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Buildings built between 1947 and 1971 played an important role to seek national identity during the postcolonial period of Bangladesh when the country was known as East Pakistan and was unified with West Pakistan. In a decolonised setting of rebuilding one nation with two halves of Pakistan, this thesis will unravel the connections between geopolitical tensions, socio-economic concerns, and cultural and religious perplexities through an investigation of a series of governmental and institutional buildings designed by local and internationally renowned architects. The analysis examines the relationship between nationalism and architecture through a study of power and design in the postcolonial context of East Pakistan. The analysis of the buildings includes distinct and at times contradictory interpretations. Architecture of East Pakistan not only depicts spatial transformation but also represents a narrative of awakening from supremacy. In an attempt to gain control in the Eastern part, the ruling Government of Pakistan sought to appease the subaltern populace by developing the province. Alongside architectural readings, this is demonstrated through the studies of nationalism, governmental development schemes, ample outsourced funding and both foreign and local architects who executed their diversified designs within a postcolonial network. Although these buildings introduced an architectural shift in the region, nevertheless, the transitions from colonial to postcolonial architecture were overshadowed by the neo-colonial subjugation of Pakistani authority. The two key concepts - nationalism and architecture serve both as a critical lens for historiography as well as a framework for detailed analysis of the case studies. The key ideas are divided into sections and sub-sections of themes and tropes that form a deeper meaning of diverse ideas incorporated in this thesis related to culture, tradition, ethnicity, religion and politics. The research method is informed by existing literature, archival materials, photographs and architectural drawings in which these buildings have been identified typically either Regional or Tropical architecture. This research challenges the traditional ideas arguing for a rational and contextual architecture by connecting critical understanding of the concepts of multi-layered and changing interpretations of nationalism. This occurs through a historiographic analysis of the case studies combined with an intricated architectural reading of the building designs from three perspectives: how it relates to the multi-layered nationalism and religious dogmatism; to what extent cultural incorporation was applied in the design and construction techniques; and the relationship between the client and the architect(s) for the individual projects. By analysing the governmental and institutional buildings of East Pakistan within a broader historical and global context, this thesis explores how nationalism had altered meaning to seek ethnic and religious identity and how the political events, global funding and design implications interpret these spaces. This research not only unlocks a wider possibility for new research in the history of Bangladeshi architecture but also highlights the formations of twentieth century postcolonial countries and the emergence of nation-states through architecture.

Regional bodies, particularly in Africa, are playing an increasingly important peace-making role. However, critical peace research is yet to come into communication with the phenomenon of regional peace-making. Notably, critical peace research overwhelmingly focuses on the critique of liberal peace and overemphasises the local-turn and/or the everyday. On the other hand, regional bodies, especially in Africa, are often claimed to fail in their peace-making efforts by mainstream scholarship largely due to their deviation from the European model of regional integration. Through the case of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), I engage with how hybrid peace theory can be strengthened and developed further by integrating the regional platform as an agonistic space. Agonism, in my reading, entails viewing multi-layered disagreements that characterise peace-making as normal political encounters and processes. Thus, I suggest that hybridity, with agonism integrated, is a useful conceptual, analytical and explanatory pathway to engaging with the phenomenon of regional peace-making in a nuanced way. In so doing, I extend and develop critical peace scholarship further. Empirically drawing out from archival and documentary research, as well as elite interviewing, I unpack the complexity of the South Sudan conflict and of the intricate regional relations that underscored the formation and subsequent tumbling into civil war of the newly created country. Analytically, I draw out the importance of IGAD's structure and functionality and use the case of Riek Machar's contested status to engage the regional entanglements and their implications on IGAD's conceptions and approaches to peace. I suggest that both the declaration of IGAD as a failure and Machar's contested status, among other factors, facilitate a process that sustains discourses and regulates relations that could otherwise explode into various theatres of violence. I further engage with how multiple extant ideas of peace, circulating in the region, inform the often contradictory and controversial assessments of what needs to be done by regional actors in their interaction with the conflict and their peace-making efforts within the framework of IGAD. Consequently, I emphasise the significance of IGAD, and other African regional bodies, as an agonistic platform, capable of facilitating and domesticating the political into constructive avenues through which hybrid peace is not only conceivable but possibly attainable.

This thesis presents a regional framework for the political and military history of the Caucasus during the period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Based on journalistic materials, archival documents and contemporary publications in Russian, Georgian, French and English, this chronological study demonstrates that political, military and ideological leaders in the Caucasus 1917-1921 were operating in conscious awareness of their regional context and took it into consideration as they maneuvered through the challenges they faced in the international, all-Russian, national and local spheres. It does so mainly by proving that, despite their preoccupations with national or class concerns, these leaders repeatedly promoted or visited the idea of creating a shared political, administrative or security space for all the Caucasian nations, whether as a regional autonomy, a federation or a confederation. In 1917, the Caucasian leaders' attention to the regional dimension is evidenced through an analysis of their debates, reflected in the press, about what sort of legal-political relationship the nations of the Caucasus ought to have with each other, a potential regional center and the all-Russian center, and about whether Russia should be reconstituted as a unitary or federal republic. The parameters of these debates had already been mapped in previous decades of discussion about whether the Caucasus ought to form a regional autonomy within a reformed Russian Empire or the Caucasian nations should create a regional federation, and whether this federation would be independent or part of a new Russian federation. As this thesis shows, in 1918 the "national-regional" question in the Caucasus was resolved through a spontaneous decentralization process when circumstances forced the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, and, subsequently, the four national republics of the Caucasus, to proclaim independence. Then, between 1918 and 1921 the four Caucasian republics struggled, albeit rather feebly, to reconcile their conflicting interests and territorial claims with their need to cooperate to remain viable and survive as they each tried to obtain international recognition while under the threat of reabsorption into Russia, which was seen as a recentralizing force, whether White or Red.

This dissertation considers the politics and practices of incorporating regional dialects into the nineteenth-century English novel form. After roughly 1850, there is a distinct expansion of publications written in dialect in England. This is owing to both a peak in academic interest in comparative philology and publishers' recognition of the market potential of urban working-class readers. Using writers from both working- and middle-class backgrounds from the region of Lancashire, this study argues that dialect novelists engage in a form of performative recording to compose dialect texts, wherein the success of a dialect novelist relies on both accuracy of dialect terms and a performance of authenticity. While critics have previously considered the dialect ballad and lyric, this thesis reveals the specific work that the dialect novel undertakes to present regional language. Chapter One compares the work of Edwin Waugh (1817-90) and Oliver Ormerod (1811-79), two working-class Rochdale novelists whose differing perspectives on dialect orthography provide rich ground for debate and humour. Waugh's dynamic invocation of nostalgia in his 'Besom Ben' serial is accompanied by a reliance on modern print conventions. My second chapter focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-65) and her late novel, Sylvia's Lovers (1863), where the novelist attempts a Yorkshire orthography for the first time in print. This chapter maps the bruising revision process that Gaskell was compelled to undertake by reader responses, as well as the productive links that can be drawn between dialect novels and dialect dictionaries of this period. Chapter Three explores Benjamin Brierley's dialect Readings that were popular in the 1870s and 1880s, illuminating the elements of performance that were latent in his dialect prose. This chapter uses playbill and local newspaper material to analyse the politics of laughter and the mechanics involved in the staging of regional voices on the Reading platform. My fourth chapter takes the dialect novel composed away from or read at a distance from one's region of origin as its focus. This chapter analyses the early Lancashire dialect novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), as well as Gaskell's involvement in the Soldier's Reading Room project. This chapter reflects on the intensely local novel form amidst increasingly global and portable print cultures. This thesis explores the value of committing local languages to print in the latter decades of the nineteenth century by putting forward considered analysis of texts and regional cultures that have previously been regarded as peripheral.

This dissertation investigates the dynamics of the power relationship between the African Union and non-African external actors. For many authors, this relationship is understood in terms of a donor-recipient dynamic: the AU is in a permanent and continuous negotiation with more powerful extra-regional actors over the funding of its activities across a broad range of policies and political programmes. As such, external actors are seen as having influence over processes and outcomes. This conventional view is however increasingly contested: a growing number of scholars argue that while AU actors may have limited control over the financing, they are still able to exert significant influence and lead on issues. This thesis reconsiders how to theorize this relationship, and asks the following question: How should the influence of external actors in key issue areas of the African Union be characterised? The thesis analyses the dynamics of interactions between external actors and AU actors in three issue areas: peace and security; migration; and human rights. It does so in a manner which enhances our understanding of external involvement beyond donor dependency, by focusing on discourse, framing and the role of ideas. In the AU issue area of peace and security, the dissertation analyses military intervention and civilian protection; in the migration issue area the analysis focuses on the treatment of migrants; and in the issue area of human rights, the dissertation analyses the rights of sexual minorities. This thesis argues that an important element in the relationship between the AU and external actors is the discursive struggle over the ways in which contemporary African issues should be framed. A focus on discursive contestations therefore helps us better understand African and non-African agency within the African Union. Thus, this dissertation expands our understanding of ideational and discursive interactions between African and non-African actors in the AU, as well as the nature of the contestations and inevitable frictions which arise from them.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, Chinese people understand the significance of nation and prioritise the nation over their local communities. Yet conflicts among people to defend local interests keep happening everywhere, thus damaging the harmonious unification. As a part of social life, Chinese football fandom is also associated with nationalism and regionalism. Fandom express inevitably links with the conflict among local communities. In addition, fans examine which team matters to them more by evaluating their senses of national and regional belonging. Football fans' self-identification in the international and domestic spheres is therefore a window to observe Chinese people's attitudes towards their national and local communities. This doctoral research is an academic inquiry to explore this social fact. The theoretical framework of this thesis is drawn upon the correlated theories of the relationship between fandom, regionalism and nationalism. This study employs qualitative approaches: semi-structured interviews, focus groups and open-ended survey as investigative instruments. It selects fans of Henan Jianye Football Club and Shenzhen Football Club as cases to document and analyse the fandom for Chinese men's national football team and local football clubs. The thesis establishes a comprehensive knowledge of how football fandom is developed in the Chinese context, whereby making itself a pioneer in interpreting Chinese football fans' self-identification at international and domestic levels. It reveals that Chinese people's emotional attachment to their local communities is stronger than their sense of belonging to their nation. Nevertheless, Chinese nationalism is the critical factor that prevents contradiction among people.

This doctoral thesis is a qualitative study of policy ideas and programs in the higher education sector aimed at fostering regional cooperation between China, Japan and South Korea. The aims of the research were to understand the cognitive and normative ideas about regional cooperation in Northeast Asia from the perspectives of actors involved in government-initiated programs for higher education regional cooperation at Japanese universities. This takes in an investigation of how policy ideas at the government-level are adopted and adapted across different institutional and disciplinary contexts, and explores the conditions under which the ideas of actors at universities are implemented and any perceived barriers that impede their realization. To investigate these issues, two government-initiated programs for regional cooperation were selected, one representing higher education’s societal role as a producer of research-based knowledge, and the other representing its social function as a site for teaching and learning. The program addressing the former role is the A3 Foresight program, a funding scheme for scientists to engage in regional research collaboration. The program addressing the latter role is CAMPUS Asia, a regional exchange program for students at top universities in the three countries. The research design took the form of an interpretive study underpinned by a social constructivist epistemology. Nine participating universities were selected as cases, and the primary source of data were the transcripts of semi-structured interviews with 67 individuals involved in varying capacities in either A3 Foresight or CAMPUS Asia. 52 documents from five key governmental organizations involved in regional cooperation were also collected and analyzed, and these served as structuring elements with which to compare and illuminate the ideas of actors in the selected universities. Data analysis and interpretation involved a combination of methods, including the deductive application of an analytical framework from an International Relations theory known as discursive institutionalism along with inductive thematic analysis. The constructed findings highlight a range of interconnected ideas about the current state and possible futures of regional cooperation in Northeast Asia. Variation in ideas about higher education regional cooperation connected to the distinctive underlying philosophies of different academic disciplines, with STEM fields focused on ‘borderless’ knowledge production and competitiveness, the Arts on cultural connections and creative collaboration, and Social Sciences on communicative action for the resolution of regional problems. Each of these idealized visions intersected in practice with government-level ideas of regional cooperation for global competitiveness, resulting in various tensions and the frequent repurposing of government policy rhetoric to align with institutional and disciplinary orientations. Actors described a number of perceived ideational and institutional barriers impeding the realization of their visions for regional cooperation. Some lamented how neoliberal policies marked by competitive project-based funding schemes hindered both domestic cooperation within and across Japanese universities as well as efforts to implement effective strategies for internationalization. At the societal level, many reported that nationalistic worldviews espoused by politicians and the media, incommensurable historical memories, and frequent diplomatic tensions posed persistent barriers to regional stability, prosperity, and possibilities for educational exchange and research collaboration. However, many students who participated in one of the two programs reported broadened perspectives, an increased awareness of a shared humanity, and renewed hope for the future of the region. In the final chapter of the thesis these and other emergent themes are critically discussed in light of extant empirical and theoretical scholarship. I address the study’s novel empirical, methodological and theoretical contributions to knowledge and present an argument on the importance of incorporating studies of the ideational dimension into research on higher education regional cooperation with examples and justifications from the case of Japan. I also consider limitations of the study and implications for further research.

This thesis looks at the Common Market of the South (Mercosur) and its Education Sector (SEM) to explain the role of HE in region-building over time. Mercosur is a regional organisation launched in 1991 among Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay. Venezuela became a full member in 2012, and Bolivia is in process to acquire full membership. The research aims to shed new insight on the changing place, players and space of HE in region-making by means of a historical analysis of Mercosur HE projects from 1991 until 2016. It argues that understanding Mercosur's HE sectoral regionalism should be done in relation to the broader development of Mercosur as a region, as well as to the different scales of rule that shape these social relations. The thesis aims to answer the main question: 'what is Mercosur HE a case of?' I understand Mercosur HE as a relational space (Harvey 2006), therefore constructed in relation to Mercosur as a region. This process spans external and internal influences grounded in economic, cultural and political dynamics (Robertson, Olds, Dale, & Dang, 2016) that are specific to the experience of Latin American regionalisms. The study adopts a Critical Theory approach to understanding social worlds, including social change (R. W. Cox & Sinclair, 1996). It used critical realism in order to identify the relationship between the outcomes and the action of mechanisms in context (Pawson & Tilley, 1997; Sayer, 1992, 2000). To address the research questions, I traced the historical trajectory of Mercosur's HE using Process Tracing (Falleti, 2016; Trampusch & Palier, 2016). The framework of Critical Junctures (Collier & Collier, 1991) indicated five moments of change and legacy in the historical development of Mercosur HE. The data analysed was a combination of documentary analysis, unstructured observation and interviews, collected in two fieldwork trips to Latin America in 2016 and 2017. I analysed them as text using critical discourse analysis (CDA) with a focus on external relations of texts (Fairclough, 2003). The analysis shows that, in considering Mercosur HE as a spatial regional organisation, there are four features which are transversal through time: first, the role of the Coordinating Committee (CCR) in shaping the HE Sector; second, the weak institutionality of Mercosur HE limits the resources and capacity to implement decisions and activities; third, the events of the meetings appear as the principal mechanism for governing the HE Sector and setting the pace of the changes in HE in the region; and, finally, the evident role of Argentina and Brazil in leading the HE Sector. Results also point out Mercosur HE's contradictions. On the one hand, its weak institutionality prevents the efficient shift from ideational to material, yet the awareness of this deficit does not alter the regularity of its meetings and the Sector's operation. On the other, the high level of diversity amongst its Member States' HE systems did not hinder creating outputs, such as the accreditation and the mobility projects. Finally, a key aspect to impulse the legitimacy of Mercosur HE is to fulfil its primary role of promote regional integration by strengthening its relationship with Mercosur's economic and political project. One can only exist in relation to the other.

This thesis argues that in critical discussions of the history, mythology, and literary culture of California, the work of Los Angeles' bibliographers, antiquarians, collectors, librarians, and archivists has been hugely overlooked. Examining this group from the end of the nineteenth century through to the 1930s, this thesis proposes that their collection and assemblage of literary, historical, and visual material about California - often dubbed Californiana - points to a much wider and more systemic operation of regional mythology. Critically evaluating the history of these bibliographic institutions in Southern California, this thesis argues that the collecting and arranging of Californiana has been as influential to the construction of regional knowledge as the material itself. This thesis is concerned with both the literal and metaphorical shapes of history that these collections construct. Essentially, whilst there has been much scholarship on the mythography of Los Angeles and California history, this thesis proposes that how that history has been indexed and classified is as important and generative as what was written in its key historical and literary texts. This thesis is mostly about white elites of Anglo-American Southern California and how they framed regional history in line with their, at times, imperialist beliefs about the region's Spanish, Mexican, and Native American past. Whilst there is a substantial amount of academic literature on Anglo society, this thesis proposes that an entire strata of this culture has been relatively unexamined. This group of antiquarians, bibliographers and collectors were centrally concerned with cataloguing and arranging texts and historical data about the region and the conclusions we can draw from their work significantly advances our historical understanding of how the epistemology of American culture in the region operated, with all the social divisions that imperial lens implies. Anglo collecting and bibliographic culture developed in Los Angeles in a historical context radically different to, and much later than, other American cultures of regionalism. Reframing the region's past as antiquity, they collected and assembled Californiana in a setting of late-modernity in which the landscape of Southern California was rapidly changing. Through bookshop catalogues, the building and housing of library collections, the activities of the historical society, and the dimensions of private collections and personal archiving, this thesis posits that these works of artefact and document assemblage mediate between a romanticized past and a changing present, recreating narratives of Californian history and the way that history is experienced. The extension of this argument is that these institutions contributed to a historical optic and perspective on the region that would continue to be utilised by Anglo-American society throughout the twentieth century. The conclusions this thesis draws ensures it contributes to studies of American antiquarianism and modernity, bibliographic culture, regional history, material culture, and visual studies. This thesis builds on the recent critical directions in Los Angeles history that scholars such as William Deverell, D. J. Waldie, and Phoebe Kropp have advanced but it also reaches towards theoretical discourses proposed in fields not centrally connected to the study of California. In addition to the extensive work on Los Angeles and California, this thesis brings together theory in cultural history, studies of bibliographic culture, travel writing, and studies of visual culture. This theory helps to situate this thesis' archival case studies within a much broader and more dynamic critical context. Where these case studies have been written about, if they have been written about at all, they are restricted to local studies or limited discussions of the trades they were each a part of. But they deserve a much more expansive consideration: they each operated at the intersection between space and text, and their collecting work tells us how Anglo American society viscerally understood the history, culture, and mythology of a region that has long maintained a place within many societies' imagination and historical experience.

The main objective of the study is to explore higher education policies and practices in Thailand which have been shaped by the regional integration project known as 'ASEAN Community'. With regard to the influence of regionalisation, the study looks at higher education initiatives at three layers (regional, national, and institutional levels) but focuses on analysis of internationalisation initiatives in Thai higher education. An inductive analysis is conducted through interviews together with documentary analysis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with policymakers, executives and senior administrators from a government agency, a regional organisation and six universities. The study reveals that ASEAN has utilised higher education as a vital mechanism to enhance the regional integration and strengthen its global competitiveness. Since Thailand is a member of ASEAN, the government has developed internationalisation in higher education towards the provision of the ASEAN Community aiming to generate intercultural understanding of Thai students and staff, enhance academic cooperation with ASEAN sub-regional countries and external partner countries and promote harmonisation of higher education in Southeast Asia. With these rationales, the Thai government attempts to enhance the international quality of Thai higher education. At the university level, it is found that internationalising policies and practices have also been influenced by the regional and national agendas; nevertheless, the context of individual universities such as location, human resource, and institutional mission has shaped the scope of their international activities. However, the study shows that the internationalising practices in Thai higher education lack ASEAN-oriented contents and need to develop more comprehensive international practices.

This thesis focuses on the issue of regional authenticity in Barry Hannah's contemporary southern fiction (1970-2010), in the context of some recent concerns about the validity of regional studies in a postregional moment, and about the efficacy of the authenticity paradigm itself. By examining those Hannah narratives that best encourage some rethinking of conceptual understandings of the post- South and postsouthern literature, this thesis reveals the significant contribution that Hannah's fiction can make to critical apprehensions of the region as an evolving field of enquiry. The metafictional dimension of Hannah's writing is testimony to its unique value, because the putative sense of "southernness" his stories appear to dramatize is complicated by an intense self-reflexivity about the ways in which a sense of place has never been foundational or essential but has always been constructed and performed. Deploying sustained close analyses of the best of Hannah's fiction (the kind of attention it has conspicuously lacked), this thesis argues that the region is constantly (re-)emerging in a process of myth-making, dialogue and performance, rather than having suffered some simple historical shift from southern to postsouthern. Understanding Hannah's fiction in the ways presented is to offer the possibility of some revision in thinking, about whether the concepts "South" and "southern" have survived both the deconstructive and postregional turns of the late twentieth century, and the transnational turn into the "new" southern studies from the early twenty-first century onward. The Hannah texts included here are identified exclusively for their value in reconceptualising those issues in recent southern studies where an impasse is imagined between regional ("southern") and global ("postmodern"), to suggest it is wholly conceivable to "have it both ways."

This thesis addresses the question as to why multilevel politics is becoming an integral part of politics in Europe. Multilevel politics is conceptualized as a system which functions through a complex web of political relations within and across levels of decision making. The thesis argues that the rise of multilevel politics can be explained by its institutionalization in terms of the emergence, the evolution and especially the effects of relevant institutions. Based on a mixed-method research project, the influence of European institutions on subnational actors and the alignment of actor motives with institutional characteristics are empirically shown. The first chapter of the dissertation establishes the centrality of institutions for political transformation, examines the role of transnational and domestic institutions for multilevel politics, and contextualizes the research question in terms of institution-actor relations. The second chapter develops a new-institutionalist theoretical framework that explains the emergence, the evolution and the effects of the institutions, and formulates a series of hypotheses with regard to freestanding institutional influence, power distribution, material benefits and political identification. The third chapter outlines the mixed-method research design which addresses individual-level and institutional-level variations through a Europe-wide survey and a comparative case study. The fourth chapter on survey results shows generally favourable views on multilevel politics, and strong associations of these views with the independent variables under scrutiny. The fifth chapter specifies a multivariate model which includes all posited variables and confirms the majority of the hypotheses. Therefore, the new-institutionalist argument is broadly confirmed, while there is relatively weak evidence to sustain sociological explanations. The final chapter compares the Committee of the Regions and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, and examines the institutional characteristics which correspond to the hypothesized variables. It is then concluded that the two institutions share several overarching similarities, and display complementarity in other aspects.

This thesis examines the ideological nexus of nationalism and heritage under the social conditions of neoliberalism. The investigation aims to demonstrate how neoliberal economics stimulate the irrationalism manifest in nationalist idealisation of the past. The institutionalisation of national heritage was originally a rational function of the modern state, symbolic of its political and cultural authority. With neoliberal erosion of the productive economy and public institutions, heritage and nostalgia proliferate today in all areas of social life. It is argued that this represents a social pathology linked to the neoliberal state's inability to construct a future-orientated national project. These conditions enhance the appeal of irrational nationalist and regionalist ideologies idealising the past as a source of cultural purity. Unable to achieve social cohesion, the neoliberal state promotes multiculturalism, encouraging minorities to embrace essentialist identity politics that parallel the nativism of right-wing nationalists and regionalists. This phenomenon is contextualised within the general crisis of progressive modernisation in Western societies that has accompanied neoliberalisation and globalisation. A new theory of activist heritage is advanced to describe autonomous, politicised heritage that appropriates forms and practices from the state heritage sector. Using this concept, the politics of irrational nationalism and regionalism are explored through fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews and photography. The interaction of state and activist heritage is considered at the Wewelsburg 1933-1945 Memorial Museum in Germany wherein neofascists have re-signified Nazi material culture, reactivating it within contemporary political narratives. The activist heritage of Israeli Zionism, Irish Republicanism and Ulster Loyalism is analysed through studies of museums, heritage centres, archaeological sites, exhibitions, monuments and historical re-enactments. These illustrate how activist heritage represents a political strategy within irrational ideologies that interpret the past as the ethical model for the future. This work contends that irrational nationalism fundamentally challenges the Enlightenment's assertion of reason over faith, and culture over nature, by superimposing pre-modern ideas upon the structure of modernity. An ideological product of the Enlightenment, the nation state remains the only political unit within which a rational command of time and space is possible, and thus the only viable basis for progressive modernity.

This thesis examines the determinants of institutional quality and the process of convergence in the ECOWAS in order to inform policy about the region's deep integration scheme. The first part of the thesis examines the historical changes that took place in the development of common institutions in West Africa in the pre-independence era. The findings demonstrated that the region exhibited some common institutions, including common currencies, standardised trade rules and protection of trade routes which facilitated regional and international trade. A single administration system helped in the effective implementation of the common institutions. Therefore, historical changes after independence led to the loss of some facets of these common institutions in West Africa. The second part examined determinants of institutional quality and the process of convergence using econometric analysis. The findings demonstrated that the process of convergence could be accelerated if WAMZ and WAEMU work together as one monetary zone under ECOWAS. Moreover, the findings also demonstrated that the level of development, state capacity, FDI, regional trade, history and regional trade partners institutional quality contain useful information in explaining the quality of institutions today. Therefore, ECOWAS's deep integration goal would require improving some of these factors in order to facilitate the process of developing common institutions and improve their quality. In the long term, a single administration system akin to the colonial era and the Empires of Western Sudan would be desirable. This will require political commitment to do so. ECOWAS members should have the confidence that deep integration is feasible given that it existed in the region in the past.

Canada is widely regarded as a liberal, multicultural nation that prides itself on a history of peace and tolerance. Oftentimes set up in contrast to the United States, Canada’s history of colonialism has been popularly imagined as a gentler, necessary, inevitable, and even benevolent version of expansion and subjugation of Indigenous populations. In recent decades scholars in the social sciences and humanities have challenged the rhetoric of Canada as a consistently benevolent and peaceful nation. They have pointed to the discontinuity between Canada’s rosy image, drawn from foundational nation-building myths of benevolence, and the deeply rooted colonial narratives of necessity and inevitability that underpin those nation-building myths. This discontinuity manifests itself in far reaching patterns of social and economic disparity between Indigenous and settler populations over time across the nation. This reality is acutely seen in the Canadian West, as Canada’s historic frontier. This thesis re-problematises narratives of Canadian nation-building from a regional perspective. It is argued that positioning the West as the frontier peripheral to Canadian ‘civilisation’ is part of a broader settler colonial logic that sees the contemporary manifestation of disparity between Indigenous and settler populations as emanating from uniquely backward, peripheral places in Canada, rather than challenging the fundamental benevolence of the Canadian nation. Through a close reading of two trials pertaining to an instance of multiple perpetrator sexual assault that occurred in Saskatchewan in 2003, I demonstrate how the complex web of interlocking systems of domination that oppress and privilege in trials do not emanate from the backwardness of the place in which they occurred, but are rather indicative of broader societal processes and power relations indicative of settler colonialism. This thesis argues there is a conflation between western Canadian identity, and settler identity, owing to the foundational nation-building myths in which the West became Canadian. In moving forward, this thesis proposes an acknowledgment of the settler colonial nature of westward expansion and suggests practicing openness to considering different ways westward expansion might have been understood and experienced. Key to this process is learning to listen, learning to hear, learning to believe, and learning to see oneself implicated in the stories of those who experienced westward expansion differently from how it is popularly constructed in settler society. I begin here by proposing the complainant’s voice in the trial be heard, and be believed. Her voice and her silence provides insight into understanding the oppressive power of settler-colonialism.

This thesis is a study of attitudes to regional and national identity in Kabylia, a Berber-speaking region in northeast Algeria, and among Kabyle migrants in Paris. I illustrate how Kabyles nurture a fragile balance of nationalism and regional particularism through a primarily moral notion of local community, and extend it to an alternative vision for an Algerian nation which they believe has been debased by a corrupt state regime and Arabo-Islamic ideology since national independence. The thesis is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork divided between two places – Paris and a large village in Kabylia – and reflects my interest in how people ‘imagine’ national community through their experience as members of smaller social groups. Many Kabyle activists today formulate an alternative vision of Algerian national politics as a federation of several regionally based affective communities, each maintaining internal solidarity. This echoes a tendency in French colonial writings on Kabylia, discussed in the opening chapter, to conceive of the region as an island, intensively connected yet defensive of its autonomy. As citizens of the existing Algerian state, many Kabyles contest assimilation by claiming to represent Algeria’s ‘true past’, and investing contemporary governance initiatives with its values. They represent the radical difference that this implies with metaphors of the Kabyle community as a family within ‘public’ national life, and accuse the state regime of reversing this relationship by adopting a language of coercive authority appropriate only within the family. The transmission of Kabyle values today relies heavily on music, and especially political song, which I demonstrate – beyond its role in disseminating dissident ideas – acts as a vehicle for a type of secular revealed knowledge widely seen as the purest embodiment of Kabyle morality. Beyond the hollow rhetoric of Western liberalism that some see in Kabyle activism, I set out to demonstrate that the particular narrative of identity that I examine, in stressing regional uniqueness at the expense of recognition from a centralized state, also reflects anomalies inherent in the concept of ‘nationalism’ itself as a compromise between the requirements of external co-operation and internal allegiance.

The goal of this study is to generate a more holistic picture of the diffusion and assimilation of universal human rights norms in diverse cultural and political settings such as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The overarching question to be investigated in this thesis is the relationship between the evolving international human rights regime and the emerging human rights normative and legal culture in the Middle East. This question will be investigated in detail with reference to regional human rights schemes such as the Arab Charter of Human Rights, as well as local human rights developments in three Middle Eastern states, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Having gauged the take-up of human rights norms on the ground at the local and regional levels, the thesis examines in full the extent of socialisation and internalisation of human rights norms across the Middle East region at large.

This thesis analyses the terms in which collective identity and regional institutions can explain state action towards the unfolding of regionalism in the Andean Community (AC). This analysis develops a constructivist approach that assesses constitutive and casual effects of ideas in order to provide explanations. For the assessment and distinction of these effects, the thesis proposes an interpretive method that consists of focusing on transitive verbs and metaphors denoting causation that state officials and regional bureaucrats use to refer to the role of ideas in orienting state action. The analysis of the explanatory role of collective identity and regional institutions is carried out in three case studies of the AC, namely, Peru remaining an AC member while being reluctant to adopt the Andean Free Trade Zone (FTZ) and the Common External Tariff (CET); collective negotiations of a free trade agreement between the AC and the European Union; and the adoption of the Integrated Plan for Social Development (PIDS). The thesis shows that constitutive and causal effects of ideas are possible to observe in the three case studies of the AC. By observing these effects, the thesis provides a better understanding of a relationship of mutual constitution and causation between collective identity and regional institutions in the AC, and suggests a number of issues that may explain the AC’s maintenance despite its little achievements and low material benefits it provides to member states. The thesis also makes a significant contribution to constructivist theorising inasmuch as it provides a method to operationalise constructivism’s aim of providing explanations based on the role of ideas. To the study of the AC, this thesis represents a major contribution inasmuch as it is the first work that analyses the views of some of the main performers of state action and of the AC as a regional organisation, which accounts for the closest approach to how member states act in the AC.

Examining Canada and Britain from 1990 to 2004, the thesis explores how the surge in minority nationalist agitation that occurred in Quebec and Scotland changed the political environment in Canada (outside Quebec) and England allowing regional elites to advance political agendas which mobilized regional and national identities. The thesis considers the role of democratic institutions at the regional level in shaping political demands through a comparative study of regional and national identity mobilization in Nova Scotia and the North East of England. The analysis contends that the relationship between minority and majority nations is dialectical; nationalism stems from fundamentally different interpretations of the state and is not the ‘fault’ of either nation. Using this claim as the basis for analyzing elite debate at the centre and in the regions, the dissertation systematically examines regionalism within the majority nation by investigating debates at the national and regional level. The work looks at parliamentary debates, campaign material, newspaper accounts and elite interviews; and as identity mobilization and political debates are targeted at the electorate, survey analysis is undertaken to see whether elite debate resonated with the masses. The thesis demonstrates that regionalism is a component of the ongoing (re)conception of nation within the majority nation, and that during periods of strong minority nationalist agitation, a political environment is created which allows elites in the majority nation to mobilize national and regional identities. Regional identity mobilization is shown to be part of the nationalism of the majority nation; as the dominant conception of the state within the majority encompasses the minority nations as co-nationals and equal citizens, regional elites are able to use the minority nations as examples of successful agitation without subscribing to their interpretations of the state. Regional levels of democracy did not alter the nature of regionalism in either state and though the demands issued may have been different, the underlying concerns were the same: a lack of voice and efficacy.

The emergence of regional security organisations during the 1990s in Africa proved to be of great significance for the lives of many Africans, including those living in conflict-torn countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire or the Democratic Republic of Congo, but, at the same time, this phenomenon has been understudied. This dissertation explores why regional security organisations with an agenda of democratic governance emerged in Africa in the 1990s. This question is answered with two in-depth case studies on the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Driven by an empirical puzzle, this study is both hypothesis-testing and hypothesis generating. The study starts by laying out the different possible factors put forward by several bodies of theory in international relations to explain the emergence of ECOWAS and SADC as security organisations. These hypotheses are then tested throughout the history and the evolution of ECOWAS and SADC in order to highlight the circumstances of their creation and their qualified failure as economic communities. This is followed by a comparative analysis of the security and democracy mandates entrusted to ECOWAS and SADC by its member states based on the study of the legal texts that outline the specific objectives of each regional security organisation and the tools they were given to implement their mandates. The study finally analyses the implementation records of ECOWAS and SADC in order to assess the commitment of their member states to their new democracy and security mandate. The research concludes with the two following hypotheses: 1) A security agenda cannot emerge without the involvement of the regional hegemon. 2) What the regional hegemon can do, including affecting the speed of the transformation, is constrained by the acceptance of its leadership by its neighbours (legitimacy) and by state weakness (capability).

In the post-Cold War era, the Balkans came to exemplify the power of resurgent nationalisms freed from the straitjacket of bipolar stability. The break-up of the Yugoslav federation suggested that exclusivist ethno-national identities trumped the logic of political and economic integration. Yet, by the early 2000s, regional cooperation made significant inroads into South East Europe. This study addresses the puzzle of why the Balkan states have engaged in a number of multilateral schemes in fields such as military security, trade, infrastructure development, energy, despite the region's divisive historical legacies and political instability. The thesis explores the impact of three factors: regional interdependence denoting the socio-economic and political linkages which contribute to the convergence of Balkan states' material interests, external push referring to the policies for fostering regional cooperation adopted by key actors such as the EU, US, and NATO, and identity politics: the discourses on the borders, cultural make-up and history of a Balkan regional entity as well as the latter's relationship with constructs like Europe and the West. The thesis argues that external projection of power, rather than regional interdependence, accounted for the development and growth of Balkan regionalism. However, the push from outside was legitimised by Balkan collective identity built upon myths of belonging to and exclusion from 'civilised Europe'. Regionalism was not solely a reflection of the supply and demand for integrative frameworks, but amounted to a symbolic strategy for transforming the volatile Balkans into South East Europe by the adoption of the institutional norms and practices of international clubs such as the EU and NATO. The case of regional cooperation in South East Europe contributes to the debates about the politics of interest and the politics of identity in the field of International Relations, and raises questions about the nature of power in contemporary Europe and the international society.

Territory remains a focus for identification and territorial identity an enduring topic of scholarly research. This dissertation explores the territorial identity of Cornwall in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study does three things; it defines Cornish identity on the basis of concepts of distinction, integration, process, narrative, context and scale; it applies the model of regional identity formation proposed by Anssi Paasi; and it develops the disciplinary approach of the new Cornish Studies. The subject of the dissertation is the period after the fragmentation of a linguistically based ethnic identity and before the reconstruction of a 'Celtic' Cornish identity. A comparative investigation of this phase of the history of identity transformation restores continuity between Cornwall's industrial and post-industrial periods and provides an account of modern Cornish identity. The first part of the dissertation reviews representations of Cornwall and its people in the early nineteenth century. The focus then shifts to discuss the structures and institutions - economic, social and religious - around which identities cohered. The argument of the thesis is that industrialisation based on deep metal mining gave the Cornish a renewed pride as inhabitants of one of Europe's first centres of industrialisation. In this sense Cornwall resembled other industrial regions in the early nineteenth century British Isles. However, it also differed from them, most notably in its demography, in the social relations produced by rural industrialisation and in the way its historians had re-fashioned a history of the Cornish as a distinct group. By the later nineteenth century a hybrid identity had emerged, one based on a regional pride induced by industrialisation but one that also looked back to symbols of ethnic distinctiveness. This regional identity nested within identities of Englishness and Britishness that constrained its political potential.

This thesis analyses the work of the artists living and painting in the area around the fishing village of Cullercoats and examines the conditions which fostered and maintained this colony during the period 1870 to 1914. As part of this process, two hitherto disparate bodies of scholarship are considered in tandem. Firstly, the increasing number of studies into European artists' colonies, encompassing consideration of both the phenomenon itself and of the artworks produced at them. Secondly, the locally-based recovery of late-Ivth-cenrury north east artists and their milieu, which has grown out of regional exhibition projects. Exposing the very clear areas of commonality between the two spheres of study underscores the central questions which this thesis addresses; namely, can the group of artists at Cullercoats be described as a colony; and if so, why has it been so consistently denied a place in colony surveys to-date? Answers are sought by engaging with a number of inter-related issues. These include the particular economic and social conditions which could sustain a local artists' colony and the variety of art clubs, exhibition spaces and sales venues which the colony fostered: the specific elements which are necessarily present to mark out a 'colony', rather than merely a 'sketching ground': the wider contemporary awareness of the colony and its work and how this compares with similar coastal colonies in Britain: the unpicking of the ideologies which underpinned the Naturalist subject in British art in the late-LOth century, including issues of race and gender ideals, nationalism and regionalism, tourism, and anxieties over urbanisation and industrialisation. The scope of this thesis demands an inter-disciplinary approach, combining social, economic and political history, gender studies, the wider field of 'cultural studies', as well as the usual analytical tools of the art historian. In essence, the thesis combines an empirical and theoretical contextualisation as the framework for a fresh perspective on the position and work of the Cullercoats artists' colony, which has wider implications for our understanding of European Naturalism and the colony phenomenon.

This thesis examines the politics of local, governance in the Scottish Highlands, taking the Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) network - made up of a central core and 10 Local Enterprise Companies (LECs) - as its institutional focus. It synthesises regulationist approaches and neo-Marxist state theory to explain LECs as part of a broader process of re-regulation under consecutive Conservative governments. LECs are unelected, business-led agencies operating at the local level. The political discourse through which LECs were established and promoted created expectations of local autonomy among business representatives that clashed with the centralising tendencies of Thatcherism. The thesis examines how the resultant tension between local initiative and central control has been worked out within the HIE network. It relies on data collected from seventy semi-structured interviews with representatives of HIE, LECs, local authorities, businesses and community groups. The initial chapters introduce the research and consider key methodological issues, set out the theoretical framework, and review the practices of the Highlands and Islands Development Board (HIDB, HIE's successor). The thesis then explores the key tension between local initiative and central control, explaining how it has been mediated and resolved through routine institutional practices. It also examines HIE-LECs relations with other key agencies, notably local authorities, through selected examples of multi-agency partnerships and assesses LECs' local accountability and representativeness. Finally, a concluding chapter sets out the main findings and considers their implications. While key managerial 'technologies' such as targeting, audit and financial controls allow central government to monitor and steer the HIE network, the thesis argues that the authoritative resources of the HIE core - grounded in the combination of local knowledge and technical expertise inherited from the HIDB - enables it to adapt key aspects of the operating regime to its own purposes. Local autonomy is limited by the relative centralisation of the Network, and LECs operate in a system of structured flexibility in which their scope to adapt policy to local conditions is constrained by state rules and procedures. In emphasising that local autonomy is limited by hierarchical mechanisms of control, the thesis argues that local governance in the Scottish Highlands continues to be underpinned by government. It also points to the limits of the regulation approach and neo-Marxist state theory as theoretical perspectives, suggesting that neo-Foucauldian writings on govemmentality are useful in providing stronger analytical purchase on the specific mechanisms and procedures through which state regulation is practised.

This thesis seeks critically to examine Sierra Leone's participation in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). From a more general perspective, it assesses the role and contribution of regional integration and co-operation groupings in developing regions to national development. ECOWAS, an originally economic integration arrangement with common market objectives, has uniquely taken on security and defence responsibilities with the formation of the ECOWAS Cease-fire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) in 1990 to help resolve the Liberian civil war. Within the context of regional security and political co-operative, an ECOWAS Peace Plan brought about a resolution of the Liberian conflict and restoration of constitutional rule in Sierra Leone. This inevitably has had serious consequences for ECOWAS member states like Sierra Leone. In addition to the financial and political constraints of the regional security initiative, ECOWAS integration objectives such as trade liberalisation, harmonisation of economic policies, and the free movement of the factors of production, have debilitating economic, political and socio-cultural consequences for the country. The implementation of these regional policies constrain the political sovereignty, economic and fiscal autonomy of Sierra Leone. The purpose of this thesis is to attempt a cost-benefit analysis of Sierra Leone's ECOWAS membership, using integration theory as the conceptual framework for analysis. An examination of the traditional and recent theories of regionalism will assess the utility of these conceptual models in explaining, or providing an understanding of, the regional integration process in West Africa. The thesis argues that incremental pragmatism provides a more convincing explanation of Sierra Leone's ECOWAS integration and the integration process in West Africa. The evaluation of this multi-sectoral project will seek to assess the political, economic, and socio-cultural gains and losses of Sierra Leone's ECOWAS membership. The analysis of Sierra Leone's ECOWAS membership will be instructive in understanding the problems of distribution of the benefit of integration which had led to the disintegration of many integration schemes in Third World regions. Evaluation of Sierra Leone's ECOWAS integration, would invariably provide an insight into other member states politics of economic integration. It is hoped that this pioneer study will generate further research interest among ECOWAS countries in their search for a viable development strategy.