Browsing by Subject "State"

Dynamic models, also termed state space models, comprise an extremely rich model class for time series analysis. This dissertation focuses on building state space models for a variety of contexts and computationally efficient methods for Bayesian inference for simultaneous estimation of latent states and unknown fixed parameters.

Chapter 1 introduces state space models and methods of inference in these models. Chapter 2 describes a novel method for jointly sampling the entire latent state vector in a nonlinear Gaussian state space model using a computationally efficient adaptive mixture modeling procedure. This method is embedded in an overall Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for estimating fixed parameters as well as states. In Chapter 3 the method of the previous chapter is implemented in a few illustrative

nonlinear models and compared to standard existing methods. This chapter also looks at the effect of the number of mixture components as well as length of the time series on the efficiency of the method. I then turn to an biological application in Chapter 4. I discuss modeling choices as well as derivation of the state space model to be used in this application. Parameter and state estimation are analyzed in these models for both simulated and real data. Chapter 5 extends the methodology introduced in Chapter 2 from nonlinear Gaussian models to general state space models. The method is then applied to a financial

stochastic volatility model on US $ - British £ exchange rates. Bayesian inference in the previous chapter is accomplished through Markov chain Monte Carlo which is suitable for batch analyses, but computationally limiting in sequential analysis. Chapter 6 introduces sequential Monte Carlo. It discusses two methods currently available for simultaneous sequential estimation of latent states and fixed parameters and then introduces a novel algorithm that reduces the key, limiting degeneracy issue while being usable in a wide model class. Chapter 7 implements the novel algorithm in a disease surveillance context modeling influenza epidemics. Finally, Chapter 8 suggests areas for future work in both modeling and Bayesian inference. Several appendices provide detailed technical support material as well as relevant related work.

Iraqi academics have had a pivotal role in shaping and building Iraqi society, identity, and national structures, since the country’s independence from British colonial rule. Following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a significant number of academics were assassinated and forced into exile and internal displacement. Since this population has always been intertwined with the state and different regimes of power, they are uniquely-situated to provide critical and multifaceted analyses on politics, the intertwined relationship between academics and power, and the complexity of exile. Through what I call a “genealogy of loss,” this ethnography traces the academic, political, and social lives of academics in contemporary Iraq to uncover the losses this population-and the Iraqi people- have incurred in contemporary Iraq. Beginning with the period from the ascendancy of the Ba‘ath Party in 1968, to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and up to the present, I examine the lives of Iraq’s exiled academics in three sites: the UK, Jordan, and Iraqi Kurdistan. I first examine their experience during the Ba‘ath era to explore their work, struggles, and hardships, as they made significant contributions to building their society and nation. I attempt to provide a nuanced anthropological account of life under the Ba‘ath regime and its ideals and complex realities. The second part examines these academics’ post-US occupation experiences both inside Iraq and in exile. I argue that the reconfiguration of the Iraqi state, and the shift from a secular, unified, one-party system into a divided space ruled by the occupying forces and their appointed sectarian and ethno-nationalist leaders and militia groups, has reconfigured the role of the academic and of higher education. The occupation and the subsequent Iraqi governments used death threats and assassinations, sectarianism, and “de-Ba‘athification” as forms of governance to restructure society. Many academics and professionals were either assassinated or forced into exile by sending them bullets and threat notes in envelopes. I explore how academics’ relatively stable jobs in pre-invasion Iraq are now “contracted lives” with devastating effects on their personal lives, intellectual projects, and the future of Iraq. Such lives entail living in spaces under precarious and temporary contracts and with residency cards subject to annual renewal or termination. These academics now live in constant fear and what I call a “plan B mode of existence.” While an extreme and violent case, this ethnography argues that the conditions of Iraqi academics in exile are connected to neoliberal global trends marked by the commercialization and corporatization of higher education, adversely affecting academic, social, and political freedoms of writing, thinking, and being in this world.

Among the most significant changes to the agricultural sector in the twentieth century include a sharp decline in employment and the numbers of farms, a decline in the proportion of total value that accrues to agricultural producers, and an increase in farm level and regional specialization. Within the U.S., substantial differences in the characteristics of agricultural producers and the spatial distribution of production persist amid industry change. These changes coincided with changes in global markets, domestic consumption, consolidation and concentration within the processing and retailing sectors, and government policy. The causality that lies behind these developments is the key puzzle that this study addresses.

This study advances an institutional explanation of industry formation across locations within the U.S. Differences in industry constitution at the local level produce different impacts of and responses to global markets, reflected by economic changes and policy developments, as actors work to secure stability and advantage in markets (Fligstein 2001). This study uses the global value chains' definition of the industry, which incorporates the network of actors arrayed along a process of production, to capture the set of actors with the capacity to affect industry operation (Gereffi 1994). An assessment of the relative importance of local economic characteristics, global markets, organization and coordination within industries, and government policies to where production locates in the primary objective of the study.

The pork and non-cigar tobacco industries across several states within the United States from 1959 through 2005 allow for a contrast along the key changes identified above. Within case comparison is used to construct causal narratives of industry change at the state level. Panel and pooled time series analysis assess the relative importance the factors to agricultural change.

Local economic characteristics largely fade from significance with the inclusion of the theoretical perspectives. Total and net trade in agricultural and manufactured products is generally significant across industries for production, although this is not the case for specific tobacco types. The proportion of farms composed of small farms is significant for production and for farm structure in both industries. The presence of manufacture is significant for hog production and could not be assessed for tobacco. While federal policies are broadly significant for the tobacco industry, identified state policies exhibit few consistent effects for hog production. Importantly, farm structure measures were only available for Census years, which reduces sample size. Second, many of the measures are industry-specific, which reduces comparability.

This study is a comparative historical analysis of the link between environmental activism and state-society relations in 20th century Russia and Mexico. It explores the three main currents of environmentalism that originated in these two countries under non-democratic political systems that originated in the social revolutions of 1910 (Mexico) and 1917 (Russia) and the roles that each current has played in the process of democratization that began in the 1980s. It is based on critical evaluation and synthesis of the following theoretical fields: collective action, social movements, political regime change and democratic transition. Scholarly literature and press sources are used to corroborate and evaluate findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with environmental activists, researchers, lawyers, and journalists as well as data from participant observation conducted by the author in Russia and in Mexico. The main findings of the study are two-fold. 1) Environmental activism affects social rather than political democratization. 2) The type of environmental activism that has the most significant impact on social democratization is social environmentalism - the current that emphasizes the synergy between the struggles for social justice and civil rights on the one hand and against environmental degradation on the other.

This dissertation is an account of how contemporary Pakistani ulama grapple with their political realities and the Islamic state of Pakistan. The central conceptual question that scaffolds my dissertation is: How do Pakistani ulama negotiate tradition, authority and sovereignty with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? In engaging with this issue, this dissertation employs a methodology that weds ethnography with rigorous textual analysis. The ulama that feature in this study belong to a variety of sectarian persuasions. The Sunni ulama are Deobandi and Barelvi; the Shia ulama in this study are Ithna Ashari.

In assessing the relationship between Pakistani ulama and their nation-state, I assert that the ulama's dialectical engagements with the state are best understood as a dexterous navigation between affirmation, critique, contestation and cultivation. In proposing this manner of thinking about Pakistani ulama's engagements with their state, I provide a more detailed and nuanced view of the ulama-state relationship compared to earlier works. While emphasizing Pakistani ulama's vitality and their impact on their state, this dissertation also draws attention to the manners in which the state impacts the ulama. It theorizes the subject formation of the ulama and asserts the importance of understanding the ulama as formed not just by the ethico-legal tradition in which they are trained but also by the state apparatus.

This dissertation examines the interplay between sovereignty and governmentality in the domain of welfare provision in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast through the analytic of debt.

The dissertation shows that debt lies at the heart of Turkish and Kurdish political identities in Turkey, but with a significant difference. For decades the Turkish state has exerted strong control over the economy and selectively distributed economic resources in favor of allegiant populations while dispossessing the unruly. This dynamic has given way to a common conception among the mainstream Turkish citizenry that allocation of economic resources is at the mercy of the state and citizens owe allegiance and obedience to the state for all that it bestows on them.

Although this debt morality pervades Turkey, it is interrupted and transformed in the Kurdish region. Considered the internal other of the Turkish nation and resisting ethnic homogenization and economic and political centralization policies for decades, Kurds have been subjected to systematic state violence and dispossession. This state violence and resistance to it have engendered a counter-debt morality in the Kurdish region, finding expression in the idiom bedel ödemek (paying the price). Foregrounding a history of state violence and dispossession rather than state benevolence, bedel reverses the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey, rendering the state indebted to the Kurds. Moreover, having emerged out of the Kurdish struggle, bedel redefines the Kurdish political identity around a new set of obligations: to stand up against the state for individual and collective self-determination and to pay tribute to those who made sacrifices in resisting the state.

This dissertation unpacks the political, economic and cultural logics of these two competing debt moralities and traces their contestation in the domain of welfare bureaucracy in an effort to demonstrate how struggles over sovereignty permeate governmental practices in the region.

My two years of ethnographic research (2012–2014) largely focused on the decision-making practices of local welfare officials, who enjoy an immense discretionary power in selecting beneficiaries. It showed that many officials’ practices were informed by the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey that promotes welfare as state benevolence and expects beneficiaries to repay their debt through allegiance and subservience. Although bedel leaks into welfare distribution—through the moral judgments of Kurdish officials—it works in the shadows, remaining largely silent and secret. This suppression of bedel, I suggest, bespeaks the state’s role in denying its own violence and asserting a unidirectional debt relation on beneficiary citizens. Illustrating how state-sponsored social welfare governance operates as a violent, debt-producing mechanism, the dissertation suggests that sovereign violence is intrinsic to the state’s governmental practices in the Kurdish region.

However, the domain of social welfare is not limited to the central state-sponsored social assistance programs. Over the years Kurdish movement has initiated its own welfare programs. Just as with centrally organized welfare programs, alleviation of poverty constitutes the main framework in which these initiatives operate. However, bedel plays a more overt role in these initiatives’ approach to social welfare than it does in centrally organized public social assistance programs. This difference can be traced to the categories and vocabularies that Kurdish movement-led initiatives use as well as to their practices of beneficiary selection. The dissertation traces the ways in which bedel is incorporated into the workings of Kurdish movement-led welfare programs and illustrates how this incorporation opens up room for the nurturing of resistant subjectivities and socialities that challenge the hegemonic debt morality in Turkey as well as the political and economic dispossession it entails. I thus argue that incorporation of bedel in Kurdish initiatives politicizes welfare and constitutes an obstacle to the Turkish state’s establishing and maintaining its sovereign power in the Kurdish region by means of welfare governance.

The dissertation contributes to broad theorizations of power and statecraft, redistribution and dispossession, and political conflict in the Middle East. These lines of inquiry have dominated social sciences for decades, but they have often remained separated. This disconnect obscures the close connections between governmental practices and the workings of sovereign power, preventing us from accounting for the moral and economic dynamics that inform political conflicts. I take debt as both an empirical object and an epistemological vantage point to bring these literatures together and offer different historical and ethnographic strategies of analyzing the state, political subjectivities and their conflictual construction.