Ariel I Ahram
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 348104 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ariel I Ahram |
| NOMBRES | Ariel I |
| APELLIDO | Ahram |
| FIRMA | AHRAM A I |
| AFILIACIONES | Virginia Tech |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9272-3406 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 42 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 189 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 39 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Water and Ethnic Conflict in Iraq’s Internal Frontier
This article examines the political ecology of water and ethnic conflict in Kirkuk, Iraq. Kirkuk is an internally disputed frontier territory, controlled by the federal government of Iraq but claimed by Kurdish nationalists. Kirkuk contains some of Iraq’s largest oil fields and most productive agricultural lands. In recent decades Kirkuk has also faced water shortages tied to global climate change. The article deploys survey data, supplemented by…
Territory, sovereignty and rebel oil governance in the Arab uprisings
Symposium Introduction
Advancing Comparative Area Studies
In a previous volume, Comparative Area Studies (Oxford University Press, 2018), the editors laid out the distinctive features and value-added of “comparative area studies” (CAS) against the backdrop of ongoing methodological debates in the social sciences. Since that time, more researchers have been keen to employ CAS to frame their own research, while others have raised new questions about the epistemological flexibility of CAS and about the org…
Tribes and the State in Libya and Iraq
Tribes are having a day in the Middle East. A few ripped-from–the-headlines examples: New York Times travel and food writers, homebound during the pandemic, invited readers to witness “tribal” traditions like mansaf or camel wrestling vicariously. A Jordanian prince is under house arrest for allegedly instigating a tribal uprising against the Hashemite monarchy. Tribes are credited with helping oust the Asad regime in Syria and helping the Egypti…
In Search of a Middle East and North Africa Peace System
This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of the peace system in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It views peace not merely as the absence of direct violence but as the result of institutions and systems that mitigate, defuse, and diminish conflict. The peace system of MENA operates at multiple scales and deals with multiple kinds of violent conflict. Different system components produce different forms of positive and negative pe…
There Should Be No Life
This article examines the natural environment during the Kurdish genocide in northern Iraq. The genocide killed between 50,000 and 180,000 people and destroyed some 4,500 Kurdish villages from the 1960s to 1980s, reach peak violence during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). The paper uses American, British, and Iraqi archival documents to analyse how the violence affected the natural landscape and how ecological conditions constrained the violence. Ira…
The paperwork of plunder
When rebels govern oil
Weaponizing Interdependence in the Middle East
Global interdependence was supposed to herald a new age of peaceful cooperation. America's global leadership in many ways derives from its ability to maintain, augment, and protect mutually advantageous interactions. Yet the United States has also tried to use its dominance in networks of finance, trade, and communications as a tool of coercion. No region has been more affected by such weaponized interdependence (WI) than the Middle East. But WI,…
Separatists and Spoilers
Rebel oil regimes and economic governance
Most studies on oil and rebellion focus on the physical competition to control sites of resource production such as fields, refineries and export terminals. Issues of ownership are tertiary, even derisory. This paper takes issues of ownership seriously, detailing how rebel groups make legal claims to ownership of state-controlled oil assets. Rebel oil regimes are embedded in broader forms of rebel economic governance and diplomacy. Rebels can ass…
Militias, States, and the Long Shadows of Violence
Review of: Ugur Ümit Üngör, Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 224 pages. ISBN 978-0-198-82524-1
Salafism, Sectarianism, and National Identity in Iraqi Kurdistan
This article examines the history of Salafism within the Kurdistan Region of Iraq using interviews, archives, social media, and an online survey. Despite Salafism and nationalism generally being seen as rival political ideologies, KurdishSalafis have over the last decade increasingly linked their sectarian struggle to the Kurdish ethno-nationalist cause. Such efforts provide new understandings both of Salafism and of Kurdish nationalism while als…
Comparative Area Studies and the Study of the Global South
Comparative Area Studies (CAS) offers a template to bring the Global South back into the foreground of social science inquiry. CAS urges researchers to grapple directly with empirical variations derived from across the seemingly different global regions. CAS offers three comparative modes: intra-regional, cross-regional, and trans-regional. A number of scholars have used CAS’s comparative rubrics, even without knowing about the wider CAS agenda a…
Perspectives on the rebel social contract
Break All the Borders
Comparative Area Studies
Area studies scholarship has been indispensable for the development of social scientific knowledge. However, it risks becoming marginalized without more concerted efforts to demonstrate its relevance for contemporary social science. This volume showcases comparative area studies (CAS). CAS incorporates familiar elements from past comparative research but draws them together into a strategy for balancing context-sensitive understandings of diverse…
Comparative Area Studies
Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contex…
Comparative Area Studies
Area studies have undergone significant changes over the last two decades. They have been transformed from mostly descriptive accounts in the international context of the Cold War to theory-oriented and methodological analytical approaches. More recent comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related approaches, which are particularly suitable for medium N studies, have significantly contributed to this development…
Separatism, the Arab uprisings and the legacies of lost territorial autonomy
This paper considers the origins of separatist conflicts by examining the Arab uprisings of 2011. Given the internal fractionalization of Arab polities and the artificiality of their borders, many anticipated that Arab states would disintegrate. In fact, separatist conflicts only arose in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The paper combines fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis (FS/QCA) and within-case process tracing of individual cases to iden…
Sexual Violence, Competitive State Building, and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
This article examines the practices of rape, sexual enslavement, and forced marriage used by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Most research see wartime sexual violence as solutions to battlefields challenges. Studies of civil war and competitive state building during civil wars have largely overlooked the implications of such violence for rebel governance. This article explores how efforts to regulate sexuality figure within processes …
On the Making and Unmaking of Arab States
Since 2011, Arab states have faced unprecedented challenges to their territorial integrity. Movements in Kurdistan, southern Arabia, and Cyrenaica have all made unilateral bids to secure administrative and coercive control over territory. While some disavow secessionism, their agendas for separation clearly undermine their respective parent state, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Added to this is the Islamic State (IS), intent on breaking all the b…
Civilian Strategies in Civil War
Territory, Sovereignty, and New Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa
This article examines the interaction between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the Middle East and North Africa. Various groups have aspired — and have failed — to become states since the contemporary regional system’s inception after World War I. Since the 2011 uprisings, movements claiming territory and sovereignty have emerged or become more viable throughout the region, including the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Rojava, C…
Perspectives on the rebel social contract
The warlord as arbitrageur
Researching Authoritarianism in the Discipline of Democracy
Object This article examines the ways social science research approaches the study of authoritarian regimes and identifies ways to engage with regimes that are both deliberately opaque and oppressive. Method The article examines existing methodological prescriptions and practices as they pertain to the study of authoritarian regimes. These cover issues of data collection, research safety, subjective safety, and the positioning of knowledge about …
Pro-Government Militias and the Repertoires of Illicit State Violence
Most studies of pro-government militias (PGMs) take a narrowly functionalist approach. This article sees PGMs as the product of broader processes of state formation and regime dynamics that generate distinctive repertoires of violence. The article uses a cross-national dataset to shows that low state capacity is singularly correlated with the appearance and activity of all forms of PGMs. Once militias are active, they tend to endure even after in…
Sexual Violence and the Making of Isis
ISIS deploys sexual violence in ways that mirror the states it is trying to supplant. Notes1 ‘Transcript: President Obama's Speech on Combating ISIS and Terrorism’, CNN, 10 September 2014, http://www.cnn.com”/2014/09/10/politics/transcript-obama-syria-isis-speech.2 See Katrina Lee-Koo, ‘“War on Terror”/“War on Women”’, in Alex J. Bellamy et al. (eds), Security and the War on Terror (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 42–54.3 Laura Sjoberg, Gender, W…
Development, Counterinsurgency, and the Destruction of the Iraqi Marshes
Following the 1990–91 Gulf War and the subsequent March 1991 uprising, the Iraqi government launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the marshes of southern Mesopotamia. Alongside mass killing and forced population resettlement, the state used hydrological infrastructure to divert water from the wetlands, permanently desiccating the area. Using newly available Iraqi government archives, this paper argues that the destruction of the marshes…
Learning to Live with Militias
This article develops a new policy framework for dealing with weak and frail states by encouraging the formation of local militias and paramilitary forces. The international community's responses to state failure have been premised on false assumptions about the historical process of state-building. Neglecting the historical lessons of state formation contributes to interventions marred by moral hazards, unintended consequences, and ultimate futi…
Concepts and Measurement in Multimethod Research
This article argues that concept misformation and conceptual stretching undermine efforts to combine qualitative and quantitative methods in multimethod research (MMR). Two related problems result from the mismatch of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts. Mechanism muddling occurs when differences in the connotation of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts embed different causal properties into conceptual definitions.…
Sexual Violence, Competitive State Building, and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
This article examines the practices of rape, sexual enslavement, and forced marriage used by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Most research see wartime sexual violence as solutions to battlefields challenges. Studies of civil war and competitive state building during civil wars have largely overlooked the implications of such violence for rebel governance. This article explores how efforts to regulate sexuality figure within processes …
The Role of State-Sponsored Militias in Genocide
This article explains how and why armed, non-state actors collaborate with states to inflict massive levels of violence. Regime type and state capacity interact to provide state elites a menu of repertoires for implementing violence, some emphasizing direct state action, others emphasizing cooperation and alliance between state and armed, non-state actors. Rather than struggling in vain to build strong states to eliminate armed non-state actors a…
The theory and method of comparative area studies
Though many now downplay the tension between area studies and disciplinary political science, there has been little substantive guidance on how to accomplish complementarity between their respective approaches. This article seeks to develop the idea of comparative area studies (CAS) as a rubric that maintains the importance of regional knowledge while contributing to general theory building using inductive intra-regional, cross-regional, inter-re…
The paperwork of plunder
Origins and Persistence of State-Sponsored Militias
This article uses a sequential mixed method approach to examine the origins and persistence of paramilitaries and state-sponsored militias in the developing world. Combining comparative case studies of Southeast Asia and the Middle East with statistical analysis, it shows that revolutionary decolonization produces more decentralized and localized force structures, while direct inheritance of colonial armies leads to more conventional force struct…
Territory, Sovereignty, and New Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa
This article examines the interaction between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the Middle East and North Africa. Various groups have aspired — and have failed — to become states since the contemporary regional system’s inception after World War I. Since the 2011 uprisings, movements claiming territory and sovereignty have emerged or become more viable throughout the region, including the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Rojava, C…
The Decline and Fall of the Arab State
The malaise of Arab states was triggered by domestic battles, but made possible by global changes in the nature of sovereignty
Separatists and Spoilers
Separatism, the Arab uprisings and the legacies of lost territorial autonomy
This paper considers the origins of separatist conflicts by examining the Arab uprisings of 2011. Given the internal fractionalization of Arab polities and the artificiality of their borders, many anticipated that Arab states would disintegrate. In fact, separatist conflicts only arose in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The paper combines fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis (FS/QCA) and within-case process tracing of individual cases to iden…
The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding Ten Years on
© 2016 Taylor & Francis. The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This special volume opens up with a selection of nine of the most influential articles published in the journal. JISBâ s editorial team has asked the authors for their reflections on their original articles, telling us more about the writing process at that time, what they would do differently (with hindsight), or how they see their …
The Rise and Fall of Iraq in the Social Sciences
Objective This article analyzes how the extremely authoritarian nature of the Iraqi regime affected scholarship of Iraq and shows how regime opacity and brutality constrain social science research. Methods The article examines scholarly output on Iraq using qualitative and quantitative metrics from the Saddam Hussein era and the post‐2003 period after his removal from power. Results The article finds a dramatic increase in the quantity of publica…
Iraq in the Social Sciences
This article argues that the study of Iraq has been critically hampered by the opacity of the regime and the country's inaccessibility for field research, a staple technique for effective social science research. In lieu of these methods, scholars of Iraq have adopted many practices akin to those used in Cold War Sovietology, relying on a number of instrumental variables that are observable remotely. These include taking the discursive turn in ex…
When rebels govern oil
Rebel oil regimes and economic governance
Most studies on oil and rebellion focus on the physical competition to control sites of resource production such as fields, refineries and export terminals. Issues of ownership are tertiary, even derisory. This paper takes issues of ownership seriously, detailing how rebel groups make legal claims to ownership of state-controlled oil assets. Rebel oil regimes are embedded in broader forms of rebel economic governance and diplomacy. Rebels can ass…
Salafism, Sectarianism, and National Identity in Iraqi Kurdistan
This article examines the history of Salafism within the Kurdistan Region of Iraq using interviews, archives, social media, and an online survey. Despite Salafism and nationalism generally being seen as rival political ideologies, KurdishSalafis have over the last decade increasingly linked their sectarian struggle to the Kurdish ethno-nationalist cause. Such efforts provide new understandings both of Salafism and of Kurdish nationalism while als…
Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt – By Lisa Blaydes
The Frontiers of Loyalty
Proxy Warriors
The book explains why some Third World states have centralized, conventional military forces while others rely on militias, paramilitaries, and other non-state actors using detailed case studies of Indonesia, Iraq, and Iran and offers policy recommendations for dealing with weak states based on this analysis.
Learning to Live with Militias
This article develops a new policy framework for dealing with weak and frail states by encouraging the formation of local militias and paramilitary forces. The international community's responses to state failure have been premised on false assumptions about the historical process of state-building. Neglecting the historical lessons of state formation contributes to interventions marred by moral hazards, unintended consequences, and ultimate futi…
Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak's Egypt – By Lisa Blaydes
Origins and Persistence of State-Sponsored Militias
This article uses a sequential mixed method approach to examine the origins and persistence of paramilitaries and state-sponsored militias in the developing world. Combining comparative case studies of Southeast Asia and the Middle East with statistical analysis, it shows that revolutionary decolonization produces more decentralized and localized force structures, while direct inheritance of colonial armies leads to more conventional force struct…
The theory and method of comparative area studies
Though many now downplay the tension between area studies and disciplinary political science, there has been little substantive guidance on how to accomplish complementarity between their respective approaches. This article seeks to develop the idea of comparative area studies (CAS) as a rubric that maintains the importance of regional knowledge while contributing to general theory building using inductive intra-regional, cross-regional, inter-re…
The warlord as arbitrageur
Iraq in the Social Sciences
This article argues that the study of Iraq has been critically hampered by the opacity of the regime and the country's inaccessibility for field research, a staple technique for effective social science research. In lieu of these methods, scholars of Iraq have adopted many practices akin to those used in Cold War Sovietology, relying on a number of instrumental variables that are observable remotely. These include taking the discursive turn in ex…
Concepts and Measurement in Multimethod Research
This article argues that concept misformation and conceptual stretching undermine efforts to combine qualitative and quantitative methods in multimethod research (MMR). Two related problems result from the mismatch of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts. Mechanism muddling occurs when differences in the connotation of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts embed different causal properties into conceptual definitions.…
The Role of State-Sponsored Militias in Genocide
This article explains how and why armed, non-state actors collaborate with states to inflict massive levels of violence. Regime type and state capacity interact to provide state elites a menu of repertoires for implementing violence, some emphasizing direct state action, others emphasizing cooperation and alliance between state and armed, non-state actors. Rather than struggling in vain to build strong states to eliminate armed non-state actors a…
Pro-Government Militias and the Repertoires of Illicit State Violence
Most studies of pro-government militias (PGMs) take a narrowly functionalist approach. This article sees PGMs as the product of broader processes of state formation and regime dynamics that generate distinctive repertoires of violence. The article uses a cross-national dataset to shows that low state capacity is singularly correlated with the appearance and activity of all forms of PGMs. Once militias are active, they tend to endure even after in…
Sexual Violence and the Making of Isis
ISIS deploys sexual violence in ways that mirror the states it is trying to supplant. Notes1 ‘Transcript: President Obama's Speech on Combating ISIS and Terrorism’, CNN, 10 September 2014, http://www.cnn.com”/2014/09/10/politics/transcript-obama-syria-isis-speech.2 See Katrina Lee-Koo, ‘“War on Terror”/“War on Women”’, in Alex J. Bellamy et al. (eds), Security and the War on Terror (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 42–54.3 Laura Sjoberg, Gender, W…
Development, Counterinsurgency, and the Destruction of the Iraqi Marshes
Following the 1990–91 Gulf War and the subsequent March 1991 uprising, the Iraqi government launched a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in the marshes of southern Mesopotamia. Alongside mass killing and forced population resettlement, the state used hydrological infrastructure to divert water from the wetlands, permanently desiccating the area. Using newly available Iraqi government archives, this paper argues that the destruction of the marshes…
The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding Ten Years on
© 2016 Taylor & Francis. The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This special volume opens up with a selection of nine of the most influential articles published in the journal. JISBâ s editorial team has asked the authors for their reflections on their original articles, telling us more about the writing process at that time, what they would do differently (with hindsight), or how they see their …
The Decline and Fall of the Arab State
The malaise of Arab states was triggered by domestic battles, but made possible by global changes in the nature of sovereignty
Researching Authoritarianism in the Discipline of Democracy
Object This article examines the ways social science research approaches the study of authoritarian regimes and identifies ways to engage with regimes that are both deliberately opaque and oppressive. Method The article examines existing methodological prescriptions and practices as they pertain to the study of authoritarian regimes. These cover issues of data collection, research safety, subjective safety, and the positioning of knowledge about …
The Rise and Fall of Iraq in the Social Sciences
Objective This article analyzes how the extremely authoritarian nature of the Iraqi regime affected scholarship of Iraq and shows how regime opacity and brutality constrain social science research. Methods The article examines scholarly output on Iraq using qualitative and quantitative metrics from the Saddam Hussein era and the post‐2003 period after his removal from power. Results The article finds a dramatic increase in the quantity of publica…
Civilian Strategies in Civil War
Territory, Sovereignty, and New Statehood in the Middle East and North Africa
This article examines the interaction between territory, sovereignty, and statehood in the Middle East and North Africa. Various groups have aspired — and have failed — to become states since the contemporary regional system’s inception after World War I. Since the 2011 uprisings, movements claiming territory and sovereignty have emerged or become more viable throughout the region, including the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), Rojava, C…
Comparative Area Studies
Area studies scholarship has been indispensable for the development of social scientific knowledge. However, it risks becoming marginalized without more concerted efforts to demonstrate its relevance for contemporary social science. This volume showcases comparative area studies (CAS). CAS incorporates familiar elements from past comparative research but draws them together into a strategy for balancing context-sensitive understandings of diverse…
Comparative Area Studies
Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contex…
Comparative Area Studies
Area studies have undergone significant changes over the last two decades. They have been transformed from mostly descriptive accounts in the international context of the Cold War to theory-oriented and methodological analytical approaches. More recent comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related approaches, which are particularly suitable for medium N studies, have significantly contributed to this development…
Separatism, the Arab uprisings and the legacies of lost territorial autonomy
This paper considers the origins of separatist conflicts by examining the Arab uprisings of 2011. Given the internal fractionalization of Arab polities and the artificiality of their borders, many anticipated that Arab states would disintegrate. In fact, separatist conflicts only arose in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. The paper combines fuzzy set/qualitative comparative analysis (FS/QCA) and within-case process tracing of individual cases to iden…
Sexual Violence, Competitive State Building, and Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
This article examines the practices of rape, sexual enslavement, and forced marriage used by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Most research see wartime sexual violence as solutions to battlefields challenges. Studies of civil war and competitive state building during civil wars have largely overlooked the implications of such violence for rebel governance. This article explores how efforts to regulate sexuality figure within processes …
On the Making and Unmaking of Arab States
Since 2011, Arab states have faced unprecedented challenges to their territorial integrity. Movements in Kurdistan, southern Arabia, and Cyrenaica have all made unilateral bids to secure administrative and coercive control over territory. While some disavow secessionism, their agendas for separation clearly undermine their respective parent state, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya. Added to this is the Islamic State (IS), intent on breaking all the b…
Political science (35 obras) · Law (31 obras) · Sociology (28 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Law (21 obras) · Economics (19 obras) · Political economy (16 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras) · Political Conflict and Governance (14 obras) · State (computer science (12 obras)