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The historiography of British intelligence on British India's north-west frontier has typically been focused on the "Great Game": the struggle between Russia and Great Britain for influence in Central Asia and Afghanistan that stretched from the mid-1800s to 1907. Comparatively little attention, scholarly or otherwise, has been paid to frontier intelligence over the subsequent 40 years of British India. This thesis fills this gap in our understanding through a detailed analysis of the development of the British frontier intelligence bureaucracy and its impact on frontier policy and security during this timeframe. It provides a bureaucratic history of a heretofore unstudied intelligence organization and argues that individual leaders played key roles in the bureaucratic and philosophical debates that shaped the system's modernization. Further, it aims to show how frontier intelligence played a far more central role in crafting British policy on the frontier during the 20th century than is currently appreciated. It also provides broader insights into the workings of British India and the evolution of its approach to security policy and intelligence. Finally, this thesis expands our understanding of how intelligence organizations develop on the fringes of state power.

This thesis sets out to understand the consequences of prejudice against German Jews in the Weimar Republic, and British Muslims in contemporary England. I am interested in the responses of targets of these prejudices, and the social and political dynamics underpinning these responses, as well as how the collective self-esteem of targets relates with their responses. Discourses of self-esteem have been well documented in psychological literature, however, there is little research on the mechanisms connecting stressors of prejudice, collective self-esteem and coping with Islamophobia and Antisemitism in particular. The primary contribution of this piece of work is its attempt to devise a typology of coping strategies and use them to offer insight into the processes of Antisemitism and Islamophobia. I explore the lived experiences of Jews in the Weimar Republic and British Muslims in contemporary, post-9/11 England. Through an exploration of their responses to Anti-Semitic and Islamophobic prejudices, ranging from assimilation to withdrawal from society, I put forward the ‘third way’ response of accommodation. I study their choice of coping strategies against these prejudice through a combination approach using semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, and an analysis of memoirs, diaries and autobiographies. The thesis also evaluates how the collective self-esteem of individuals in both cases is affected by the prejudices they face, and it seeks to establish a link between collective self-esteem and coping strategies of the targets of prejudice. I hope that by studying these two cases in parallel, I can bring to prominence a more contextualised understanding of responses towards religious prejudice through the target’s lens, as well as a nuanced perspective into the dynamics of both Antisemitism and Islamophobia.

This thesis considers how India negotiates international rules and why it ratifies certain international rules but not all. To date, the scholarly coverage on this question has not captured the texture of India’s interactions with the international order, specifically the process through which India negotiates international rules on key issues. This lacuna is unfortunate since India has been widely involved across the international order working to influence, shape, evade and resist international rules that have an effect on its development and security. In this study, I argue that India’s approach toward international rules is determined by three factors – what the interests are toward a particular rule; how adeptly institutions like the bureaucracy, legislature and executive understand the policy problem being negotiated and adopt policy actions given state interests on the issue; and how effective domestic interest groups are in articulating their respective preferences to state institutions responsible for international negotiations and coordinate with them thereafter to secure policies in their favour. Empirically, I consider India’s behaviour negotiating four specific international rules - Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and GATT’s Uruguay Round Trade Agreement. Through detailed case studies, I demonstrate that political economy considerations, specifically how interests, institutions and interest groups interact, affects how India negotiates international rules and the decision taken thereafter to ratify or not. The empirical findings of the thesis also call us to question prevailing claims of India being a rising power that has the ability to manage its rise in the international order that involves interacting with various aspects of the order including the negotiation of international rules. We might require a new conceptual vocabulary to consider and explain the behaviour of key states like India that are rising powers when measured in aggregate terms and systemic impact but less so when considering their development challenges and constraints.

This thesis is an ethnographic exploration into the nature of the social contract in one region of Pakistan, known as Lower Sindh. It looks at the state-citizen relationship in this part of Southern Pakistan through a new and unique lens and goes beyond traditional frameworks of caste, kinship and feudal networks that have long dominated scholarship on political society in non-urban Pakistan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three districts of Lower Sindh in the aftermath of a devastating flooding disaster in 2010 and 2011, this research illustrates that a direct relationship between the state and the citizens exists in this part of the country. This relationship includes aspects of clientalistic relations with powerful political individuals and families but also equally aspects of rights, entitlements and notions of being citizens of a bigger social and political entity 'the sarkar'. Despite a dominant and pervasive narrative on the absence of the state and collapsed citizenship in Pakistan, my evidence illustrates that there is an ethnographic construction of a social contract that is based on rights of citizenship. This aspect of citizenship that is based on rights and entitlements was actually pushed along in the aftermath of the flooding disaster in Lower Sindh. The state is neither as absent, nor is its relationship with its citizens as broken as has been suggested by popular accounts.