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Humanitarian interventions tend to be justified by claims to the existence of an obligation upon ‘us' (the benevolent saviours) to intervene militarily when a state is responsible for large-scale atrocity crimes against its own population. However, this justification is paradoxical, given that there is rarely held to exist a commensurate obligation to address structural violence (even when ‘we' may be partly responsible for, or complicit within, structures that are violent). The paradox arises because structural violence can be harmful – even evil – in its own right, and can also lead to – or exacerbate – direct violence. Hence, intervening militarily, and inevitably causing further harm in the act of intervening, results in a moral shortfall. This shortfall is indicative of a prevailing understanding of harm that is blind to the potential for structures to be violent. In responding to the paradox, I adopt a critical cosmopolitan perspective to argue that because structural violence can be harmful on a great scale, and because it is co-constitutive of direct violence, we ought not to countenance intervening with the use of military force (with what this brings in the form of inevitable intended and unintended harm) to stop direct violence without also considering and addressing violent structures, especially if they are violent structures that we are, ourselves, embedded within. Therefore, it is morally imperative to engage in an ongoing process of illumination and addressing of evil structures to rectify the harms they cause, alongside any efforts to stem direct violence, if any sort of intervention is to be legitimate and just. This requires us to a) expand our understanding of harm and evil at the global level, and b) engage in consistent and sustained deliberative processes that bring to the forefront structural violence and structural underpinnings of direct violence.

Legal positivism posits that the observation of how officials and citizens treat the legal system’s rules combine to constitute law’s existence. This is not an understanding verified by cases such as Nigeria’s legal system. Using historical evidence from the UK National Archives, and examples of recent court cases, I attempt to show that although such legal systems do, in fact, exist, they defy positivism’s conceptualization. They suggest that while the legal legitimacy of law is one thing, it does not account for obedience; and neither is the social fact of obedience necessary in defining legal validity. This thesis aims to suggest that far from being an outlying case, Nigeria provides interesting philosophical illumination about what positivism does not explain about legal systems in general—namely, what determines obedience. This thesis uses the political philosophies of Aristotle and Rousseau to construct a philosophical understanding of the basis for obedience to law. It suggests that it is by participation in the function of a legal system, that law is shown to a given population to have a specific purpose that is tied to the moral nature of the state. This thesis asserts that participation serves to illuminate law’s moral legitimacy as an especial type of legitimacy that is, in a sense, prior to its legal legitimacy and as what explains obedience separately from law’s legal validity, which simply explains its plain existence. This thesis further uses a field experiment centred on a transportation system in Lagos, Nigeria to test, empirically, the hypotheses generated by its theoretical investigations that: 1: the greater a people’s direct participation in creating their laws, the greater they perceive of the law’s moral legitimacy. and 2: The greater the people’s belief in the law’s moral legitimacy, the greater their free obedience to the law. The results suggest that the manner in which citizens are allowed to participate on the formulation and enactment of rules affects the extent to which they go on to obey those rules. These results, further, give empirical grounds for the thesis’ theoretical combination of an Aristotelian understanding of law’s authority with a reformulation of Rousseau’s argument that participation is necessary for, and derived from, freedom.

Of the numerous public policy debates currently taking place throughout the United States, perhaps no issue receives more attention than the persistence of “chronically” low-performing public schools. As of 2009, approximately 5,000 schools—5% of the nation’s total—qualified as chronically low performing (Duncan, 2009d). Certainly, these statistics merit the attention of policy scholars, yet the political contestation of interests attempting to influence how the federal government should address such issues has reached a new fevered crescendo. Given the increased politicization of the federal government’s role in education and the growing number of interests attempting to influence the debates concerning school reform, education policy scholars have recognized the need to extend the field of policy studies by using analytical frameworks that consider both the discourse and performative dimensions of deliberative policy making. Therefore, this study addresses this particular need by employing a critical interpretive policy analysis that illustrates how both dominant discourses and the deliberative performances of the federal government shaped the policy vocabularies embedded within the Title I School Improvement Grant program of 2009 as the commonsense solutions for the nation’s chronically low-performing schools. In addition, this study provides a historical analysis, illustrating how the omnipresent threat of an economic crisis has been a primary influence in the politics of federal governance since the global economic collapse of the 1970s. This study demonstrates how over the course of the last four decades the United States has consistently reduced its commitment to the public sector, choosing instead to promote economic policies informed by the ideals of market-based liberalism. Subsequently, this study presents the argument that education, specifically the “chronic failure” of public schools, has emerged as a “primary emblematic issue” (Hajer, 1995) and now serves as an “effective metaphor for the nation’s economic crisis.” Thus, with such issues presented as a contextual backdrop, this study examines how the Obama/Duncan Administration operationalized dominant discourses and performative practices to establish consensual support for a turnaround reform agenda, effectively defining the policy solutions made available to those who participated in the revision of the Title I SIG program of 2009.