Hassan, Osman Ali (2009)
Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham.
This thesis generates a greater understanding of the George W. Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda for the Middle East and North Africa. It is motivated by two central research questions: How and why was the Freedom Agenda developed? And, how was the Freedom Agenda constituted? To address these questions, a constructivist institutionalist methodology is developed. The value of this undertaking, is that it theorises the relationship between the events of September 11, 2001, and the rise of the Freedom Agenda. Consequently, this research focuses on the narrative constructed in the aftermath of the “crisis”, and how this laid discursive tracks for the evolution of the Freedom Agenda. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the Bush administration appropriated and articulated multiple discourses into a distinctive ideological-discursive formation, which in turn, sedimented particular definitions of concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. This created a new policy paradigm, which failed to address the ‘conflict of interests’ problem central to US-Middle East relations. As a result, the Freedom Agenda demonstrated a commitment to regional stability and the gradual reform of ally regimes, whilst seeking to challenge regimes hostile to the US. It was a policy caught between promoting democracy and domination.
|Type of Work:||Ph.D. thesis.|
|Supervisor(s):||Dunn, David H and Pace, Michelle|
|School/Faculty:||Colleges (2008 onwards) > College of Social Sciences|
|Department:||Department of Political Science and International Studies|
|Subjects:||JK Political institutions (United States)|
JZ International relations
JQ Political institutions Asia
|Institution:||University of Birmingham|
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