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- Genre: Doctoral Dissertation
Description
Arguing for the importance of decolonial pedagogy in human rights education, this research is located at the intersection of human rights education, pedagogy, and justice studies, and is situated in the context of a contested neoliberal university in order to learn about and understand some of the challenges in implementing pedagogical change inspired by decolonial theory. This research focuses on pedagogical approaches of human rights professors to understand how and to what extent they are aligned with and informed by, incorporate, or utilize decolonial theory. This is accomplished through a content analysis of their syllabi, including readings and pedagogical statements, and semi-structured interviews about their praxis to draw attention to the what and how of their pedagogical practices and the ways in which it aligns with a decolonial pedagogical approach. This research calls attention to the specific manner in which they include decolonial pedagogical methods in their human rights courses. The findings determined that a decolonial pedagogical approach is only just emerging, and there is a need to address the barriers that impede their further implementation. In addition, there is a need for research that will further investigate the pedagogical approaches professors are employing, particularly those in alignment with decolonial criteria; the impact of decolonial and non-decolonial approaches on students’ epistemologies, and how to overcome barriers to advance implementation of a decolonizing pedagogical approach.
ContributorsAldawood, Danielle (Author) / Gomez, Alan (Thesis advisor) / Simmons, William (Committee member) / Rothenberg, Daniel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
ABSTRACT
Although the US government has been using remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), more commonly referred to as drones, to conduct military strikes against terrorists and insurgents since at least 2001, only around 2011 did media outlets and polling organizations began assessing the attitudes of Americans towards the use of drones as a weapon of war. Initially, public support for drone strikes was robust with nearly 70 percent of Americans expressing approval. As the discussion of drone strikes intensified however, public support declined over 10 percentage points.
Only a handful of studies have examined public opinion and drone strikes, and all have focused exclusively on explaining support. This study seeks to fill this gap in the literature and explain opposition to drone strikes. The primary argument put forth in this dissertation is that people’s beliefs determine their opinions, and their morality determines their beliefs. Although independent opinion formation is often considered a cognitive process, I argue that, at least in the case of drone strikes, the opinion formation process is largely an affective one.
By examining media coverage and elite discourse surrounding drone strikes, I isolate three narratives which I believe communicate certain messages to the public regarding drone strikes. I argue that the messages produced by elite discourse and disseminated by the media to the public are only influential on opinion formation once they have been converted to beliefs. I further argue that conversion of message to belief is largely dependent on individual moral attitudes.
To test my arguments, I conduct a survey-experiment using subjects recruited from Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies student subject pool. My research findings lead to two key conclusions. First, opposition to drone strikes is largely the product of the belief(s) that drone strikes are not necessary for protecting the United States from terrorist attack, and that drone strikes kill more civilians than do strikes from conventional aircraft. Second, whether an individual expresses support or opposition to drone strikes, moral attitudes are a relatively good predictor of both beliefs and disposition.
Although the US government has been using remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), more commonly referred to as drones, to conduct military strikes against terrorists and insurgents since at least 2001, only around 2011 did media outlets and polling organizations began assessing the attitudes of Americans towards the use of drones as a weapon of war. Initially, public support for drone strikes was robust with nearly 70 percent of Americans expressing approval. As the discussion of drone strikes intensified however, public support declined over 10 percentage points.
Only a handful of studies have examined public opinion and drone strikes, and all have focused exclusively on explaining support. This study seeks to fill this gap in the literature and explain opposition to drone strikes. The primary argument put forth in this dissertation is that people’s beliefs determine their opinions, and their morality determines their beliefs. Although independent opinion formation is often considered a cognitive process, I argue that, at least in the case of drone strikes, the opinion formation process is largely an affective one.
By examining media coverage and elite discourse surrounding drone strikes, I isolate three narratives which I believe communicate certain messages to the public regarding drone strikes. I argue that the messages produced by elite discourse and disseminated by the media to the public are only influential on opinion formation once they have been converted to beliefs. I further argue that conversion of message to belief is largely dependent on individual moral attitudes.
To test my arguments, I conduct a survey-experiment using subjects recruited from Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies student subject pool. My research findings lead to two key conclusions. First, opposition to drone strikes is largely the product of the belief(s) that drone strikes are not necessary for protecting the United States from terrorist attack, and that drone strikes kill more civilians than do strikes from conventional aircraft. Second, whether an individual expresses support or opposition to drone strikes, moral attitudes are a relatively good predictor of both beliefs and disposition.
ContributorsDavis, Christopher Todd (Author) / Wood, Reed (Thesis advisor) / Fridkin, Kim (Committee member) / Kubiak, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Wright, Thorin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
How do political elites perceive regional intergovernmental organizations that seek to promote democracy? When do political elites view regional intergovernmental institutions promoting democracy as legitimate? Many informal and formal types of regional intergovernmental institutions have sought to spread democracy. However, previous research on the nexus of regional intergovernmental institutions and democracy has focused primarily on the latter. Furthermore, these studies claim that membership in these formal international institutions (a.k.a. international organizations) increases the likelihood of the democratic survival of a newly democratic regime. Membership in these organizations provides a seal of approval that the newly democratic country intends to remain democratic. This kind of external validation should dissuade spoilers from undermining the transition and encourage ordinary people to support the transitional regime. This argument assumes that the domestic audience trusts this organization and believes it plays a vital role in society. Whether elites have confidence that the regional organization can positively impact democratic consolidation and how they perceive different types of regional organizations promoting democracy are empirical questions. This project seeks to answer these questions through a small sample and non-population-based elite survey experiment in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. I also run a laboratory survey experiment with a larger sample of university students, giving me the opportunity for statistical power. The results suggest that political elites are skeptical of regional intergovernmental bodies promoting democracy. Meanwhile, non-elites consider regional institutions promoting democracy illegitimate when they are informal, i.e., no written shared expectations, rules, and permanent secretariat. When regional interstate cooperation on democracy operates under a formal procedure or codified in an international treaty and supported by a permanent secretariat, non-elites tend to consider them more legitimate.
ContributorsSari, Angguntari Ceria (Author) / Thies, Cameron G. (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis advisor) / Neuner, Fabian (Committee member) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Shair-Rosenfield, Sarah (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
In this dissertation, I investigate the causes of differences in the use of suicide terror by non-state armed groups, including magnitude of use, targeting decisions, and how reliant groups are on suicide attacks. I develop and test the propositions that the age of groups and the capability of the state military they face significantly impact the scale of use and targeting selection of their suicide attacks. Older groups are predicted to carry out a decreased number of suicide attacks in comparison with younger groups, but increase their focus on attacking hard targets and decrease their focus on attacking soft targets, due to older groups being more likely to possess skilled terror operatives and to follow traditional guerrilla warfare practices. Groups that began using suicide terror later in their existence are predicted to carry out less suicide attacks than groups that adopt the tactic earlier in their histories, due to organizations having increased reliance on established practices and procedures. Groups fighting strong state militaries are predicted to carry out more suicide attacks, a higher proportion of attacks on soft targets, and be more reliant on suicide terror than are groups fighting weak militaries, as increased military pressure on groups decreases the effectiveness of their individual attacks, reduces their ability to train skilled operatives, and increases their desperation and incentive to use unconventional tactics. I conduct a quantitative analysis of 140 groups from 1998-2012 and find that older groups and groups that adopt suicide terror later in their existence carry out less suicide attacks than younger groups and groups that adopt suicide terror earlier in their histories. I also find that groups respond to increases in state military personnel by carrying out more suicide attacks overall, a higher proportion of suicide attacks against soft targets, a lower proportion against hard targets, and by becoming more reliant on suicide terror. These dynamics are also illustrated in depth through case study analysis of suicide terror campaigns by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)/Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which represent two distinct models of suicide terror.
ContributorsGoldenberg, Samuel Klapper (Author) / Wood, Reed (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis advisor) / Peterson, Timothy (Committee member) / Siroky, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This dissertation develops a theory on the strategic interaction between civilians and combatants in war zones. It builds on the emerging field of research on noncombatant self-protection mechanisms in civil wars and addresses two questions: first, once civilians have decided to organize a resistance campaign, why do they choose armed or unarmed methods of struggle? Second, how do armed groups respond to this challenge? Regarding resistance strategies, I argue norms against the use of violence determine the content of a campaign when a community depends on an external ally to organize the mobilization and such an actor has strong preferences for peaceful activism. Strategic factors (e.g., rebels’ reputation) are determinant when norm entrepreneurs are absent or fail to influence the community. Concerning groups’ reaction to a resistance campaign, the dissertation conducts one of the first comparisons of the effectiveness of these strategies. To do so, it advances a typology that distinguishes between moderate (i.e., protests) and radical strategies (either unarmed or armed self-protection) and proposes two game-theoretic models of the civilian-combatant interaction in war zones. These models predict that rebels are more likely to repress radical rather than moderate strategies. The dissertation tests this theory with statistical methods and a novel dataset on resistance campaigns in Colombia (1985-2005). It explores the Catholic Church's promotion of peaceful activism against the war in this country and tests the theory on the civilian choice of strategy with multilevel multinomial models. This empirical method yields robust evidence to the theory: when encountering a rebel group with a negative reputation, civilians are more likely to organize violent self-protection rather than peaceful activism. In contrast, when there is a powerful third party with the leverage and resolution to promote nonviolent action, civilians are more willing to undertake a peaceful mobilization rather than create a militia. The empirical expectations concerning the warring parties’ reaction to civilian dissent are examined with methods for causal inference with panel data. The dissertation corroborates that protests can compel insurgents to make concessions to the population. In contrast, rebels tend to harshly retaliate against communities that escalate a campaign with violent tactics.
ContributorsOrtega Poveda, Pablo Alberto (Author) / Wood, Reed (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Thesis advisor) / Hechter, Michael (Committee member) / Kaplan, Oliver (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
How do religion and ethnicity shape the sustainability of peace after civil wars? Ethnic and religious conflicts have been rising in prevalence over the last half-century, generating larger headlines as they influence every corner of the world. These conflicts occur across faiths, sects, and nations, and they appear to reignite in intervals, devolving into conflict again and again with spells of relative peace in between. With some notable exceptions, previous research on conflict recurrence has focused primarily on either ethnicity or religion, resulting in limited understanding of the ways that religion and ethnicity may interact. Moreover, many studies simplify the study of religion, ethnicity, and conflict by reducing it to an issue of shared identity, i.e., whether the two warring parties are from the same nominal religious or ethnic group. This project explores the role that religion and ethnicity play in three major causes of conflict recurrence: post-war autonomy, peacetime discrimination, and territorial claims. The primary argument is that religious and ethnic identities drive conflict recurrence through territorial claims, achieving autonomy, and their reactions to discrimination. Using a stratified Cox Proportional Hazard model, I analyze global data on all post-intrastate armed conflict peace years between 1980 and 2006. The results suggest that the indivisibility of territory in religious conflicts makes conflict more likely to recur, but only in cases where the fundamental question at hand is the role of religion in government. In addition, conflicts organized around ethnicity are increasingly unlikely to respond to discrimination by returning to war. The extreme scarcity of post-war autonomy arrangements rendered robust conclusions about its effect difficult to discern.
ContributorsTarr, Nathan (Author) / Siroky, David (Thesis advisor) / Warner, Carolyn (Committee member) / Wright, Thorin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022