Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2026
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Psychology
Advisor
Michelle Fine
Committee Members
Brett Stoudt
Krystal Perkins
Anthony Alessandrini
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences | Social Psychology
Keywords
violence, social psychology, sociology of science, critical discourse analysis
Abstract
Operationalizing Aimé Césaire’s concept of “rigged investigations”, this dissertation moves from the premise that the discursive and material landscape surrounding political violence is intimately shaped by the science investigating it. Being explicitly attentive to the geopolitics of knowledge production, this research aims to demonstrate that the “evidence-based” social psychological literature on violence is skewed by assumptions that researchers embed in their empirical studies a priori, namely their hypotheses.
Through a large-scale critical discourse analysis of hypotheses tested across three contexts designated as “Middle Eastern conflict zones”: Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, this research asks: What is the political rhetoric that is silently embedded in the social psychological study of violence, and how does this rhetoric predetermine and constrict research findings, applied implications, and public discourse on violence?
Taken together, the findings are read against the sociology of science, critical psychology, and prison literature to illustrate how violence is narratively cohered by psychology, and how this narrative relates to military and political power structures. The main throughline articulated in this dissertation is that the “evidence-based” discipline is grounded in questions and assumptions decided on before evidence is collected; this predetermined evidence is then cumulatively reworked to create realities where the individual is the main destabilizing agent and peace is envisioned as a psychological, and not a material, state. This dissertation then addresses the stakes attached to the predictive paradigms of psychological science, both in shaping discourse on political violence, and in contributing to AI-assisted targeting technologies that assign probabilistic risk scores based on behavioral and identity-based individual variables.
Against those stakes, the dissertation finally turns to the Palestinian prison literature as a site of psychological theory generation that is cognizant, at once, of lived and historical-material conditions and that reads political violence as a symptom of power systems in crisis rather than an aggregate of individual predispositions.
Recommended Citation
Abi-Ghannam, Ghina, "Rigged Investigations: Psychological Science and the Story of “Violence in The Middle East”" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6900
