College of Behavioral & Social Sciences

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..

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    Land Use and Degradation in a Desert Margin: The Northern Negev
    (MDPI, 2021-07-23) Prince, Stephen; Safriel, Uriel
    Degradation in a range of land uses was examined across the transition from the arid to the semi-arid zone in the northern Negev desert, representative of developments in land use taking place throughout the West Asia and North Africa region. Primary production was used as an index of an important aspect of dryland degradation. It was derived from data provided by Landsat measurements at 0.1 ha resolution over a 2500 km2 study region—the first assessment of the degradation of a large area of a desert margin at a resolution suitable for interpretation in terms of human activities. The Local NPP Scaling (LNS) method enabled comparisons between the observed NPP and the potential, nondegraded, reference NPP. The potential was calculated by normalizing the actual NPP to remove the effects of environmental conditions that are not related to anthropogenic degradation. Of the entire study area, about 50% was found to have a significantly lower production than its potential. The degree of degradation ranged from small in pasture, around informal settlements, minimally managed dryland cropping, and a pine plantation, to high in commercial cropping and extreme in low-density afforestation. This result was unexpected as degradation in drylands is often attributed to pastoralism, and afforestation is said to offer remediation and prevention of further damage.
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    The Smoking Gun: Toward Understanding the Decision Calculus Behind Repressive Outcomes
    (2015) Munayyer, Yousef; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Why do states repress? Why are civil liberties curtailed? Explorations of these questions have departed from the assumption that security concerns motivate decisions that lead to repressive outcomes. If the state is challenged, it will repress. A state, it is assumed, must "strike a balance" between security and liberty. But what if those assumptions are flawed? If the decisions behind politically repressive outcomes are not always motivated by security challenges to the state, then we must ask a different set of questions about what can motivate state behavior and repression. This study examines the validity of these assumptions. A survey of cases of repressive episodes in the United States, using both primary and secondary sources, reveals that the decisions behind enacting repressive measures is not as straightforward as these assumptions would have it seem. A unique case, situated both contextually and historically by the preceding survey, is then explored in depth using data that is rarely available to shed a new degree of light on a decision making process. This data is overwhelming primary source information and includes declassified material from a variety of archives, material obtained from Freedom of Information Act Requests, as well as uniquely revelatory audio evidence that has only recently been made publicly available. After reviewing the case I argue that enough evidence exists to suggest the main assumptions of the repression and civil liberties literature fails to encompass all motivating factors behind repressive outcomes and a deeper understanding of how other factors can lead to repressive outcomes is needed.
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    Hawks to Doves: The Role of Personality in Foreign Policy Decision-Making
    (2008-06-25) Ziv, Guy; Telhami, Shibley; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Why do some hawkish leaders become doves, and what determines whether these leaders' views affect dramatic change in a state's foreign policy? Structural and domestic political explanations of foreign policy change tend to overlook the importance of leaders in such change. Political psychologists offer important insight into how and why certain leaders are inclined to revise their beliefs. Two psychological factors in particular hold great promise for explaining leaders' foreign policy shifts: cognitive openness and cognitive complexity. Cognitively open leaders are receptive to new information and are thus more prone to changing their beliefs than cognitively closed leaders. Similarly, cognitively complex leaders recognize that distinct situations possess multiple dimensions, and so are more likely to engage in adaptive behavior than their cognitively simple counterparts. The primary case explored in this dissertation is that of Shimon Peres, who began his political career as a tough-minded hawk and, in mid-career, transformed into a leading dove. Peres is found to possess particularly high levels of cognitive openness and complexity, thus explaining why his dovish shift was more expansive and occurred sooner than did Yitzhak Rabin's dovish turn. Begin and Shamir, by contrast, are found to be more cognitively closed and simple than either Peres or Rabin, thus explaining why these hawks remained hawks despite having witnessed the same systemic-structural and domestic political events as Peres and Rabin. While cognitive structure is seen as the key causal variable for the leader's dovish turn, systemic-structural and domestic political factors serve as the permissive conditions and/or triggering events for this phenomenon. In the case of Peres, his cognitive structure also helps to explain why he was able to wield disproportionate influence on Israeli foreign policy during periods in which he was a secondary political actor. His high degree of cognitive openness enabled him to seek out domestic and international partners in an effort to build coalitions of support for his political agenda. His high degree of cognitive complexity facilitated an understanding of the intricate needs of the many political and bureaucratic actors with whom he dealt, enabling him to win over the necessary support for his agenda.