state. Second, paying attention to the way statecraft is a haunted performance, being haunted by the things we perhaps ethically should be haunted by, can re-conceptualize the way International Relations thinks about concepts such as security, citizenship, and power. Finally, memorialization, while seemingly innocuous, is really a space for political contestation that can, if done in certain ways, really implicate the high politics of security conventional wisdom.
ContributorsAuchter, Jessica (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation critically examines whether and how the practices involved in the crafting of the European Union may be said to go beyond modern statecraft. European integration should in part be seen as an attempt to transcend the modern state. Among many of the early proponents of European integration, the nation state had become associated with militarism, jingoism and ultimately, at least partly, to the blamed for the many devastating wars on the European continent, and even a normative order that made the Holocaust possible. Most other studies that have dealt with the EU's alleged difference from the modern state have employed an understanding of the state which confers a certain ontological standing and status onto its purported object of study. This dissertation argues that a critical approach to European integration needs to go beyond such a representationalist, ontologizing understanding of a political entity. Instead, in order to start addressing the question of state violence that European integration emerged as a response to, the crafting of the Europe Union needs to be problematized in relation to practices of statecraft. The dissertation also contends that previous engagements of European integration in relation to the modern state have neglected engaging the broader normative horizon in which the modern Westphalian state is inscribed. The first chapter puts forward a way of understanding modern statecraft. The subsequent chapters examine four different legitimation discourses of European integration against such an understanding: EU's failed Constitutional Treaty, EU's foreign policy discourse, European integration theory, and an instance of European migration policy. The dissertation concludes that the crafting of Europe in many ways resembles the crafting of the modern state. In fact, the crafting of the European Union is plagued by similar ethical dilemmas as the modern state, and ultimately animated by a similar desire to either expel or interiorize difference.
ContributorsBorg, Stefan (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L. (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Thomas, George M. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
The call for an Inter-Civilizational Dialogue informed by cosmopolitical forms of Comparative Political Theory as a way to address our unprecedented global challenges is among the most laudable projects that students of politics and related fields across the world have put forth in centuries. Unfortunately, however, up until this point the actual and potential contributions of the Indigenous or 'Fourth' World and its civilizational manifestations have been largely ignored. This has clearly been the case in what refers to Indigenous American or Abya-Yalan cultures and civilizations. The purpose of this dissertation is to acknowledge, add to, and further foster the contributions of Indigenous American cultures and civilizations to the emerging fields of Comparative Political Theory and Inter-Civilizational Relations. Guided by a cosmopolitical concern for social and environmental justice, this work adds to the transcontinental and transdisciplinary effort to decolonize knowledges and practices by offering socio-ecologically balanced alternatives beyond the crisis of globalized Western modernity. This work draws on three broad Indigenous traditions, Mesoamerican, Andean, and Native North American, to offer some historical and contemporary examples of the many possible ways in which the recovery, revalorization, and revitalization of Indigenous modes of thought, practice, organization and planning can contribute to foster forms of comparative political theorizing that address the challenges of a global age bedeviled by the confluence of social and environmental crises of an unprecedented scale and scope. The dissertation first introduces comparative political theory as a framework for the inter-civilizational dialogue, arguing that Indigenous contributions have been marginalized and must be considered. Part I then focuses and elaborates on specifically Mesoamerican contributions; Part II is dedicated to Andean contributions; and Part III to Native North American contributions. The dissertation closes with a brief reflection of how Indigenous American contributions can help us address some of our most crucial contemporary global challenges, especially in what concerns the construction of cosmopolitical alternatives built on post-anthropocentric forms of socio-ecological justice.
ContributorsFigueroa Helland, Leonardo Esteban (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Mitchell, Michael J. (Committee member) / Killsback, Leo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Stability in Afghanistan has always been and will always be impossible to achieve, so long as Afghanistan remains the most corrupt country on earth, and so long as the nation's illicit drug trade continues to flourish unchecked. Longstanding conflict in Afghanistan has fostered an environment in which the interest of the nation's influential individuals tips more in favor of instability than in favor of creating a peaceful, stable country under the rule of law. Progress in securing the nation and defeating the Taliban insurgents will not win the counterinsurgency campaign alone. Dramatic political and economic reforms are required if the nation is to have a future after the withdrawal of ISAF troops and eventual reduction in foreign aid. Only permanent changes in behavior in the country can have permanent effects on the government, economy, and welfare of the population.
ContributorsPerry, Michael MacMillan (Author) / Roberts, Daniel (Thesis director) / Pagel, Bruce (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Military Science (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Stability in Afghanistan has always been and will always be impossible to achieve, so long as Afghanistan remains the most corrupt country on earth, and so long as the nation's illicit drug trade continues to flourish unchecked. Longstanding conflict in Afghanistan has fostered an environment in which the interest of the nation's influential individuals tips more in favor of instability than in favor of creating a peaceful, stable country under the rule of law. Progress in securing the nation and defeating the Taliban insurgents will not win the counterinsurgency campaign alone. Dramatic political and economic reforms are required if the nation is to have a future after the withdrawal of ISAF troops and eventual reduction in foreign aid. Only permanent changes in behavior in the country can have permanent effects on the government, economy, and welfare of the population.
ContributorsPerry, Michael MacMillan (Author) / Roberts, Daniel (Thesis director) / Pagel, Bruce (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Military Science (Contributor)
Created2014-05