The Iranian regime has repeatedly demonstrated a singular institutional resiliency that has been absent in other countries where "colored revolutions" have succeeded in overturning incumbents, such as Ukraine, Georgia, ...

The conflict in Syria has had a devastating impact on its people – by the end of 2015, the United Nations estimated that over 250,000 people had died throughout the previous four years of conflict, over half of Syria’s ...

The aspirations of this assessment are to convince the reader that by identifying critical features of the Ben Ali regime and its observable transformations over 23 years, I will support the conclusion that the system that ...

This dissertation argues that in order to explain the political stability of Qatar amid the region-wide tumult of the Arab Spring, we must go beyond classic rentier state explanations of economic buyoff of the citizenry. ...

Despite the urgency of rogue states for U.S. policy, scholars have not developed an understanding regarding their definition and emergence. My dissertation seeks to resuscitate rogue states as a subject of inquiry for ...

In seeking to explain why and when democratic transitions occur or do not occur, political science has treated all types of states similarly without regard to a state's ideological character despite ideology being a critical ...

This study aims to analyze the relationship between Internet access and political stability in authoritarian regimes. Internet access has been argued to both overcome certain barriers to collective action and significantly ...

This study theorizes the determinants of Islamist groups’ entry into formal political life and examines how their participation shapes the politics of neoliberal economic reform in authoritarian settings. Employing an ...

While the Arab political rebellions around 2011 grabbed the world’s attention, much ensuing scholarship focused on the short-term dynamics of contentious politics rather than the deeper authoritarian legacies that shaped ...

This thesis uses social movement theory to examine how the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and the Moroccan Justice and Development Party (PJD) frame their roles in the 2011 Arab uprisings and in the political shifts ...