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This thesis proposes a critique of the critique of transnational feminism in post-communist Europe. The critique of transnational feminism asserts that the process is, in essence, a unilateral knowledge-transfer, and as such functions as one among many exercises of Othering the West has employed vis-à-vis its Semi-Other since the fall of communism. Using case studies of Russia and Serbia, this research challenges this argument from three angles. First, it shows that it is ahistorical. Transnational feminist encounters occurred in the communist period, and were characterised by Soviet Russian and Yugoslav feminists' independence and assertiveness. Second, by applying the critical theory framework to over sixty interviews with feminists in Russia and Serbia that were conducted by the author, an empirical examination demonstrates that a critique of knowledge-transfer is marginal in both cases. This acts as a springboard for the third and central claim. Based on a computer-aided, post-Marxist discourse analysis of the interviews, the thesis argues that feminists' priorities undergo a fundamental shift under authoritarianism. In settings where authoritarian regimes propagate an anti-Western discourse, that relies on anti-gender discourse in attempts at Othering back, the subversion of this hegemonic discourse becomes the priority for feminists on the ground. From this perspective, the argument proposed by critical theory - that transnational feminism is a form of Western domination expressed through knowledge-transfer - resonates with the authoritarian discourse. This is why critique of knowledge-transfer is not only marginal, but rejected in an effort not to become complicit in the authoritarian discourse. As a result, Russian and Serbian feminists focus on formulating alternative signifiers for knowledge-transfer in order to subvert the authoritarian regime. First, they endorse knowledge-transfer but attach positive meanings of agency and empowerment to it. Second, they reframe it as an exchange between equals. Finally, they reject the dichotomous boundaries of West/East associated with it.

This dissertation aims to make a contribution to our understanding of the 20th century political theory of play. Particularly in the 20th century, play and game analogies become ever more influential in political theory. I suggest that what unites this ‘turn to play’ is the desire to develop a critique of and also an alternative to traditional models of political authority. In response, this thesis is organised around a comparative reading of four influential accounts of politics as play – which focus on play as a political activity, rather than simply using play as a metaphor for politics. Each account offers important lessons for politics as play activity – and taken together they offer a kaleidoscopic perspective on politics as play. However, in presenting these four accounts, the thesis highlights the importance of Johan Huizinga’s conception of politics as play, as a particular engagement with play that remains neglected by political theorists, yet which nevertheless provides vital insight for our understanding of the challenges of 21st century politics.

Recently, some political commentators and academics have suggested that we should replace democracy with 'epistocracy', or rule by the competent. Drawing on historical case studies in Britain, India and the United States, the first part of this thesis sheds light on the use of franchise restrictions, legislative office qualifications, and indirect elections as epistocratic mechanisms concerned with competence in the legislative assembly. The second part of the thesis offers a normative critique of each of these mechanisms, demonstrating why these would be either self-defeating or simply futile from an epistemic perspective.

Republicanism - in particular the 'Roman' or 'neo-Roman' republicanism of Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner - has brought notions of domination and power to the forefront of political philosophy. Its proponents argue that non-domination is a radical ideal, one that is demanding and practical, and which can ground an effective and open-ended "normative and institutional research program". I hope to show that non-domination in the sense envisioned by most mainstream republicans is indeed a radical ideal, but one that requires much more substantial change than many of those republicans envision. Specifically, this thesis intervenes in ongoing debates within and around contemporary republicanism about the demands of non-domination when it comes to the organisation of work. It has both a critical and a constructive element. Where they pay attention to the organisation of work at all, the typical republican strategy involves little more than strong workplace regulation and some very limited mechanisms of worker voice. This set of proposals is coupled with tentative support for a universal basic income, or other ways of lowering the exit costs of any given job. After defending the application of personal accounts of domination to the world of work, I critically assess this mainstream republican approach to the workplace before arguing in favour of two broad strategies that better satisfy a commitment to non-domination: the pursuit of workplace democracy and the reduction of work. I argue that both strategies ought to be cornerstones of an anti-domination approach to the workplace, whether from a republican perspective or not.

Military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq highlighted a key characteristic of contemporary Western civil- military relations. Today, a small group of volunteers fights a distant conflict while popular familiarity with military service and war declines. There is a disconnect between this way of war and enduring cultural understandings of the appropriate normative relationship between gender (particularly masculinity), military service, and citizenship. This study examines "support the troops" (StT) discourses in the United States and United Kingdom during the "global war on terror" (2001-2010) as a representation of this on-going transformation in gendered/ing civil-military relations. Methodologically, the study employs structured discourse analysis to map an original data set of previously unexamined documents produced by UK and US state and military officials, pro-military non-governmental organizations, peace and anti-war movements, and media. It is the first systematic social scientific study of the "support the troops" phenomenon. The patterns inductively generated within the mapping are interpreted using a poststructural (re)conceptualisation of the military as a discursive structural effect, as well a formal institution and social relation. The study argues that StT is a means of addressing the gendered civilian anxiety that accompanies non-service in wartime. It finds that StT is a political contestation over the appropriate normative structure of gendered civil-military relations. Through the articulation of three ideal-typical, intertwined logics of gendered political obligation, StT discourse reconstitutes military support, rather than military service, as the sine qua non of contemporary normative citizenship. Via a series of gendered associations and contrasts with "the troops", support is further produced as a means of military participation. Correspondingly, ostensibly separate "civil" society is (re)masculinised. Together, the underlying logics of gendered political obligation work to discursively instantiate and (re)produce an idealised vision of the political community, extending and legitimating the transnational liberal social order.

With the world's fourth-largest Muslim population, Bangladesh is an important case study in the exploration of what it means to be a 'secular' country with Islam as a state religion. One important mechanism through which to analyse the relationship between religion and the state is through the country's laws, and family laws are especially significant in that they represent the state's determination of which long-standing social and religious practices find their way into legislation as a representation of societal values. As with many other countries with significant Muslim populations, personal status legislation has remained relatively static in the years following independence, despite attempts at change. Inspired by studies of negotiations between state and civil society actors in bringing about changes in law, this study analyses the evolution of family laws for Muslims in Bangladesh, revealing a range of voices using such laws in their negotiations between competing notions of 'Islam' and 'secularism' and their role in governance. Using parliamentary and Supreme Court records, newspaper archives, expert interviews, and secondary literature, I show that there has been little change in personal status legislation beyond procedural simplification, and that the judiciary and policymakers have had a tendency to support freedom of religious practice except in family laws. This study explores why this is the case, and focuses on the discourse around the National Women Development Policy and its clause on property and inheritance as the greatest point of contention in enhancing women's rights in family laws.

The knowledge base of empirical psychology is more expansive than ever before. So too is the impulse to integrate this factual knowledge into political theory. But how should this psychological turn be undertaken? What would a political psychology for political theorists look like? How could psychology credibly tackle the questions that political theorists characteristically ask, especially regarding the nature and consequences of prescriptive political judgment? In this thesis, I explore this issue through the framework of recent debates between political moralists—specifically, John Rawls, G. A. Cohen, and Peter Singer—and political realists—largely Bernard Williams. Deploying the insights of political realists, I argue that moralists cannot quarantine the relevance of psychological facts through the ideal of a 'pure' normative judgment. To explore what this empirical engagement might look like, I contrast these moralist ideals of judgment with Jonathan Haidt’s social intuitionism, which proposes a more affectively laden and pluralistic model of judgment. I then redeploy the insights of political realism to critique social intuitionism, to uncover its weaknesses from the perspective of existing political theory. Finally, to stabilize this critique, I lay out the framework for a reflexive political psychology, which acknowledges the co-constitutive relationship between the discipline of psychology and its subject matter: human psychology. This reflexive political psychology offers an agenda by which we can investigate the political usefulness of psychological and political theories.

This thesis seeks to provide an account of the role played by ideologies in acts of mass violence against civilians, such as genocides, murderous state repression, war crimes, and other ‘atrocities’. Mass violence of this kind has already received extensive study, with scholars frequently emphasising their belief that ideology is important. Until now, however, discussions of ideology have been held back by a lack of conceptual and theoretical development, leading to narrow portrayals of ideology’s role, vagueness over its relevance, and dubious assumptions about its theoretical implications. This thesis addresses these problems by building a more focused and integrative theoretical framework for analysing the ideological dynamics of atrocities. I engage in an extensive conceptual and methodological discussion, to establish the best way of defining and utilising the concept of ideology. In doing so, I emphasise how ideology can be important even for that majority of atrocity perpetrators who do not meet classic but misleading stereotypes of fanatical killers driven by burning hatred. I then detail my actual account of the ideological dynamics of deadly atrocities, which centres around the identification of six ‘justificatory mechanisms’: dehumanisation, guilt-attribution, threat-construction, deagentification, virtuetalk, and future-bias. These justificatory mechanisms describe sets of ideological processes that recur across different cases of violence against civilians, and which make that violence look permissible or even desirable to those who, in a variety of roles, carry it out. I then substantiate this account through three case studies: of Nazi atrocities, Stalinist oppression, and Allied area bombing in World War II. These cases demonstrate the cross-case applicability of the six justificatory mechanisms, and illustrate how the framework I offer allows us to construct more causally explicit, psychologically plausible, and comprehensive pictures of the way key ideologies feed in to the most destructive campaigns of violence against civilians.

A critical investigation of the public/private distinction as it has been conceived in Anglo-American political thinking in the second half of the 20th century. A broadly held consensus has developed amongst many theorists that public/private does not refer to any single determinate distinction or relationship but rather to an often ambiguous range of related but analytically distinct conceptual oppositions. The argument of this thesis is that if we approach public/private in the search for analytic or conceptual clarity then this consensus is correct. Against this I propose that a number of the most dominant invocations of the distinction can be understood to express public/private as an irreducibly political dialectic that mediates the relationship between the subjective and objective side of social and political life. By locating these conceptually diverse invocations within a broader and more determinate framework of the historical development and contestation of the boundaries which establish the conditions for subjectivity, as the assertion of political agency, on the one hand, and which demarcate, police and defend these particular boundaries, as part of the objectively given character of social life and institutional organisation, on the other hand, then a more determinate character to public/private can be recognized. I then seek to explore the capacity of this model to capture and explain the peculiar post-war problematisation of public/private amongst a number of new left thinkers in Britain and America.