Matching Items (18)
Description
Billionaires are a relatively new phenomenon, yet their influence is immense. Some billionaires hide in the shadows, and others are at the forefront of our society. With the advent of social media, the reach of billionaires at the forefront has expanded exponentially. Some sport their fancy lifestyles, some preach their views on the world, and some share what it takes to become like them. With 2.562 billion monthly YouTube users and millions of views for any video with or about billionaires, the reach the highly wealthy have is immense. So many are watching, raising two questions are the viewers watching with the intent of learning how to become a billionaire themselves or are they purely focused on entertainment value? Additionally, what purpose does speaking to the masses through YouTube serve for the wealthiest individuals in the world? This paper will attempt to answer these questions and dive deeper into the billionaire YouTube landscape. There will be a discussion of the immense power of billionaires, what it means to be one, and an analysis of a select few of America’s wealthiest individuals. Hopefully, this will give a better perspective on the wealth-based social media landscape.
ContributorsSchwager, Justin (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis director) / Strickland, James (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
This thesis provides an overview of the events of the 1956 Suez Crisis. It begins with a brief introduction to the history of decolonization in the immediate aftermath of World War II and proceeds with an analysis of the rise to power of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Next, the events leading up to the Suez Crisis are detailed along with the motivations and objectives of the aggressor nations. A final section is dedicated to the end of the Crisis and its ramifications.
ContributorsDuntley, Eric (Author) / Niebuhr, Robert (Thesis director) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor)
Created2023-05
Description
Civil conflicts with ethnic motivating factors are more likely to experience recurrence than nonethnic conflicts. In this paper I conduct a survival analysis on a group of 175 conflict episodes from 1946-2005. I argue that grievances based on religion, race, culture, language, and/or history are difficult to resolve due to the concept of indivisibility that makes compromise on ethnic issues unpopular. Along with Clausewitz’s theory on the influence of passion, chance, and reason in war, I also argue the importance of following clear objectives. When goals change over time, strategy becomes confounded and conflict recurrence increases. Utilizing the Cox Proportional Hazards model, the hazard rate is found to be significantly higher for ethnic conflicts than nonethnic conflicts. They also face shorter periods of peace. To highlight how ethnic mechanisms effect similar conflict scenarios, a case study of the first Indo-Pakistani and Chinese Civil War is made. I find that in the absence of ethnic grievances through China’s cultural assimilation campaigns, they were able to effectively curb violent disputes while India could not.
ContributorsNguyen-Morris, Kelly (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin (Committee member) / Siroky, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Created after the Second World War, the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, was a new and important part of the United States military and intelligence apparatus. Throughout the next two decades, the agency was tasked with working alongside the president and Department of State to promote the United States’ interests abroad, and work to prevent the spread of communism during the Cold War. It engaged in multiple controversial regime changes during this era and consistently drifted away from presidential authority. Despite this, the CIA never lost funding and always had complete support from the president. The CIA would face a reckoning during the Kennedy Administration, though, when its director was forced to resign. The understanding of the CIA’s relationship to the resident and his authority is crucial to analyzing the operations it performed, and the ever-increasing power the agency would wield in its global fight against communism.
ContributorsRadu, Zachary (Author) / Niebuhr, Robert (Thesis director) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
What factors influence an authoritarian state to emphasize lower-utility repressive methods to neutralize dissidents? Previous studies have addressed covert methods of repression in the form of intelligence gathering to support the state's overt repressive actions. Such constructs, however, fail to fully articulate clandestine repressive methods that not only conceal the identity of the responsible actor from the target, but also the activity itself. To fill this gap, in this study I explore the construct of disintegration as a means for states to clandestinely neutralize dissent. While effective, these methods are also resource intensive, which makes them lower utility for the state from a cost perspective relative to overt repression and in turn begs the questions of why a state would emphasize such methods in their repressive strategy. To answer this question, I forward a structuralist argument that seeks to challenge assumptions in the literature that over-rely on existing theories of state repression. By incorporating literature from multiple disciplines, I outline a causal process that identifies the linkage between a state’s legitimation strategy and its guarantees for civil-political human rights norms to create a mechanism that could cause the state to emphasize disintegration measures. I examine three periods in the history of the German Democratic Republic and find that it emphasized disintegration in its repressive strategy during the mid-seventies due to its financial and economic agreements with the West being dependent on (appeared) compliance with the human rights stipulations of the Helsinki Accords of 1975. Stemming from this case a mid-range theory of disintegration that has implications for contemporary autocracies as well as democracies. The primary contribution of this theory lies in its ability to explain this outcome in authoritarian states that are typically less restricted in their implementation of overt repression.
ContributorsRector, William (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Hanson, Margaret (Committee member) / Bustikova, Lenka (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
How does the presence of interstate patronage impact the use of physical repression by client regimes? Previous studies have failed to comprehensively conceptualize and measure these important relationships between states. Moreover, previous studies have devoted limited attention to investigating the substantive implications of these relationships on domestic and international politics. This dissertation presents an original conceptualization and measurement of interstate patronage from the United States to every country in the 1946-2010 period. The dissertation then turns to an analysis of how patterns of US patronage impact state repression in client regimes. The findings indicate that US patronage improves human rights in autocratic client states - however, the receipt of US patronage leads to worsening human rights in democratic client settings. The findings have implications for scholars, policymakers, and observers of international politics.
ContributorsTurner, Jonathan Charles (Author) / Thomson, Henry (Thesis advisor) / Wright, Thorin M (Thesis advisor) / Peterson, Timothy M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
This work explores the underlying dynamics of democracies in the context of underdevelopment, arguing that when society has not attained a substantial degree of economic independence from the state, it undermines democratic quality and stability. Economic underdevelopment and political oppression are mutually reinforcing, and both are rooted in the structure of the agriculture sector, the distribution of land, and the rural societies that emerge around this order. These systems produce persistent power imbalances that militate toward their continuance, encourage dependency, and foster the development of neopatrimonialism and corruption in the government, thereby weakening key pillars of democracy such as accountability and representativeness. Through historical analysis of a single case study, this dissertation demonstrates that while this is partly a result of actor choices at key points in time, it is highly influenced by structural constraints embedded in earlier time periods. I find that Ghana’s historical development from the colonial era to present day closely follows this trajectory.
ContributorsEllis, Alicia N (Author) / Thies, Cameron (Thesis advisor) / Warner, Carolyn (Committee member) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
This paper applies six components of Tocqueville's lens to Imperial Germany in an effort to demonstrate how from a contemporary's perspective the Kaiserreich can be understood to have deviated from what was conceived at the time as the standard path to political, economic, and social modernity, and that these deviations give a justification for the original positive understanding of a German Sonderweg that balanced the excesses of both Western Liberalism and Eastern Reactionarism whilst using the best.
ContributorsMcCoy, Jonah F (Author) / Taliaferro, Karen (Thesis director) / Benkert, Volker (Committee member) / Thomson, Henry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership (Contributor)
Created2021-12