Date of Award

12-2005

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Dr. Paul Ciccantell

Second Advisor

Dr. Paul Wienir

Third Advisor

Dr. Barry Goetz

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

Historically, research in Social Movement Theories has been limited to only certain aspects of a social movement, whether it was the impetus of the movement, explaining the reasons for its mobilization, how they recruit members and money, how social movements are able to function as an organization, or why groups suffer demise after flourishing for a period of time. This research attempts to build a framework of a particular social movement, Hizb'allah, a Shi'a Islamic movement based in Lebanon. This framework is built by extracting various elements from several social movement theories to explain and illustrate this movement's life course including its origin, history, success, and its current organizational structure. This method of borrowing various aspects from these models like pieces of a puzzle allows us to design a pattern that can potentially build a model to generalize to various other social movements. We can also see the patterns emerge as to why a social movement may begin, how they develop and what, if any, determinants contribute to the demise of a social movement. This method of building bridges between these theories also helps to establish a general holistic theoretical explanation to the life course of a social movement, which is something that this researcher has yet to find any current theories do.

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