Browsing by Subject "ISIS"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Conflict politics surrounding the advent of ISIS: an Iranian media perspective
(2015-12) Martin, Matthew Allen; Shirazi, Faegheh, 1952-; Aghaie, Kamran S.
At first glance, Iran and the United States seem to be natural allies in the fight against the Islamic State. However, there has been neither military cooperation between the two countries in this regard nor is there evidence to suggest that the respective governments of these countries understand one another. In a twofold effort of increasing mutual understanding and filling in a gap in media content analysis, this research used qualitative discourse analysis to investigate the Iranian regime’s political narrative surrounding the Islamic State as presented by the regime-affiliated publications Kayhan Farsi and Kayhan English, printed in Farsi and English respectively, from 1 June 2014 to 31 August 2014. The study found that while both Iranian regime publications advocated for the same political ends, they did so via different means; generally, Kayhan Farsi justified its stances on various issues by scapegoating the United States and Israel while Kayhan English favored legalistic arguments seemingly designed to persuade English speakers to the regime position. The harsh anti-American tone taken by the Iranian regime makes any counter-ISIS cooperation beyond military de-confliction appear unlikely.
The Cultural Offensive Against ISIS
(2016) Pauloski, James Gregory
Enemy of My Enemy, Enemy of My Friend: the United States, the Syrian Kurds, and Proxy War in Syria
(2021-05) Reppeto, J.P.
An ongoing resurgence of proxy warfare in the world’s conflicts has created an opportunity to reexamine the frameworks used to study it, namely principal-agent theory. In Syria, the United States formed a principal-agent pairing with a local Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), to defeat the transnational threat posed by the militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Their relationship is but one of several proxy dynamics taking place in Syrian Civil War, with the pressure exerted by different actors such as Turkey and Russia ultimately affecting the US-YPG partnership. This thesis seeks to update principal-agent applications to proxy war by inspecting the impact of third parties on the US-YPG principal-agent relationship.
Eschatology in the ISIS narrative
(2015-12) Petit, David Nathaniel; Moin, A. Azfar; Kuperman, Alan J
Apocalyptic millenarianism, rooted in traditional Islamic eschatology, is at the very core of the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s narrative and its claim to sovereignty and legitimacy. The millenarian narrative also represents a radical departure from the jihadist paradigm of al-Qa’ida and provides a major conceptual and theoretical challenge to al-Qa’ida’s leadership of the global jihadist movement. Other combatant groups in the Syrian civil war, such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Hezbollah, make some limited use of millenarian symbols. This essay will reference these cases briefly, for the purposes of comparison and context. The primary goals are to analyze the Islamic State’s challenge to al-Qa’ida, document ISIS’s millenarian narrative, and to contextualize these millenarian outbursts.