Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, African-American and African Studies

This dissertation highlights racism's role in the evolution of the U.S. national security state between 1959 and 1980. It investigates the U.S. government's violent responses to domestic and global nationalist movements, including the Cuban Revolution, the Black urban rebellions in Harlem and Watts, the Viet Nam War, the Black Panther Party, and the war for liberation in Zimbabwe. In doing so, it challenges the rigid boundary separating events that occur at home from those abroad. Seen together through a racial lens, U.S. domestic and foreign activities comprise a singular apparatus that I identify as the national security state. Moreover, the state and these movements employed tactics against each other that involved constant adjustment. This dissertation therefore also conceptualizes the modern U.S. national security state as a culmination of the moves and countermoves between these oppositional forces. During the 1960s and 1970s, state forces utilized increasingly preemptive and punitive tactics against Black and Third World populations. This development, I argue, stemmed from the institutionalization of counterrevolutionary warfare as a permanent condition afflicting Black and Third World peoples. Mass incarceration, counterinsurgency, proxy war, and protracted military occupation comprise the U.S.'s modern and global counterrevolutionary war. This dissertation concludes that war became the predominant mode of racial domination after the 1960s. Through war, the U.S. national security state buttressed and elaborated the racialized global order. As such, racial violence, and the resistance against it, compelled adaptations in policing and warfare, which were consolidated into a militarized operation that transcends borders.

Committee: Kwaku Korang (Advisor); Leslie Alexander (Committee Member); Curtis Austin (Committee Member); Mathew Coleman (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American History; Black History; Black Studies; Comparative; Geography; History; International Relations; Modern History; Political Science; Social Structure; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, History

This dissertation examines the international history of the Palestinian armed struggle from late 1967 until the beginning of the Lebanese Civil war in 1975. Based on multi-archival and multilingual research in Lebanon, the United States, and the United Kingdom, I argue that the Palestinian guerillas won the struggle for international recognition by identifying themselves with the cultural forces of anti-colonialism and Third World internationalism. By laying claim to the status of a national liberation struggle, Palestinian fighters tapped into networks of global support emanating from places like Beijing, Hanoi, Algiers, and Havana that allowed them to achieve a measure of political legitimacy in the international community and provided for the continued survival of their movement. At the same time, these efforts to emulate revolutionary movements from other parts of the world helped to reshape Palestinian national identity into a profoundly cosmopolitan organism; a product of twentieth century globalization. However, these radical visions of national liberation ran headlong into U.S. designs for global order; if radical Palestinians could create a “second Vietnam” in the Middle East, the implications for U.S. authority in the Third World could be disastrous. Through support for regional police powers like Israel and Jordan, Washington was able to mount a sustained counterinsurgency campaign that prevented a guerilla victory.

Committee: Peter Hahn (Advisor); Robert McMahon (Committee Member); Stephen Dale (Committee Member); Kevin Boyle (Committee Member) Subjects: History; International Relations; Middle Eastern History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2008, History

On December 12, 1977, the U.S. signed a treaty offered through the ICRC entitled Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977. This treaty drastically altered the relationship between individual behavior in warfare and combatant status. For the United States, the impact of domestic political tensions, the fresh and painful experience in Vietnam, and a continued emphasis on Detente all played parts in the decision to participate in the conference and sign the treaty. Signature during the Carter administration would not be followed by ratification, and would be rejected by subsequent administrations. Was this decision, continued through every administration to date, a simple outcome of a rogue nation exercising its sovereign right based upon its own ability to wage war, or is there more to the story? In this thesis, a new analysis of the political processes and environment surrounding the final treaty's outcomes is offered. The global tensions between superpowers are examined, emphasizing the United States response, in the context of its perceptions of the treaty's requirements. A broader coalition of actors, both state and non-state, would ultimately hold the key to the treaty's significance to conventional warfare. The Global South engaged the issue of lawful behavior in war with a distinct set of outcomes in mind. Their ability to gain agency, build effective coalitions addressing inequities in the asymmetry of warfare that had historically disadvantaged them, and then alter the outcomes of international humanitarian law through democratic practices, are placed in the context of rational choice theory. The logical and methodical approach used by these actors to deconstruct the central premise of conventional warfare distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, consistently the hallmark of advancing improvements in international humanitarian (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Gary Hess PhD (Advisor); Dr. Douglas Forsyth PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Armed Forces; History; International Law; International Relations; Military History