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Prior to the 2011 political unrest in the Middle East, Al-Qaeda had been the hegemon in the global jihadism until its offspring the Islamic State in Iraq shot into fame through their spectacular military successes in Iraq and Syria, throwing a challenge to Al-Qaeda. The feat of the Islamic State attracted a lot of foreign fighters to join them. The relationship between Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State became more acrimonious when the Islamic State rebranded and called itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). As was expected, these developments caused concerns among leaders of Al-Qaeda who felt their monopoly over global jihad was slipping out of their hands. Though the affiliates of these two groups fought each other in every theater they met, their Sahel affiliates, Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS), and Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimeen (JNIM) in Northwest Africa had a cooperative relationship until 2019. While Al-Qaeda embarks on preaching Islam to the people in its areas of jurisdiction, ISIS focuses on seizing territories. This series of events has created problems between the two prominent terrorist groups of which none is ready to accept the other's supremacy. Brigadier General, Ghana Army Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited.

This thesis analyzes Libya's historic 2003 decision to abandon its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs and normalize relations with the West. Despite the political and scholarly claims at the time, this thesis shows that the effectiveness of any specific policy instrument is best evaluated in the dynamic domestic and global geopolitical and economic contexts within which they are exercised. A within case comparison of the 2003 reversal and two other Libyan policy reversals allows us to hold a number of key variables constant, while allowing U.S. coercive instruments to vary. This thesis generally finds that U.S. policy instruments were most effective when they worked to magnify or exacerbate an antecedent condition. Specific lessons learned from the Libyan case could apply to counter proliferation efforts vs. Iran as well as future U.S. policy in Africa. http://archive.org/details/thelibyconversio109455379 US Marine Corps (USMC) author Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.

Terrorist havens are an imortant policy problem today. The policy and academic literature has generally concluded that failed states are more likely to be terrorist havens, but some have begun to question this conventional wisdom. While the link between state failure and terrorist havens is fairly clear, it does not tell the entire story. This thesis borrows from an aspect of social mobilization theory to try to explain why some havens are more resilient to outside pressure than others. It argues that a shared collective identity between the group providing haven and the havened terrorist group makes the havening group less likely to buckle under outside pressure. To test this theory, the thesis compares the frames that define al Qaeda's collective identity with those of the Sudanese National Islamic Front and the Afghan Taliban to see if observed variation in haven resiliency can be explained by the levels of shared collective identities in each case. The findings suggest that the theory can account for the variation in resiliency, while raising new questions for future research. http://archive.org/details/theresiliencyoft109452448 Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.