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The emergence of mobile money and other new forms of payment has changed the sovereign foundations of money. Starting as a DFID funded project in Kenya, mobile money has now spread to many countries including Malaŵi. This thesis looks at the regulatory issues that mobile money poses, and the risks that this alternative form of payment poses to the financial system. The thesis argues that the traditional regulatory architecture of supervising the financial services is ill-suited to supervise mobile money. There are essentially two models of mobile money: telco-led and bank-led. The first is an innovation by telecommunication operators and utilises the small messaging service. There is no requirement to own a bank account. The bank-led model is linked to a bank account. The regulatory approaches to these two models are different. Unlike the telco-led, the bank-led model is under prudential regulation. This has manifested itself in the way the services have developed. The telco-led model had thrived while the bank-led model has fizzled indicating that for mobile money, less regulation may be an enabler. Mobile money is now considered a key developmental tool to achieve financial inclusion among the poor, rural based, unbanked, and underbanked. As opposed to traditional additive forms of financial inclusion, mobile money, especially the telco-led, is transformative. It employs a different approach where the consumer does not have to have a bank account or even travel to a bank to access financial services. In Malaŵi, the financial regulatory framework largely embodies the command and control model. Mobile money, however has largely been regulated using light-touch, with regulation following innovation. This thesis proposes an approach based on the concept of really responsive regulation. This approach, is best suited to embrace mobile money as it passes through the different phases of its evolution.

As a new emerging industrializing nation, industrial pollution is a challenge in Ethiopia. To address the problem, the government has introduced different laws, policies, strategies and established environmental organizations at federal and regional levels. However, the government has not performed well in this regard due to various barriers militating against sustainable industrial pollution control and management. Partly this is due to organizational weaknesses, lack of effective implementation of standards as well as the absence of expertise and capacity building. The aim of this research is to investigate the practice of industrial pollution control and management in Ethiopia with particular emphasis on two selected industries. For the practical investigation a methodology that combines semi-structured interview from key informants in industrial pollution, together with documentary and observational data has been employed. The findings of the research show that the magnitude of industrial pollution is rapidly increasing in the country. This is particularly the case in the textile and leather industries. It is also more severe in urban centers where most of the industries are located. The problem is most operating industries in Ethiopia do not have waste treatment plants. They simply discharge their untreated effluent to the nearby rivers or drainage facilities in violation of the established standards. Even for those industries with treatment plants (including the two case study industries) the treatment plants are not functioning properly due to cost implications; and they discharge their effluent to the nearby rivers with nominal treatment. Thus, they are sources of damage to the environment and the nearby communities. The main barrier to industrial pollution control has been the application of weak form of sustainable development policy and lack of institutional regulations—including laws and organizational implementing mechanisms. This is manifested through lack of political will on the part of the government to enforce the existing industrial pollution control laws; lack of capacity (resource and personnel) and coordination among the environmental organizations. On the part of the affected community there is lack of awareness and organization to protect their constitutionally enshrined right—the right to clean and healthy environment. Similarly there is also lack of corporate social responsibility on the side of the two industries subject of the study.

Through analysis based on an empirical study of the Chinese criminal process, this thesis examines the underlying reasons that lead to a striking feature of criminal trials in China---the absence of witnesses. The Chinese criminal justice system routinely relies on official written dossiers to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. To investigate whether the constructed written evidence is truly reliable, participant observation and semi-structured interviews have been conducted to explore how these investigative dossiers are created, scrutinised and utilised at different stages of the criminal process. Themes that emerge in this study include the police's manipulation and fabrication of written statements, prosecutors' acceptance of, and even encouragement of, police malpractice in falsifying evidence, coerced prosecutorial interrogation in pursuit of a guilty plea, the pro forma trial process, predetermined judicial outcomes based on the official dossier produced and marginalised defence practice throughout the criminal process. Approaching the enquiry from an internal perspective of the legal institutions for the first time within empirical research, this study outlines the key issues with the Chinese criminal justice system through examination of the strategic inter-relationships between the key legal actors, the deep-seated legal culture embedded in legal actions and the structural injustices that follow. Positioning these findings within the Chinese socio-political context, this study reveals that the criminal justice system in China is not a precise truth-finding process, but serves as a State apparatus of social control. The criminal justice system has been structured through the Appraisal System, bureaucratic management, and the central value of collectivism in such a way as to maintain the stability of the authoritarian regime. None of China’s criminal justice institutions are capable of functioning independently to protect innocent individuals from being wrongly accused and convicted. Thus, wrongful convictions should not be seen as aberrational or exceptional, but as an inevitable outcome of established deficiencies.

The study develops two significant arguments in relation to Pakistan’s socio-legal situation and analysis. First, it outlines and discusses the various prominent facets of the country’s legal architecture to formulate and present, what the thesis terms as, Pakistan’s Socio-Legal Tapestry. It considers the historical and conceptual trajectories of some of the multiple legal and normative structures that prevail in the country, their interplay and encounters, as well as their limitations and problems. It puts this socio-legal architecture at the heart of the examination, and by making the different constituents of the legal terrain explicit – components that include common law, Islamic law, colonial law, traditional law, legal ‘exteriority’ of tribal regions, and issues of ‘lawlessness’ – it makes the case for a holistic understanding of law as the necessary prerequisite to understanding the difficulties that that the country’s law, state and the wider society are faced with. The second significant argument of the study emerges from this expansion of the subject matter of (socio)legal analysis. It is argued that a shift in the understanding of what constitutes law in the context of Pakistan logically leads towards a (re)consideration of the lenses and narratives generally employed to examine it. The identification, examination and problematisation of these narratives – which include the dominant state-oriented legal narrative and the legal positivistic approach, the Islamic law narrative, legal pluralistic approach and the ascendant discourse on human rights – formulate the second substantive part of the study. It is argued that these Narratives of law differ in terms of how they perceive the context, identify their priorities, frame the problems and then propose solutions for their rectification. However, caught in a struggle to maintain their definitional consistencies, these narratives are only able to adopt a partial view of the picture and, owing to that, they generate contradictions that ultimately weaken their approach and proposed solutions. The purpose behind these two arguments is both to make a case for new avenues of context-specific legal analysis, as well as to create possibilities for it in the case of Pakistan. The problems that the country faces and the suffering that its people experience create an urgent need to recognise the deficiencies, both in our conceptualisation of law in this particular context, as well as the narratives, perspectives, theories and ideologies that we employ to approach it. This necessitates the search for alternative narratives for comprehending Pakistan’s socio-legal situation, to offer more nuanced approaches that might enable us to frame issues differently. This, I argue, is the most pressing task for those engaged in the analyses of legal, social and political spheres of Pakistan, and the necessary first step if our goal is the (re)formation of the legal and normative orders to make them more accountable to the people. By adopting the framework of colonialism and Coloniality to offer a different lens to understand Pakistan’s socio-legal peculiarities, the study presents one such attempt in this vein, with the purpose of initiating discussion and inviting critique.

This study, for the first time, brings together the detached understanding that facilitates coherent analysis of the emerging legal and regulatory issues that mobile payments introduce after financial inclusion in Kenya. To pursue these arguments firstly the thesis finds that the law on payments systems is incomplete as it does not address the specific issues necessary for an effective payments systems. It also puts forward the argument that the current regulatory regime is weak and largely unfelt due to its nascent state of development. Furthermore the current legal instruments are dispersed, and not uniformly applied among and across all payments systems and instruments as there exists an ambiguity in the legal definition of ‘mobile money’ and ‘deposits’ that present legal challenges in the enforcement of new regulations. Secondly, the cross-roads between the telecommunications industry and the financial industry that introduces non-banks into the retail payments market, presents a challenge in its effective regulation. As policy objectives are blurred when firms which are traditionally separated have to find appropriate regulatory frameworks in convergence. Thirdly this thesis examines the approach taken by Kenya in regulating mobile payments juxtaposing the realities that combine to blunt the impact of innovation and access to finance. This thesis serves as a foundational discussion on the regulatory capacity for the adoption and development of mobile payments within a regulatory vacuum and proposes that an appropriate regulatory framework is needed to addresses all these issues.

This research examines the regulation of phishing in Taiwan, particularly focusing on legal regulation but within a context of a multi-dimensional regulatory framework which also necessarily includes an examination of international regulation and the interaction between international and Taiwan regulatory interfaces given the transnational nature of phishing. Phishing is a malicious cyber activity which targets the acquisition of various types of confidential information by deception through the use of spoofed emails and/or websites. The increasing threat of phishing to information security has inspired a growing demand for regulation. Significant effort has been made in academic research and by industry to develop regulatory measures for phishing, which is dominated by technological work with comparatively little research on legal regulation. The current legal discussion of phishing, both international and Taiwan, very often concentrates on the criminal liability of phishers and pays little attention to the alternative role of law in the regulation of phishing. Thus this research suggests a broader approach to legal regulation that goes beyond criminal law and particularly addresses the role of information privacy law which constrains phishing by ensuring the protection of personal information. Phishing has posed crucial challenges to the traditional system in terms of both criminalization and legal enforcement. The solution that has been mostly addressed by the existing research is cooperation. As phishing is frequently a global phenomenon, this research suggests that an international approach involving coordination of legal standards and cross-border cooperation of law enforcement is necessary to tackle phishing, and also suggests that the fundamental step lies in a converged regulation of phishing consistent with its true context. Weak legal enforcement is a major deterrent to the effectiveness of legal regulation which highlights a need for a broad from of regulation that goes beyond law. In addition, a successful phishing episode involves a complex of factors including not only weakness in law but also vulnerability of technical infrastructure, administrative system and user awareness. A single solution is thus unlikely to deal with phishing. This research therefore suggests a multi-dimensional regulatory framework comprising different countermeasures developed especially in the areas of law, technology, education, and institutional network. It examines the anti-phishing approach undertaken in Taiwan employing qualitative methods to supplement the doctrinal research. In the context of a shortage of Taiwan scholarship on this subject, the research provides a set of suggestions to Taiwan development of a multi-dimensional regulatory scheme.

In documented incidents alone, between January 2006 and December 2009, 900 people were killed in 534 incidents of group conflict in Turkana. On the basis of this apparent lawlessness, the central research question queries whether the apparent inability of the state law and its institutions to manage group conflicts in Turkana districts denotes a crisis of application or a crisis of substance. Is the problem merely the extension of structures of state law such as courts, prosecutors, security agents, prisons and advocates to Turkana or does the crisis speak to a more fundamental challenge. The research argues the latter, that the relationship between state law and group conflicts in Turkana demands an interrogation of the conceptual and institutional dimensions of modern state law. The thesis interrogates how state law is incorporated; an apparatus of power through which certain regulative rationalities come to reframe the terrain upon which people in Turkana live and define their lives. In order to move state law in a radically improving direction, the research argues for a reorientation of rationalities and legality. The reorientation is advanced through two corresponding techniques that allude to the structural and perspectival elements of state law. Fashioned from amongst the unfinished representations of modernity and the initial task of conceiving a (post)colonial tension between regulation and emancipation, the first task involves building on those progressive aspects of state law that enhance its political legitimacy. The second requires the adoption of a transgressive mode of thinking described as 'knowledge-as-emancipation'. On the basis of these two prescriptions, state law can develop a more purposeful and emancipatory purpose within the conflict context of Turkana in particular, and Kenya in general.

Uganda is credited for carrying out extensive reforms in its tax system in the 1990s. The system of administration was overhauled together with a complete overhaul of tax legislation. The overriding objective was to increase tax revenues. Improvements were registered in the tax revenues but only temporarily. Since 2004, there has been stagnation in the tax revenue figures. The revenue from direct taxes only contributes about 20% to the total revenue well below the Sub-Saharan average of 40%. This has focused attention on the appropriateness of the reforms. The focus of the reforms on achieving efficiency did not sufficiently take into account the fundamental importance of equity within the system. As a result, the Income Tax Act 1997 embodies distortions and inequalities in the treatment of taxable income and taxpayers that have led to inefficiency in the system as a whole. The tax reforms also took a narrow technical view of the tax system. Taxation has an impact on state-building and is, therefore, affected by the state of governance. The reforms, even where they were well designed, have been affected by institutional weakness and the lack of accountability in the political process. The fact that institutional capacity affects effectiveness of the tax system is well documented yet it does not seem to have been taken into account in 1997 (UNDP, 1991:70). Taxpayer morale and revenues have been constrained by high levels of corruption within the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and arbitrariness in the award of tax waivers and other tax advantages. The purpose of the thesis is, therefore, to examine the distortions engendered by the tax system and their impact on taxpayer morale, tax revenue and investment. The thesis focuses on the direct taxation of profits from business activity in the formal and informal sector. An examination of the taxation of business profits provides an opportunity to highlight the distinctions in the tax system with regard to the treatment of the same type of income based on the legal status of the taxpayer and other considerations. The taxation of business profits in the corporate sector is compared with the taxation of business profits under the personal income tax system, taxation of partnerships and other unincorporated businesses. There is emphasis on the taxation of the informal sector which is presently less than satisfactory. However, the analysis is done in the context of the socio-political situation in Uganda. The weaknesses in governance and corruption have had an impact on the tax system by encouraging tax avoidance and evasion among political elites as well as on activities in the informal sector. The thesis also explores possibilities of broadening the tax base within the existing legislative framework as well as other possibilities for reform, for example, the call for the expansion of the tax base through taxation of land and agriculture by various experts and the URA itself (Private Sector Foundation- Uganda, 2009:122). Account must also be taken of Uganda’s membership of East African Community (EAC) and the constraints this puts on its exercise of fiscal sovereignty.

Discrimination based on health status is a serious problem in China, which influences the fundamental rights of millions of people. This thesis mainly discusses the nature, characteristics and reasons of discrimination based on health status in China. As a contextual and socio-legal study, this thesis employs doctrinal, empirical, historical, international & comparative law methods to provide a comprehensive and in-depth study on tackling discrimination based on health status in China. It is among the earliest researches that focus on the specific topic of discrimination based on health status in China. This thesis argues that various factors are responsible for continuing discrimination based on health status in China. Particularly, the fragmentary, incomplete, ambiguous and conflicting legislation, the ineffective, arbitrary and bureaucratic administration, the dependant and ineffective judiciary, the less active nongovernmental actors, and other relevant political, economic, medical and cultural factors, interact with one another to cause continuing discrimination. To pursue this argument, first, the thesis clarifies the necessity to prohibit discrimination based on health status by analysing relevant definitions and theories of such discrimination. Second, the thesis explores how discrimination based on health status has been tackled in international law and domestic law in various other jurisdictions, in order to reveal international responsibility China should bear and foreign lessons China can learn. Third, the thesis examines how discrimination based on health status has been tackled in Chinese history and reality to understand why such discrimination remains serious today. Fourth, the thesis discusses findings of the author’s fieldwork on tackling discrimination based on health status in China to investigate the effectiveness of the current anti-discrimination regime. Based on the above analyses, the thesis finally concludes the main reasons for continuing discrimination based on health status in China and proposes a more effective antidiscrimination regime in China to prohibit such discrimination.

Islamic practices have led to exhaustive debate in academia ranging from the traditional battlefield of gender related issues to the relatively new decisiveness surrounding the war on terror. In most of the debates regarding Islam, when one legitimises or delegitimises his/her stance, the divine is invoked as the main point of reference. The divine thus turns into the source of vice and virtue simultaneously through these competing opinions. In this game of "authenticity", we often ignore the aspect that, in our religious zealousness, the divine itself is victimised. This is because, while referring to the divine as the main architect of our opinions, we sideline those non-divine factors in the process of constructing "authenticities" which help shape our reading of the divine. The divine is simply a part of our constructed "authenticity" but not its exclusive constituent. We need to realise that the divine is not read in a vacuum and by those who do not have materiality; its readings are always carried out by those who are a product of their own circumstances and their understandings are routed through their particular contexts. The present study is an effort to analyse those non-divine factors which help shape our reading of the divine, and are not any less important in the process of constructing "authenticity" than the divine with reference to the gender discourse of Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan. This study proposes that there is always a need to maintain a gap between our understanding of the divine and "the divine"; because of the fact that the former is constructed, while the latter believed by Muslims as eternal, hence immutable. In addition to carrying out problematization of "authenticity" of the JI discourse, the study underscores the fact that problematization ought to be an integral part of our exercise of ascertainment of "authenticity" so that we may maintain the gap referred to above.