UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item To Drink a Cup of Fire: Morality Tales and Moral Emotions in Egyptian, Algerian, and French Anti-Colonial Activism, 1945-1960(2019) Abu Sarah, Christiane Marie; Wien, Peter; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1940s and 1950s, newspapers in Egypt, Algeria, and France debated the behavior of activists who sacrificed themselves for a cause, calling them “hysterics,” “radicals,” “fanatics,” and “terrorists.” Underlying these debates was a core question: what “rational” person would choose to sacrifice himself for a cause? To learn how activists answered their critics, and to explore transnational patterns of activist exchange, this study explores two revolutionary moments: the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the Algerian Revolution of 1954–1962. Focusing on four Egyptian clubs (the Muslim Brotherhood, Young Egypt, the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation, and the Workers’ Vanguard); three Algerian organizations (the Front de Libération Nationale, the Mouvement National Algérien, and the Parti Communiste Algérien); and three French anti-colonial networks (the Jeanson network, the Curiel network, and the Mandouze network), the study analyzes data recovered from activist journals, tracts, court cases, police confessions, and memoirs—data gathered through multi-archival research conducted at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Amsterdam), Dar al-Kutub (Cairo), The National Archives (London), and the Service Historique de la Défense (Paris). The result is a cognitive and behavioral history of transnational activist movements. Setting aside the motive-based question of why activists made certain decisions, the study surveys how activists made decisions and narrativized behaviors. Three types of stories are examined: stories of affiliation, stories of aggression, and stories about morality. Each set of stories is linked to a research question. How did individuals decide to affiliate with certain clubs over others? How did activists decide to commit violent attacks? And what role did morality tales, moral rationalizations, and “moral emotions” (like disgust, shame, and anger) play in these processes? As the study contends, activists drew on a common toolkit of cognitive and behavioral strategies to make decisions, negotiate behavior, and mobilize support for decolonization—crossing ideological, religious, and national boundaries in the process. Activist storytelling thus highlights the hybridity of Arab and French moral imaginaries, revealing how activists practiced emotions and produced movements. Their stories also foster awareness of how individuals negotiate concepts of right and wrong, both in public and in private.Item Strategic vs. Opportunistic Looting: The Relationship Between Antiquities Looting and Armed Conflict in Egypt(2016) Fabiani, Michelle Rose Dippolito; McGloin, Jean; Dugan, Laura; Criminology and Criminal Justice; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Antiquities are looted from archaeological sites across the world, seemingly more often in areas of armed conflict. Previously, the relationship between antiquities looting and armed conflict has been assessed with qualitative case studies and journalistic evidence due to a lack of data. This study considers the relationship between antiquities looting and armed conflict in Egypt from 1997 – 2014 with a newly collected time series dataset. A combination of Lag-augmented Vector Autoregression (LA-VAR) and Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models (ARDL) is used to look at both the overall relationship between these two phenomena and their temporal ordering. Ultimately, this thesis finds that: (1) antiquities looting and armed conflict have a positive statistically significant relationship, (2) there is stronger support for antiquities looting preceding armed conflict than for the reverse temporal ordering, and (3) this relationship varies by type of conflict.Item Egyptian Pagans through Christian Eyes(2016) Juliussen-Stevenson, Heather Ann; Holum, Kenneth; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Construction of Christian identity in Egypt proceeded in pace with construction of the Egyptian pagan “Other” between the second and sixth centuries. Apologies, martyrdoms, apocalypses, histories, sermons, hagiographies, and magical texts provide several different vantage points from which to view the Christian construction of the Egyptian pagan “Other”: as the agent of anti-Christian violence, as an intellectual rival, as an object of anti-pagan violence, as an obstacle to salvation, and—perhaps most dangerously—as but another participant in a shared religious experience. The recent work of social scientists on identity, deviance, violence, social/cultural memory, and religiosity provides insight into the strategies by which construction of the “Other” was part of a larger project of fashioning a “proper” Christian religious domain.Item Vertical Integration and Institutional Constraints on Firm Behavior: The Case of the Garment Industry in Egypt(2005-05-26) El-Haddad, Amirah Moharram; Murrell, Peter; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Internalizing market transactions has been seen by New Institutional Economics (NIE) as a means of over-coming transaction costs. Several specific theories have been put forward as to how the presence of such costs (variously defined), or other institutional factors, motivates firms to vertically integrate (Chapter 2). However, a review of case study evidence from garment producers in Egypt (Chapter 3) shows that there are also important constraints on vertical integration, though these do not affect all firms equally. Small firms in particular suffer from an underdeveloped capital market which hinders expansion. Other features of the Egyptian setting encourage integration; e.g. problems with fabric quality for high-end garment producers, and the need for timely delivery. Chapter 4 uses the findings from these case studies to adapt the theories presented in Chapter 2 to the Egyptian context, and identifies other institutional factors relevant to the 'make or buy' decision. This thesis presents analysis of a new data set of 257 private Egyptian garment firms collected for this research. Chapter 5 presents the sample and survey design, and descriptive analysis of the degree and order of integration. Features of the Egyptian business environment, such as imperfect credit markets, are shown to be among the most significant determinants of vertical integration (Chapter 6). However, prominent theories of vertical integration are also relevant, for example search and switch costs encourage integration while monitoring costs discourage it. The contributions of this thesis to the existing literature include the analysis of vertical integration in a developing country setting using a new data set. The empirical analysis encompasses all existing theories, rather than simply the one of interest, and introduces context-specific factors not considered elsewhere, which is shown to bias other research's results. Integration is modeled as a fractional response, rather than a dichotomous variable as has been done in other papers, using a model specification that partially gets around the endogeneity problem, which has plagued the literature. The empirical findings have two methodological implications. First, theories are complementary rather than competitors. Second, empirical work focusing on only one theory suffers from omitted variable bias.