In the rubble following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in the violent assault of September 11 lies the tawdry remnants of religion’s innocence. In those brief horrifying moments our images of religion came of age. Religion was found in bed with terrorism. Whatever bucolic and tranquil notions we may have had were rudely replaced by those that were tough, political, and sometimes violent.

Is this the fault of religion? Has its mask been ripped off and its murky side exposed—or has its innocence been abused? Is religion the problem or the victim?

No one who watched in horror as the twin towers of the World Trade Center crumbled into dust on September 11, 2001 could doubt that the real target of such terrorist assaults was the global power of the United States. Those involved have said as much. Mahmood Abouhalima, one of the al Qaeda-related activists who was convicted of his role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center told me in a prison interview that buildings such as these were chosen in order to dramatically demonstrate that "the government is the enemy."

My involvement in the study of religious terrorism began with the Sikhs. I had lived in the Punjab for several years, and in the early part of my academic career I had focused on the relationship between religion and politics in India in general and the Punjab in particular. During the 1980s, therefore, I watched with mounting horror as a spiral of violence developed between Sikh militants and the government. How could such affable, intelligent people be swept up in an encounter that was so vicious, so unforgiving?

The evolution of the Global Refugee Regime (GRR) has been marked by a contradictory development that embodies the conflicts engendered by the rising tides of globalization. Economic concerns, geopolitical interests and identity politics have prompted many nation states to implement laws that are antithetical to the spirit of international refugee law. This development has had an adverse impact on the plight of refugees and asylum seekers. The Republic of Turkey is the ideal example of this phenomenon. This paper endeavors to explain what happens to Iranian asylum seekers and refugees at the intersection of GRR and Turkish national asylum policies. The paper employs personal testimonies of Iranian asylum seekers in order to underscore the negative impact of Turkish recalcitrance to embrace the GRR's norms and humanitarian values. The paper concludes with policy prescriptions that call on Turkey to abrogate the geographic limitation of the 1951 Convention relating to refugees and address the problems endemic to Iranians seeking international protection in the country.

This work develops a new understanding of the socials significance of martyrdom through a comparative analysis of the concept’s deployment in three distinct settings. Beginning by critically assessing the linguistic provenance of the term “martyr,” from the Greek word for a court witness, combined with a discussion of how such deaths are discursively shaped in opposition to the victim, soldier or suicide, I argue for a heuristic that centers on the opposition of interpretive frames at work in conflicts that create martyrs. To support such a model, I proceed by analyzing collected sets of texts said to be written by martyrs where they frame their intention and link their death to larger political and symbolic complexes. To establish a common lens through which to investigate deaths that occur in radically different contexts, I introduce the concept of the sovereign imaginary: a coherent ideal of cosmic order that configures moral judgments of right and wrong, delineates social boundaries, and provides processes of establishing legitimate authority. The contemporary political and religious authorities who rely on and propagate such imaginaries are responsible for shaping life for the communities under analysis, and their words are considered in tandem with those of the martyrs themselves.

The concept of the martyr as we understand it today originates in early Christianity, which has largely determined the contours of the term’s usage today. Second century Christianity in Asia Minor – the so-called cradle of martyrdom – provided much of the context for Christian martyrdom, and is the first case analyzed here. This area boasts members like Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna, two significant voices that shaped the understanding of martyrdom in early Christianity. By examining the socio-political context between the early Christian communities, their Jewish counterparts, and the Roman state, I trace the developing conflict around the true sovereign authority in the world, and show how harm against the body was used as a means of shoring up such authority. Armed with their own ideas about legitimate suffering, and refusing to capitulate to the coercive measures of the Roman State, Christian martyrs gave their lives in a show of affiliation to the true power in the world and thereby became exemplars of the true way to live.

A similar dynamic exists within the second case under study, the Shi’a Islamists of 1980s Iran and Lebanon, from whence the modern phenomenon of “martyrdom operations” or “suicide bombings” springs. Looking explicitly at the Iran-Iraq war – where huge numbers of young men walked willingly into bullets to overwhelm their enemy – alongside Hizbollah’s resistance to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon where human bombs were first employed as a tactic toward Islamist ends, I show how the repeated invocation of mytho-historical persons led to the experience of re-living history. Attending to the Shi’a roots of what will largely become a Sunni phenomenon, I show that the self-sacrificial violence was seen to be a necessary act in order to bring about the only truly just rule of God, one incumbent upon all true Muslims. The ability of one group to determine the requirements of a social group, I argue, resulted in the willingness of young men and women to place the ends of community over their own lives.

My last case leaves the Abrahamic context to examine the way martyrdom discourse is employed in regards to the self-immolations that have been occurring in twenty-first century Tibet. Though an explicitly Buddhist culture, here too I discover conflicts around legitimate sovereignty and political self-determination – issues at the heart of all cases under analysis – compel a discourse that encourages self-sacrifice through reference to sacred narratives. By tracing the language employed by the self-immolators in tandem with the ways the struggle with the People’s Republic of China is framed by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, I demonstrate how the same dynamic is evident in labeling the auto-cremations martyrdoms: a historic, political, and religious truth is expressed and cemented in the bodies of those willing to die rather than act against it.

In conclusion I articulate a new theoretical model by which to understand martyrdom as performance suffering, acts of voluntary affliction – contextualized in a symbolic world – that are seen to have the potential to change the situation on the ground by remaining true to the larger cosmic goals that would bring about a just existence. Maintaining that the operations of martyrdom occur on both personal and social levels simultaneously, I show that these deaths are used as pieces of evidence in support of a particular interpretive vision of truth, and that these deaths are particularly powerful and provocative due to the spectacular nature of a sovereign imaginary appearing in the flesh of those who suffer for it.

This paper analyses the deployment of counter-narratives on social media as part of counter violent extremism (CVE) strategies aimed at degrading Islamic State’s ability to recruit foreign fighters and inspire attacks abroad. It argues that the bulk of counter-narrative content emerges out of a small network of NGOs, think-tanks and organizations based in London which is conceptualized as a lattice. The quantity of counter-narrative content emerging from this lattice and elsewhere, whilst significant, is vastly mismatched by the scale of Islamic State content produced at their operational apex, and is frequently overestimated by policy papers and CVE reports from social media companies. Successful counter-narrative campaigns – identified by their adherence to academic communications theory and prevalence within CVE policy spheres – demonstrate the need for religious narratives in which normative Islam plays an active yet embedded role in modern societies outside of the so-called caliphate.

How do distributed ledger technologies, blockchain and post-blockchain systems, shape visions of the future, and how do these visions in turn influence the construction of new technologies? This question is global in nature as technologies and the technologists who create them are working within networks that defy geographic boundaries. Similarly, this research builds upon the work of scholars in several disciplines outside of global studies, including anthropology, sociology, economics, organizational studies, STS, and critical accounting. I make interdisciplinary use of theories of materiality, organization, accounting, agency, innovation, gender, and social movements to comparatively analyze how distributed ledgers are contributing to global political economic change, and toward what end. My research examines the political economy of distributed ledger technologies through ethnographic interviews (Appendix 3), future scenario building and discourse analysis. In the process, I grapple with the methodological challenges posed by studying global socio-technological changes in real time. My dissertation thesis includes chapters on an emergent technological commonwealth, applications of blockchain technology, positive and negative implications for sovereignty in blockchain-based futures, gendered technology, new forms of value accounting, and competing socio-technical imaginaries. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of the complex interaction between emergent technology, infrastructures, human behavior and imagination. A particular contribution of my research shows how technologists, cooperatives, and ordinary people are working together toward the creation of a post-capitalist ‘technological commonwealth’ enacted with advanced exchange, communication, and governance technologies. I identify the affordances of distributed ledger technology that open up new possibilities of organization, cooperation and governance. However, the technologies enable more than one possible future and my research makes clear there are competing versions of the future being constructed at this moment. Which world is birthed will be articulated in the conjuncture of technological agency and social movements. Whether, individuals, nation-states, corporations, technologists or communities are empowered will depend heavily on the design choices that are made in the next few years and on the path dependencies, and political dimensions of the policies, practices, applications, and institutions created surrounding this technology. A strong alliance is necessary between technologists and the commons movement to build the next system beyond capitalism.