Beyond Bouazizi: Culture, terror and gender equality in the Arab world
[Thesis]
Ammar Shamaileh
Grosser, Jens
The Florida State University
2015
153
Committee members: Coleman, Eric; Ryvkin, Dmitry; Siegel, David; Souva, Mark
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-79328-4
Ph.D.
Political Science
The Florida State University
2015
This dissertation explores two distinct lines of inquiry that are linked thematically through their focus on how narrow or broad an individual's world is affects that individual's beliefs and actions, as well as their regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Part 1 of this project provides the first known scholarly exploration of the relationship between generalized interpersonal trust and participation in terrorism, and finds substantial evidence to support the contention that, on average and when all other variables are held constant, an increase in generalized interpersonal trust is associated with lower levels of terrorist activity and support for the use of terrorism. I begin this section of the dissertation by presenting motivational examples in Chapter 2 that dissect the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria and the divergent turns those uprisings took. That exploration provides evidence that the differences between those uprisings may have been rooted, in part, in variations between the three states with respect to social capital and interpersonal trust dynamics. In Chapter 3, this dissertation theoretically examines the decision to choose terrorism over other, less costly forms of resistance through the analysis of a formal model, and further provides theoretical evidence to support the contention that lower levels of interpersonal trust are associated with a higher likelihood that an individual will participate in domestic terrorist activities. This project subsequently tests the relationship between generalized interpersonal trust and support for terrorism in the Arab world through the analysis of an ordered probit regression model, and finds substantial support for the hypothesis that generalized interpersonal trust is negatively correlated with support for terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa. Chapter 5 tests my central hypothesis at the country level through the analysis of a two-stage ordinary least squares regression model, and finds that states with lower levels of generalized interpersonal trust, on average and when all other variables are held constant, experience higher levels of terrorist activity.
Political science
Social sciences;Comparative politics;Female political leadership;Middle East;Terrorism