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Little is known about why individuals engage in political activity within the workplace despite Mintzberg (1985) outlining political motivation, or will, as a central tenet of organisational politics. Where scholars have examined political will, their disciplines have impacted their conceptualisation, with political science and organisational behaviour (OB) treating political will at either the collective level (Post et al., 2010) or at the micro-individual level (Doldor, 2017; Kapoutsis et al., 2017) respectively. Therefore, this thesis presents two studies seeking to uncover interdisciplinary insights into political motivation. Drawing on attribution theory (Weiner, 1985), both studies within this thesis stem from 60 qualitative semi-structured interviews that examine individuals' reasoning for political activity. Interviews were conducted within a context of political work: local councils throughout the U.K. with officers (n=30), who engage in more typical workplace politics, and councillors (n=30), whose role it is to be political. In the first study, attributional analysis was used to elicit the cause (i.e., motivation) of junior, mid-level and senior individuals' engagement in political activity. A key finding from this study was that power was important for the content of political motivation. Consequently, study two built on the findings of study one by adopting a unique social-cognitive mental mapping methodology to elicit the 'power mental models' of individuals and how these impacted political will. Overall, findings from study one suggested that individuals' environment, contextuality and positionality are important to political will including the impact of seniority, suggesting political motivation is part of a process of social cognition. Study two went further and illustrates how power forebears political will, acting to shape or constrain motivation. Implications of these insights from an interdisciplinary perspective are discussed in the final chapter, alongside directions for future research.

This thesis examines the role police played in facilitating statebuilding and more specifically how the disposition of the Afghan police came to challenge the success of statebuilding during the US occupation of the country between 2001 and 2021. I argue that, like the unresolved nature of state-society relations typically found under conflict conditions, the disposition of the Afghan police also remained unresolved rendering the policeman torn between his preexisting identification with local society and his evolving identification with the state. For Bourdieu, the policeman experienced split habitus or habitus clivé because his 'conditions of existence' shifted in such a way that his disposition loses coherence. Indeed, he remained in a state of flux - an unreconciled disposition. As a result, a foundational element of state legitimacy and a component of its monopoly on the legitimate use of force (and enforcement) is frustrated, thereby limiting the success of statebuilding. Following the procedures outlined in existing studies that have applied Bourdieu's approach to examining political space, I conduct three distinct operations for this study. First, the relationship between the field (society) and the 'field of power' (state) is examined. Here I highlight both the history and composition of state-society relations, as well as present day perspectives of this relationship as provided through interviews with state representatives and members of society, including government and local leaders, Afghan security personnel, former mujahidin fighters, and local day laborers. Second, by mapping the social topology of the positions that comprise these fields and their relation to each other - namely that of the competition and negotiation that exists between the state and society. Finally, the disposition of the police, including their strategies, trajectories, and interaction within the constraints and opportunities of the field, is examined with the use of a survey of 1,360 Afghan policemen.

This dissertation investigates the intentions and imaginations of migration of minority groups in the pre-migration phase and their identification and self-categorization during this time. The data was collected prior the actual move and the study aims to look beyond the scope of ethnic return migration literature and explore minority migration in its multiple shapes. A multiple case study with a mixed model design and grounded theory was conducted using two cases: Estonia and Italy. Estonia is a country with a significant minority group of Russophones which is the first group of interest in this thesis. Italy on the other hand has a region in the north, namely South Tyrol, with a considerable German speaking population; which will serve as a second case study. The quantitative and qualitative questionnaire was distributed among last year High School students in 2020 in Estonia and 2021 in Italy which led to a total of (N=151) participants in Estonia and (N=90) participants in South Tyrol. The analysis shows a higher probability of minority group members to migrate in both case studies, however not connected to ethnic return migration intentions. The main reasons for migration intentions are the divisions of societies and the lack of feeling of belonging of minority group members, as well as the imagination of a good community in the destination country. Looking at the self-identification of the participants, minority group members prefer a combined identity of their ethnic, national and the European identity, while majority group members favour solely the national identity. However, the European identity can function as an umbrella category and combine both groups. Future studies could explore the relationship between the imagination of migration and actual migration behaviours, as well as the long-term outcomes of migration for minority groups.

Love has often been regarded as merely a private affair occluded from the public domain of the political - love supposedly fostering only an expanded individualism. However, the first essential argument of this thesis is that love is already coextensive with politics - that love is an inescapable force that underpins subjectivity and as such it cannot be excluded or marginalised from discussions of the political - and since it is inescapable, we must grapple with the way it functions at level of subject formation. Therefore, this thesis's central aim is to apply a Deleuzian conceptual framework to challenge the false separation of love and politics that has been established within political theory. Through Deleuze's philosophy of difference we can understand love as process not beholden to identity, we can say that is in fact pedagogical to the degree that love must always navigate the problematic, that which does not fit in love or when love fails the event as the return of desire is fostered. Disappointment in love is central to this process for Deleuze. To radicalise love, we must also confront two central principles of identity and cyclical repetition that ground subjectivity and limit its capacity to embrace alterity: Pleasure and Memory. These subjective modes are derived from the Freudian conception of love vis-a-vi his "pleasure principle", a principle Deleuze works through and challenges, this principle ultimately rendering desire and love as dependent upon a cyclical movement of retroactivity and recollection - love becomes beholden to the return. Deleuze coupled with Freud exposes this essential tension within the core of love and the means for its overcoming. The claim that I defend in this thesis is that love may typically serve as both a conservative force subjectively and politically, but that through a Deleuzian perspective we can see that in fact love's tendency towards repetition as recollection, which is driven by lack, need not sediment identity but rather offer the means for both overcoming love as it is constituted and the means for rethinking what love can do. By applying a Deleuzian perspective we can challenge the existing image of love, which only emphasises its operation at the level of identity and unification, by a repetition of sameness which can lead to love's most violent and traumatic excesses - and we can see love as a process that not only sediments the subject but also fractures it, leading to new potentials and possibilities. Love therefore functions at a micropolitical level beyond the segmentations of molar or macropolitical negativity and conflictual identities, love being a means to undermine identity from within.

Despite the prominence of the radical right in the UK, scant research has been undertaken to explore the influence that these organisations have on the perpetration of hate crime. Whilst current literature on hate crime predominantly looks at the impacts these crimes have on victims, it does not sufficiently investigate the conditions under which these crimes occur. The few studies on this issue have been conducted in the USA and Canada, the most recent of which was conducted by Perry and Scrivens (2019) who presented a new theoretical framework to account for this relationship. This framework - permission to hate - establishes a general environment of hate. This thesis contributes to the field by developing permission to hate to a more racialised social structure, and identifies the ways in which the radical right influences hate crime in England and Wales. Thus, this thesis is theory testing, adopting a similar sequential mixed-methods approach used by Perry and Scrivens. Due to the anti-minority ideology of the radical right, this thesis uses official crime statistics measuring racially and religiously aggravated crimes and demographic data to determine whether there is a correlation between these crimes and both the electoral performance of radical right parties and the protest activities of radial right organisations at the local level. In order to identify the causal mechanisms, a case study of the West Midlands is undertaken using semi-structured interviews with individuals who worked at Third Party Reporting Centres, media reports of radical right protests and more localised crime data. By combining these methods this thesis expands upon the work by Perry and Scrivens, contributing towards the theory permission to hate, whilst also highlighting the ways in which the radical right influence racially and religiously aggravated crimes. This study finds that the radical right achieve this through the consumption of alcohol during their protests, inserting themselves into local issues and how they emphasise the risks minority communities pose to British society, especially in the aftermath of high profile events.

Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, I propose in this thesis a phenomenology of war. Theorising war as a particular way of Being-in-the-world, I am concerned with the phenomenological processes through which war is embodied, experienced, and enacted - and with how these processes constitute the possibility of war's continuity in history. The overarching methodological argument is that war, as a structure of human affairs, must be phenomenologically grounded. War studies literature has recently conceived an ontology of war, but unless this ontology of war is firmly grounded in human Being-in experience and action as it persists in time-there will remain a tendency to hypostatise war as an inevitable and external fate. Within this framework, I make two main theoretical arguments: First, I make a hermeneutic claim that war is essentially historical and that it should be understood as a tradition which is "handed down" and "taken up" between generations; and second, I make an existentialist claim that the fundamental structure of war is Being-against (an Other). Integrating these arguments, I show that war is ontologically contingent on the human body which carries it forth as a structure of Being in time. Having developed this phenomenology of war in Part One, Part Two then seeks to exemplify this methodology through an examination of the case of the contemporary British soldier in Afghanistan. Across three chapters, I examine: (1) how the British soldier is constituted as a subjectivity in war; (2) how the Afghan war scene within which the soldier exists is constituted; and (3) how the soldier is constituted in relation to the prospect of death. The main contribution of this thesis, as such, is to introduce phenomenology into war studies as a method for understanding and critiquing war.

Iraqi Kurdistan emerged as a "free" entity in a humanitarian intervention in 1991. Since then, it has been the subject of growing international involvement. The region gained its legal status in 2005 as an autonomous territorial entity in the aftermath of another US-led military intervention. Rather than incorporating the region into the institutional apparatus of a federal Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan's newly-attained legality further inserted it into global networks of governance, capital flows, ideas, advocacy and knowledge. It quickly became a space where international organisations, NGOs, and consultants eagerly promoted international frameworks of state-building, good governance, free markets, and development. This thesis explores the operation of these international actors, programs and discourses, and their political, social and economic effects in Iraqi Kurdistan. It goes beyond existing juridical epistemologies and their primary concern with the state and sovereignty, and offers a proximate account of international processes in the Kurdistan region. The research relies on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and biopolitics, and locates the region within the prevailing (neo)liberal political rationalities and dispersed power relations of global politics in the post-cold war. This thesis demonstrates how dispersed and diffused regimes of power/knowledge mobilised by a multiplicity of international, local and regional actors have constituted and reconstituted Iraqi Kurdistan's self-rule. It substantiates this argument by linking Iraqi Kurdistan's social and political development to broader changes in global politics. It also analyses the ways in which international discourses and practices of humanitarian governance, free markets, good governance, and development have shaped political, social and economic order in the region. It argues that these practices have constructed the KRI's social and political order, not on political institutions of sovereignty, but as an economic unit. The economic conceptualisation of the region has had significant implications for Kurdish nationalism, and the meaning of independence, self-determination and national liberation. In this framing, self-determination is no longer a political and legal category associated with independent statehood, rather it is a governmental category denoting a set of practices, policies and norms that seek to promote self-reliance and self-development among the Kurds.

Sexual violence has been a part of wars and political conflicts since the beginning of time. Rape and other forms of sexual violence have been utilised systematically in contemporary armed conflicts to administer maximal physical, psychological, cultural and social harm. These atrocities and human rights infringements have only recently evoked an imperative global discussion. The acts of sexual violence have principally been understood to be innate contingencies attributed to a male biological drive. This impeded an extensive inquest into the meanings and operations of cumulative sexual violence demonstrated on women. This qualitative investigation centres around how Kosovar-Albanian females construct and make sense of their experiences of sexual violence circa 23 years post war Kosovo. This study has a particular interest in how various forms of identity are negotiated in light of survivors experiences and the impact of their experiences on their intra-psychic and inter-personal relationships within a socio-political and cultural context. This research presents phenomenological data gathered in Kosovo among survivors of rape and sexual violence and the study methods included a critical narrative analysis of 7 semi-structured interviews. The data yielded from this research was explored through a multivariant theoretical lens, which included aspects of feminism, psychology, sociology, and politics. The findings from this psychological investigation indicated that systemic use of rape and sexual violence in war or political conflict harmed the physical and psychological existence of Kosovar-Albanian women, seriously damaging intra psychic and inter-personal relationships and compromising personal and collective identity. It was concluded that sexual violence against women acquires a symbolic meaning and should be examined within the context of the body politics and gender systems. The discoveries made by this research investigation evoked further discussion regarding social and political implications for the realm of Counselling Psychology and our moral obligations to humanity at large. In addition to contributions towards therapeutic theory and practice, and developments for future investigations.

This thesis seeks to advance the current scholarship on conflict transportation from the homeland to the diaspora. Focusing on the Lebanese diaspora in Dearborn, Michigan and Dakar, Senegal, it analyzes the interplay between endogenous (host state) and exogenous (homeland) conditions to determine how these factors affect group interaction. The thesis argues that socioeconomic and political conditions in the country of settlement have helped to mitigate tensions between constituent communities of the diaspora and thus prevent the importation of conflict from the homeland. Factors contributing to these dynamics include the internal features of the diaspora; the migratory trajectory of its members; mode of immigrant incorporation; political and discursive opportunity structures; and the economic opportunity structure. This thesis further argues that the absence of conflict transportation in both Dearborn and Dakar results, in part, from the framing strategies undertaken by diaspora leaders in these respective locales. They consciously framed homeland events in such a way as to forestall rather than incite physical violence, discursive confrontation and spatial separation (mutual avoidance) within the diaspora community. In the Senegalese context, the thesis explains how reactive transnationalism, which developed in response to discrimination during the colonial and early post-colonial eras, drove disparate Lebanese communities to coalesce as a single ethnic group, thus helping to preclude a replication of the core conflict that defines group relations in the homeland. This thesis introduces a new concept (legacy mobilization) to explain the strategies employed by the Lebanese diaspora in Dearborn to build a cohesive community while simultaneously protecting that community from the antagonistic frame of the homeland. This thesis is also among the first to utilize a comparative study of alternative settlement sites (one in the Global South and the other in the Global North) to research relations within a single diaspora community. The arguments that this thesis makes are based predominantly on empirical research that was undertaken across Lebanon and in Dakar and the Dearborn area. This fieldwork included interviews with clergy, journalists, university students, officials from political parties, representatives from Lebanese civil society organizations and a range of both citizens of Lebanon and diaspora members in Dearborn and Dakar. The study contributes to the scholarship by addressing key themes that are largely understudied in the literature, such as conflict within diaspora communities, the impact of host society conditions on diaspora relations, and the role of homeland events at shaping diaspora consciousness and mobilization.

This dissertation investigates the dynamics of contention between the political opposition and the incumbent in two cases of democratic backsliding: Turkey under the AKP and Venezuela under Chavismo. The political opposition in the two cases pursued various strategies, including electoral campaigns, protests, and insider-outsider coalitions, yet have failed to achieve their intertwined purported goals of overturning increasing authoritarianism and gaining power. Building on recent theoretical and empirical work in comparative politics, International Relations and social movement studies, this thesis generates an analytical narrative that can reveal how the political opposition relates to the process of democratic backsliding in the aforementioned cases. By studying the dynamics of contention between the incumbent and the political opposition with a comparative historical study, this thesis outlines the mechanisms involved in the political opposition's interaction with the incumbent in processes of democratic backsliding. In order to study this phenomenon, the thesis brings together the contentious politics framework and frame analysis, which I term "contentious frame analysis" and applies this approach to examine the dynamics of democratic backsliding. Through using this methodology, this thesis contends that three mechanisms are at play in the process of democratic backsliding in both cases. These mechanisms, termed 'polarisation', the use of a 'fifth column frame' and 'securitisation', show how both the political opposition and incumbent in both cases, contributed to the outcome of populist authoritarianism taking root in both societies. These mechanisms served to sustain contention in both cases, which has ultimately contributed to the incumbent consolidating political control, despite the efforts of the political opposition to challenge the incumbent. The findings of this research, therefore, challenge the presentation of the role of the political opposition as solely a necessary agent for democratisation in the comparative politics literature; extends the contentious politics framework to the study of the domestic, regional and international context's influence on the development and challenging of political regimes; and, shows how the frames that are used by actors in these aforementioned processes are both contested and rooted within their historical contexts.

The present research project seeks to deepen the understanding of private credit cycles by analyzing the local political economy dynamics enabling or disabling the birth of destabilizing credit expansions. Which policy configurations and settings enable credit cycles to keep expanding unchecked and which enable countries to decisively act to tame those cycles? Chapter 1 presents the overall motivation for the research project by reviewing existing work and knowledge gaps. Chapter 2 tests the existence of political credit cycles around and beyond elections. Chapter 3 presents a new dataset of credit policies deepening the understanding of the actual policies that fuel or lean against credit cycles. Chapter 4 and 5 provide a more in-depth analysis of two crucial credit policy categories, each drawing credit in opposite directions: homeownership subsidization on the one hand and their impact on credit cycles (Chapter 4) and countercyclical macroprudential policy on the other hand, by analyzing the impact of governance arrangements on the capacity to restrain credit cycles (Chapter 5).

This research sets out to investigate the links between natural resources and sovereignty. The existing scholarly literature shows that the links between natural resources and various dimensions of sovereignty have been largely overlooked. This thesis uses the concept of de facto statehood as its primary theoretical framework. This research employs a single-case study of the Kurdish de facto state to examine the oil sovereignty nexus between 2003 and 2019. It argues that the conflict over oil resources between the KRG and the Iraqi government is very difficult to resolve because it revolves around sovereignty rather than just financial interests. The findings of this research suggest that natural resources have a paradoxical impact on the sovereignty of the KRG. On the one hand, the KRG's sovereignty was strengthened by the high oil price between 2003 and 2013. On the other hand, the KRG's domestic and Westphalian sovereignty has been undermined from 2014 to 2019 by the low oil price in conjunction with other factors. While oil is crucial for the survival of the Kurdish de facto state and its engagement with foreign actors, it does not lead to the creation of a sovereign Kurdish state. The findings of this research also have significant implications for the direction of future research as they focus on issues such as competition over natural resources, contested sovereignty and natural re-sources as a foreign policy instrument, and also issues that are essential to understanding how sovereignty evolves.

This thesis argues that political violence can be broadly conceptualised as negation of human potential. The analysis bypasses essentialist definitions of violence and prioritises instead the function of violence in relation to the political experiences of subjects. The thesis examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus and Frantz Fanon and interprets their views on violence by focusing on its political function and effects on subjects. The main claim is that all three thinkers, despite their differences, agree that violence negates the potential of subjects to act and express themselves in certain ways, which involves spontaneity and creative initiative. This is shown through Arendt's concept of natality, Camus's concept of rebellion and Fanon's idea of reshaping subjectivities through anticolonial struggle. The thesis argues that violence negates potential because of the unpredictability and insecurity that spontaneous action entails and this goes against the three thinkers' views on humanism. It demonstrates how Arendt, Camus and Fanon espouse political resistance through novel creative action in order to break the circle of violence that rests upon repetition and reaction. Violence is examined in the context of politics in totalitarianism and colonialism, complemented by an analysis of violence in biopolitics though a discussion of the thoughts of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. In this way, the thesis reveals the links between totalitarianism, colonialism and biopolitics, by emphasising the role of violence that negates human potential, which is common to all these political constellations.

This thesis examines how informal institutions operate in federal relations and how they affect the dynamics of federal bargaining in contemporary Russia. In addressing these issues, the research considers how elite groups and networks operating in centre-region relations were bonded together by a complex network of vertical and horizontal ties and interactions. On the one hand informal rules of the game played a complementary role and have been instrumental to the construction and consolidation of a centralized and vertical system of governance, integrating the sub-national level into a bureaucratic hierarchy. On the other hand, however, the overreliance on informal rules and personalistic interaction between central and local elite networks and within the regional polity, played a substitutive role, deeply affecting the capacity of the centre to effectively exercise control over the regions. The research is rooted in the re-conceptualization of the notion of the federal process and relies on two case studies and the analysis of a specific, network-based, elite management model that emerged over the last twenty years and affected formal and informal resources available to regional leaders (governors). The paradox of the Russian centralized federal system identified in this work is associated with the inherent weaknesses of regional governors that makes them unable to function as an effective transmission belt between regional and federal interests. This leaves space for the operation of a plethora of different interest groups and networks within the regional polity, tempering vertical integration and control. The thesis argues that beneath the seemingly consolidated centralized system of subordination, the role of horizontal forces and the specific constellation of actors and interests creates a complex framework of asymmetric interaction that shapes the contours of regional politics and centre-region bargaining. Control is mainly exercised through manual interventionism and short-term risk aversion tactics that renders the system of federal relations more susceptible to the pressure of endogenous and exogenous shocks.

In exploring the question of Belarus's influence on Russia and the EU by the non-material means of state identity, the research has developed the Composite State Identity as a theoretical framework to examine the dynamics of influence. It argues that congruence and engagement of state identity, conceptualised as a composite of three temporal components, which are related to the past, the future, and the present, vis-à-vis the Other, help understand the dynamics of influence of Belarus, a smaller state, vis-à-vis its larger neighbours, Russia and the EU. Specifically, the engagement of at least one component of state identity which is externally congruent with the Other positively contributes to the influence, which the Self is able to wield. The thesis seeks to show how Belarus constructed its state identity in the three decades after its independence vis-à-vis two external Others, Russia and the EU, and how the change in state identity constituted Belarus's influence, both successful and not.

The thesis proposes a nuanced interpretation of Arendt's concept of judgement based on the close interpretation of key works from late in her oeuvre. It is argued that this provides a new account of the relationship between Arendt's concepts of judgement, action, forgiveness, and promising that have an impact upon how we understand her late work and its application. The central claims of the thesis rest upon the assumption that Arendt considered judgement to be both a political and an ethical faculty, because she understood ethics within a political framework founded upon her concept of "action". The thesis begins with an exploration of her ideas about the faculty of judgement and its relations to the idea of morality and politics. After the explanation of Kant's idea of Geschmacksurteil or the judgement of taste, the thesis discusses the connection between the two thinkers' concepts of judgement, examines Arendt's reading of Kant and justifies her major interpretive claims. The thesis also examines and discusses her concept of action and her ideas of politics and the political through the term politeuesthai which helps not only justify her reading and argument about Kant's theory of judgment but also helps to ground her theory of ethics. The discussion lays a foundation for the debates and arguments about her ideas of ethics in the last chapter. In the discussion about her ethical thoughts, the thesis explores and reviews some literatures concerning Arendt's theory of judgement and debates with key scholars, Kateb, Benhabib and Buckler, on a range of central issues. It also demonstrates the relationship between judgement and the other two ethical concepts, forgiving and promising. Drawing upon debates with respect to transitional justice, it concludes that Arendt's idea of judgement is more fertile than these two ideas when it comes to understanding the application of her political ethics.

This thesis addresses three central questions. The first is: how should one approach ethics of immigration? My answer to this question involves arguing that a key - perhaps the key - element underpinning differences amongst approaches is the underlying account of practical normativity. Thus, a way of developing a fruitful approach involves exploring debates on practical normativity. The second question becomes how should practical normativity be understood? In answer to second question, I argue that practical normativity should be understood in a Humean fashion: practical normativity is underpinned by desires. I specify this further by defending Bernard Williams's reasons internalism. I argue that reasons internalism, in spite of much criticism, is a robust and accurate account of the way practical normativity works. This leads to the third and final question: how could reasons internalism inform political ethics and the problem of first-admissions in the ethics of immigration? In answer to this last question, I argue that reasons internalism should make us sceptical of cosmopolitanism, but it also gives reason to be sceptical of Rawlsian statism and similar moralising and legalistic approaches to political ethics. Given this, I characterise an internalist political theory as a form of political realism. I then develop an internationalist and internalist approach to political ethics by drawing on insights from the tradition of political realism, Rousseau scholarship, and virtue ethics. I argue that this approach need not undermine the case for free movement, for which several attractive arguments have been put forward by thinkers from a range of different traditions. Rather, it constrains the way the case should be made, lending much-needed direction and clarity to the case for free movement and suggesting a way for defenders to move the case beyond a primary focus on moral or ethical argument. The thesis culminates by outlining the conditions for a realist case for free movement in the form of five guiding principles for free movement advocates.

The Brexit referendum campaign was characterised by blaming of the EU, with blame seemingly inextricable from politics. However, what is not clear from existing research is what blame actually does to the people who read, hear, or otherwise consume it (the 'audience'). Does blame actually matter? Specifically, in what ways does exogenous blame make villains in politics, as characters who are bad, strong, and active, and whom we feel negatively towards? Such a question is vital in the context of affective polarisation, where it is not simply that we disagree with our opponents-it is that we experience negative emotions towards them. This research applies an abductive approach grounded in a critical realist ontology that cycles between theory and empirical data. Feldman Barrett's Theory of Constructed Emotions is introduced to connect societal 'feeling structures' discussed in prior international relations work with the human body that has hitherto been absent, while blame is defined as a discursive practice in which a speaker claims a party is doing, or has done, a harmful thing. A data analysis framework is developed that permits for investigation of the effects of discursive practices, calling for identification of context, performance, effects, and points of resistance and contestation. The empirical chapters address each stage of this framework in sequence. The Brexit referendum campaign is selected as a case study, and a mixed methods design utilising both qualitative content and statistical analyses emerges in-depth meaning and wider generalisability alike. Data analysed includes pre-referendum materials from Nigel Farage and the Leave campaigns, particularly Leave.EU, as well as the Remain campaign (355); this is compared with three months of articles and public commentary from the 'Metro' newspaper (60 issues), providing insight into context, performance, and contestation. In-depth semi-structured focus groups and interviews with Leave voters (18) and a survey-experiment conducted amongst UK voters (1368) enables identification of both contestation and the effects of blame-specifically how blame makes people feel, and how it makes them feel about a party who is blamed. This research finds that blame makes villains in politics directly where it engenders negative, 'villain-type feelings' towards a blamed party, with annoyance predominant; and indirectly where it engenders compassion for victims. Its effects are mediated by the audience who consume the blame and may be mitigated by contestation strategies employed by that audience or others such as alternative campaigns. These include strategies that engage directly with the blame-counter-blaming, rebuttal, naming and shaming blame-as well as indirectly through use of alternate discursive practices such as credit or threat, and by changing the subjects and objects of blame. This work exceptionally investigates the vilifying effects and contestation of 'exogenous' third-party blame, contributing to the fields of international relations, political science, and social psychology; shows that it is not what we 'are' but rather what we 'know' that circumscribes the effects of blame, defraying concerns over psychometric targeting; provides insight into how communication professionals and EU staff may contest blame, beyond avoiding or shifting it; and demonstrates the effectiveness of blame in creating a villain of the EU in the specific case of the Brexit campaign.

Why do strong countries implement narratives of vulnerability in their wartime public communication? This dissertation solves the puzzling practice of powerful actors pursuing identifications we commonly associate with weakness and political failure. It is the first systematic study analyzing vulnerability narratives as a practice of statecraft and warcraft. I compare the politics of vulnerability of Israel and the UK during two conflicts: Israel's 2014 Operation Protective Edge (OPE) and the UK's participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I combine the analysis of states' wartime public communication with in-depth interviews with 32 British and 38 Israeli officials. Using identity as an analytical starting point to theorise about the states' behaviour, I expose the rationale behind actors' vulnerability narratives. I show that both conflicts were a source of ontological insecurity and that actors presented themselves as insecure to avoid negative evaluations of fighting against the underdog. In the case of strong actors, vulnerability narratives have two functions. One, they reduce anxiety about the actor's identity. Warfare against a weaker opponent erodes positive self-perceptions of the powerful state. By self-identifying as vulnerable, the country's action gains a principled meaning which supports its ontological security. Second, vulnerability narratives provide the state with a special agency. By presenting itself as vulnerable, the state securitises a weaker opponent to justify offensive action. The dissertation contributes to socio-psychological studies of conflict by showing that vulnerability is a conflict-supportive identification not only for the collectives but also for the states. Validating previous experimental research conducted on an individual and group level, it provides empirical data that vulnerability self-identifications may also be a source of legitimacy on the state level. It is an innovative study of how states introduce vulnerability self-identifications to the collective. Israel and the UK have based their communication on a multiplicity of in/outgroup vulnerability narratives. This finding broadens socio-psychological scholarship on vulnerability by showing that states' try to evoke vulnerability self-perceptions not only by referring to the in-group's but also outgroup's standing. The dissertation contributes to the ontological security studies. It lays out a new research avenue for the study of the resilience of identity. This approach recognizes that states adapt their autobiographies to their evolving behaviour and ideational needs. Furthermore, that the state's identity can be protected from criticisms of its actions. Applying the sociology of trust, I show that vulnerability narratives may be used as a trust-inducing mechanism. This allows us to read anew the political role of vulnerability where - contrary to the traditional approach - vulnerability may be a bulwark of ontological security. While it is broadly recognized that ontological security is a key source of political agency, major studies focus on routines and inhibiting functions the identity has over the behaviour of states. The recognition of the resilience of Israel's and the UK's identity - in a time of controversial armed conflicts with much weaker opponents - allows us to decouple states' routines from states' agency by accounting for the ability to sustain their sense of self and adapt to change. The dissertation sheds new light on what constitutes a crisis of ontological security. While in the literature, states' behaviour was foremost studied from the perspective of external challenges to their identity, in both case studies it was the actions of states themselves that challenged their ontological security. The dissertation investigates the researcher's interpretation of the state's anxiety with the country's officials themselves. So far, no inquiries have employed interviews to study the role ontological security plays in state actions. Little attention has been also paid to the ways of establishing that a country is dealing with anxiety. Generally, such claims are based on discourse and historical analysis. By investigating how country officials pursued the safe identity of the state, this dissertation offers granular evidence of the ways through which actors seek ontological security. Furthermore, while the literature explains why conflicts may be supportive of ontological security, it abstracts from systematically analysing how states may support the safety of their identity while pursuing military confrontation. The study exposes the use of vulnerability narratives as such practice. Lastly, the dissertation contributes to the scholarship that links ontological security with securitisation by showing that securitisations can be used to protect identity from negative evaluations of state actions.

Recent developments within political thought have sought to examine the role of emotions in politics. Part of these endeavours has focused on love. This thesis is situated within such attempts which have tried to uncover love's politicality and more specifically it examines love as a political concept in the works of Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum, and G.W.F. Hegel. It is argued here that in Arendt and Nussbaum we find political notions of love that either exclude or undermine love as an intersubjective quality in politics. These take the form of love of the world or amor mundi in Arendt and patriotic love in Nussbaum. The thesis argues that this 'repressed intersubjectivity' of love creates problems for both Arendt and Nussbaum and at the same time deprives political thought of valuable resources in thinking about politics. In turning to Hegel, the thesis discovers a political conception of love that is grounded within thick-affective practices of recognition where love involves a response of affective solidarity toward the other. The thesis contends that in Hegel we find a radical political concept of love for a re-humanising politics. At the same time, love, as the 'neglected corner' of Hegelian philosophy, brings about a plastic metamorphosis from within Hegel and opens his philosophy to the future.

The PhD is concerned with two periods of French history, the first covers the lead up to the French Revolution and the second approximately the last half century of French politics. Through the analysis of these periods, it develops the concepts of 'Total Crisis' and 'Nation as Arbiter' as a conceptual framework for understanding the potential for revolutionary change during these periods. Total Crisis refers to a situation in which an accumulation of abnormal occurrences, affecting multiple facets of the political system, compromise its stability to the point where collapse is possible. The construct of Nation as Arbiter relies on a conception of nation which evolves depending on the historical period under analysis. Rather than using a fixed academic definition, this thesis argues that in order to understand its role in politics it is important to view which of its characteristics have been politicised and what political purpose this has served. A clear distinction between the politicised nation at the time of the French Revolution and today emerged from the analysis of both periods. The key argument is twofold. First, that the political significance of the nation was born within a political conflict over sovereignty and legitimacy within the ancien régime system and therefore the words' association with identity was not yet politicised. Second, that the politicised characteristics of nation today relate to the notions of both sovereignty and identity. By drawing parallels between the lead up to the French Revolution and today, the potential for a similarly revolutionary outcome will also be considered, if not with any finality since the cycle of crisis is not complete.

This thesis assesses the implementation of federalism in a developing country by taking Ethiopia as a case. The thesis took the notion that in federations like Ethiopia, marked by developing economies, dominant party regimes, authoritarian tendencies and ethnic diversity, there are gaps between the constitution and the practice of regional autonomy. As such, the thesis systematically explores the gap between de jure and de facto by measuring regional autonomy and explaining the main drivers and instruments of de/centralisation. Regional autonomy is disaggregated into legislative, administrative and fiscal autonomy. Then, regional autonomy on two policy areas and five fiscal categories is systematically measured. The thesis reveals that the Ethiopian federation experienced centralisation over time in defiance of the constitution. The thesis shows that one of the features of Ethiopian federalism is limited regional own-source revenues. Further, centralisation of concurrent revenues and undesignated revenue powers, lack of tax autonomy, and regional lack of freedom to domestic borrowing derailed regional fiscal powers. Thus, regions are hugely dependent on federal grants. Conditional grants introduced in 2011 further eroded regional autonomy. In the spheres of policy, a range of regional policy competencies became exclusively federal in defiance of the constitution. The centralisation of land administration is a prominent example of federal encroachment on regional prerogatives. The dominant party's structure, ideologies, and internal decision-making norms are at the core of the centralisation dynamics. The thesis shows that other factors such as regional capacity shortage, economic factors, state-building, and corruption and state capture drove centralisation over time. The thesis also reveals a de facto autonomy asymmetry across regions associated with regional development, national development priorities, peripherality, marginalisation, and ethnic diversity. Spatial and temporal de/centralisation recorded was without a formal constitutional basis through an informal constitutional amendment, proclamations, delegated legislation, organisational restructuring, and coercion. The thesis discusses that the nature of Ethiopia's second chamber and generic constitutional clauses facilitated centralisation. The thesis argues that a dominant party regime is ill-fitted for building a robust federal system as the same party controls the two tiers of government. In such a regime, though regional parties may exist, they cannot be a genuine agent of regional autonomy because of the inherent lack of independence from the federal party. In such a system, the party structure works parallel to the constitution, often circumventing the constitutional division of powers; thus, implementation of federalism is highly influenced by the party decisions. Methodologically, this implies that assessing federalism and regional autonomy in such states should go beyond the constitutional text. Insights from Ethiopia suggest that new federations and states embracing federalism need to improve regional capacity to build effective federalism. Besides, in the long run, building a genuine multiparty system and institutions of democracy is needed for effective federalism. Federalism has unintended consequences of decentralising conflict in multi-ethnic states because elites representing different groups fight to control regional and subregional powers. Hence, new federations need to consider a mix of approaches to tackle such unintended consequences of federalism in ethnically diverse states. Lastly, moving away from a centralised legacy requires a complete political-cultural change to implement federalism effectively.

This thesis investigates the tactical choices political parties make in multi-level settings where a significant regional nationalist party operates. It presents an original account of the strategic options available to parties in that type of setting and then applies that framework to the case study of post-devolution Scotland. It argues that rhetorical strategy constitutes a distinct element in the tactical armoury available to political parties alongside the manipulation of policy position and issue salience. It also puts forward the idea that in circumstances where party competition takes place along a centre-periphery axis of competition alongside the ubiquitous left right one there exist two types of subsuming strategy where party spokespeople justify their party's position on one axis of competition by referencing its position on the other. It argues that there exists a positive subsuming strategy in which the position referenced on both axes is in line with the party's established policy identity and a negative subsuming strategy where one of the positions referenced is at variance with that established identity. It applies this framework via a mixed method analysis of the language used by representatives of the main Scottish parties in sessions of First Ministers Question Time in the Scottish Parliament. In doing so it shows that changes in incumbency position at state-wide and devolved level within the multi-level setting can significantly impact upon the tactical choices political parties make. Similarly whether the next scheduled electoral contest is for the devolved or state-wide tier of government is also shown to have a significant effect. The results of the analysis also demonstrate that the rhetorical justification political actors employ for their policy preferences represents a distinct element in party strategy. It presents evidence to show that this aspect of party strategy can be manipulated separately from policy position and issue salience, and that it can have a significant impact upon public perception regarding the ideological orientation of political parties. This finding extends existing scholarly understanding of how voters make judgements about political parties suggesting that they can respond to changes in rhetorical strategy by revising their judgment regarding to where political parties stand relative to their opponents.

This thesis looks at the ambivalent relationship between Turkey and the West and its impact on Turkey's state identity. It was written at the time when concerns about the West 'losing Turkey' or alternatively Turkey shifting an axis became widespread. I argue that the process of putting in doubt Turkey's position within the West started at the end of the Cold War and was initiated by the West itself. Therefore, what is now understood as a radical change is an outcome of the strategy of the West to make Turkey continuously pursue belonging without granting it due recognition. The aim of this thesis is to shift the analytical attention from 'what Turkey is for the West' or 'how it can be categorized' to account for the ways in which Turkey has responded to its changing position vis-à-vis the West after the end of bipolarity. Analytically, I build on the concept of ontological security, which overcomes the emphasis on structure and the conflation of self and identity encountered in some constructivist scholarship. I approach identity as a 'reflexive project' that requires constant attention to maintain a stable sense of self in a changing world. I put forward that stigmatization related to the status of a latecomer to the modern state system and a liminal position related to the existence of mutually exclusive discourses within this system lead to the development of a fragile sense of ontological security. Consequently, such states become extra-sensitive to concerns regarding belonging, recognition, and status, which shapes their identity and foreign policy. In three case studies, Turkey's pursuit of EU membership, the deteriorating relationship with Israel, and the decision to host Syrian refugees, I study how Turkey's quest for recognition as an equal with its Western counterparts has shaped changes within Turkey's state identity. I show that although Turkey decided to capitalize on its liminal position, which led to a more independent foreign policy and subsequent worries about Turkey's orientation, it still seeks the approval, respect, and recognition of the West.

This thesis studies the relationship between the content of the Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) and the official Russian foreign policy expressed in the state documents and the speeches of the Russian president Vladimir Putin. Using the concepts of public diplomacy, propaganda and post-truth as a theoretical basis, the thesis explores the ways in which the channel works as a Russian public diplomacy agent, its relationship to the concept of propaganda and its role in the modern post-truth communication environment. This thesis employs three methods: a quantitative content analysis of 1522 news articles, a textual analysis of 166 articles, and a document analysis of 19 foreign policy documents. The sample includes RT website coverage in English and in Russian of two wars - in Ukraine and in Syria - between 2014 and 2017. The choice of war coverage takes into consideration the importance of wartime communication for governments in terms of both public diplomacy and propaganda, and Russia's different participation modes in the two conflicts studied (a direct one in Syria and a diplomatic and an unrecognized military one in Ukraine), which aims to put in context the way political communication works within a variety of environments in which modern conflicts occur. In terms of public diplomacy this thesis demonstrates that RT is a crucial actor in the Russian public diplomacy as the themes within its content are aligned with the Russian foreign policy agenda. As a public diplomacy actor RT explains Russian polices and positions to its audiences. When it comes to propaganda the thesis demonstrates that the channel's coverage employs devices and tools universally accredited to propaganda and matches the main themes and messages of the Soviet propaganda. With post-truth, the study demonstrates RT's dual position as a partisan voice in the choir of partisan voices in the modern post-truth communication environment, and, on certain occasions, as a post-truth platform of its own. The study's large sample, its quantitative element and the inclusion of the RT coverage in Russian (this study argues it is aimed at a global Russian-speaking audience rather than an audience inside Russia) means that this thesis provides an unprecedented look into the structure of RT conflict coverage, thus filling the gap in research literature on Russian public diplomacy and international broadcasting and RT as both a political and a media actor. With post-truth the thesis provides a comprehensive overview of the recent scholarship on the topic, produces a working definition that can be used in further research, and contributes to scholarly understanding of the ways in which traditional media actors, public diplomacy actors and Russian actors in particular contribute to and benefit from the new post-truth communication environment.

The Ukraine and Georgia conflicts have attracted a great deal of attention from scholars and practitioners who seek to explore why these conflicts have emerged and endure. In the literature, the conflicts tend to be treated as outcomes of the Soviet past or as consequences of negative relations between Russia and the EU/NATO. Such research does give valuable insight into why the conflicts emerged. But it does not sufficiently explain why the states and non-state actors involved in the conflicts continue to fail in implementing the conflict resolution efforts that they have all agreed to. This dissertation explores this research puzzle. By linking social constructivism and social psychology, it explores the role the conflict parties' understandings of the situation, self, and other play in shaping conflict protraction. More specifically it engages with how the conflict parties reach such understandings through social cognitive processing, and the role their interacting processing tendencies play in shaping negative intergroup dynamics between them. The dissertation finds that the Ukraine and Georgia conflicts are protracted because the conflict parties struggle over who gets to be a group. The conflicts are thus not between groups per se but between agents who fight over who is present in the conflicts, which groups these agents belong to, and how these groups relate to each other. This struggle occurs as the result of four interacting cognitive tendencies, which the conflict parties resort to when they process conflict stimuli (social information such as behaviour, events, statements made by self or others in the conflict). The first of such tendencies is to process conflict stimulus by adapting self or other identities/interests, or to adapt stimulus so it fits with self or other identities/interests. The second tendency to process the out-group's identity/interests as the outcome of leadership manipulation, and to process in-group identity/interests as the outcome of group think. The third tendency is to process the out-group's intent to be the management of the in-group's identity/interests, and the in-group tendency to manage the out-group's identity/interests. The fourth tendency is to support parts of another conflict party's social cognitive framework, and to point to cognitive support as the cause for conflict protraction. These processing tendencies contribute to conflict protraction as they lead to flexible and opposed group identities, which the conflict parties continuously seek to present as real and distinct. It also leads to continued in-group mobilisation as the conflict parties need to uphold their opposed group identities, to ensure that their constructed in-group identity persists. This interaction leads to a cognitive struggle over how to, and who gets to, establish the social boundaries that define the conflicts. The Ukraine and Georgia conflicts are therefore not only protracted because there is a conflict between EU/NATO and Russia, nor because conflict narratives or self/other understandings are cemented. They are also protracted because the conflict parties continue to engage in processing tendencies, which shape a struggle over who gets to group the agents present in the conflict and thus by extension of this, who gets to be a group.

This investigation is an examination of party competition over the centre-periphery cleavage. The focus is placed on which factors are expected to have a deep effect on the way parties compete when framing the relations between centres and peripheries. The literature has explored different key elements that are able to strongly influence party behaviour along this cleavage, such as for example, party type, ideology, identity, or language. This thesis is centred on other factors that have been overlooked by the same different studies. These are: distance, fragmentation, and polycentricity. The main purpose is to observe the ways in which parties adapt to them in the different regions in which they compete. This research problem is approached via the research question: what factors shape party competition on the centre-periphery cleavage? To answer this research question, the research method used is the sub-national comparative method. This method is applied by using a sequential mix method approach, with a quantitative followed by a qualitative analysis. The purpose of this is obtain at the same time a complete and in-depth understanding of the phenomenon. Employing a case study research strategy, Spain is examined based on the politically salient territorial tensions between its centre and peripheries. In order to observe how the centre-periphery cleavage unfolds, the main sources of information chosen are the political manifestos articulated by parties to compete in regional elections. Addressing the regional level allows to comprehend with more detail how this territorially based cleavage is formulated. From the above three factors, the main findings point in the direction of characterising distance as the element that influence the most the way in which parties compete along the centre-periphery cleavage. The further away a region is from the centre, the more parties territorialise their appeals to the voters. This is followed by fragmentation, which has unexpected and promising results. Polycentricity has to be further analysed in future research agendas, but the results preliminary flag the importance of its different degrees of impact. Finally, these factors are best understood in a qualitative manner in contrast to the literature that also examines Spain, normally based on quantitative data.

The past several years have witnessed the apparent return of great power rivalry as Russia-West and China-West relations have grown strained or deteriorated outright, owing in significant part to disputes over instances in which the nature of state sovereignty was contested. This has led to questions concerning the future of the liberal international order, including debates over what the liberal international order precisely is - the extent to which it is rooted in American leadership and whether it includes a commitment to certain values that go beyond mere rules-based cooperation. But the strengthening character of hegemony, the emergence of a truly global international society and the increasing rigidity of certain international norms all raise further questions regarding how recent developments should be conceptualized. Drawing on a range of English School and other sources, this dissertation will explore the relationship between international society, conceptions of sovereignty and international order. It will situate the liberal international order with respect to these concepts in the post-Cold War context, examine the sources of today's Russia-West conflict, and explore the multiple vectors that inform Russia's current position in international society, including with respect to its deepening partnership with China. It will then derive conclusions regarding the future of hegemony and great power rivalry in international society.

This thesis investigates the philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars, towards the recasting of two problems: (a) The thesis examines a post-Hegelian insistence that the "ought" - understood as the disjunction of thought-acts from direct tutelage to the "is", to the way things are in nature or in society - must be retained and attributed with full effectivity. This is the problem of normativity. One reason for insisting upon its importance is that, after Kant, the rejection of the correspondence-by-resemblance theory of representation introduces an epistemic opacity between knowledge and known object. (b) In line with the elaboration of the logical form of qualitative difference which Hegel proposes near the beginning of his Science of Logic, the thesis investigates a conception of novel supersession as the contradiction via "determinate negation" of the Old. It is argued that the New - in art and elsewhere - which effectuates what Hegel calls a "good infinity" must be figured as the fruit of a "torsion". The thesis demonstrates that the two problems are inherently linked because practice (what we do) can surpass fortuitous constraints only if theory determines contradictions between cognitive obligation (what we ought to think) and extant descriptions of the world. To constructively flout such a contradiction can only be to negate it with a qualitatively new determination of what should be thought as well as of what is. Since the causal modalities of possibility, actuality and necessity are entwined with the 'oughts' of inference, quantifying gauges of success ('more of x') are vitiated by the quietism of merely reaffirming the currently actual state of affairs. Crucially, the idea found in Sellars's reading of Kant that "concepts are rules" (that is, that concepts are functional roles), demands (rather than excluding) strong qualitative differences among concepts. This allows for the metaphysical de-calcification of concepts, without severing them from objectivity. Concepts are properties of an activity. Such a stance serves to carry forward Imre Lakatos's best insights regarding the imperative to surpass in the natural sciences, while refuting the "whiggish" linearity of this process. This pointedly neo-Hegelian move is motivated by an Adornian survey of commodity fetishism which pinpoints the reification of an abstract notion of production as in thrall to what Sellars calls the "myth of the given". Concordantly, Alexandre Koyré is read as challenging the paradigm of incommensurability claiming his influence with a historiography of qualitative antagonism.

In The Three Ecologies, Félix Guattari argues for the importance of, and himself begins to offer, a philosophy and politics that responds to the imbricated entanglements between mental, social, and environmental ecologies (our relationship to ourselves, to others, and to the non-human respectively). Guattari offers us problems which we are yet either to think or creatively confront. This thesis is primarily an affirmative response to this work, and is a centralisation in particular of the problematic he raises of our contemporary mental environment (and how it may be transformed). This response is conducted as an experiment in rhythm analysis, and argues that: I. Contemporary capitalistic milieus are destructive forces in our mental ecology. II. Our rhythms of everyday life are increasingly imbricated in supporting the ontological security of capitalistic milieus (I take the examples of our contemporary distraction, depression, and debt ecologies). III. Our rhythms of everyday life (the quotidian interplay of time, desire, and habit) and the mental environment which we co-occupy are sites of revolutionary struggle. IV. As sites of struggle, we can participate in the invention of new milieus at the level of everyday life (I offer the examples of new networks, forms of care, and modes of exchange). V. Such participatory invention we can call revolutionary, with this latter term defined in the sense of a constitutively open process. As such, this thesis concludes that a rhythm analysis of the mental environment offers (I) an immanent ontological account of the production of subjectivity within contemporary capitalism; and (II) a critically-oriented and technically-engaged conceptualisation for the transformation of our mental environment.

More and more women are appointed to ministerial positions in Europe, across countries and political parties. Yet, there are significant gaps in our understanding of the factors which shape where and when women are appointed, and the impacts these appointments have on public policy. By considering the partisan dynamics and motivations of party leaders, I provide an insight into systematic variation in the number of women appointed to governments, the policy portfolios women are allocated, and the policy outcomes of women ministers on parental leave policy. This develops our understanding of women's access to government positions, which has important implications for how women are represented in the most powerful policy-making positions. I develop a theoretical framework for the role of gender in ministerial selection and portfolio allocation by considering the policy, office and vote-seeking motivations of party leaders. Through a cross-national, time-series analysis over 45 years of European governments, I find that more women are appointed to European cabinets by left-wing parties, and by female party leaders. Women are better represented in cabinets in gender-progressive countries, and where party supporters have more gender-equal social attitudes. When women are allocated to the government, they are significantly less likely to be appointed to the 'core' offices of state, and 'masculine' and 'neutral' policy areas, but this is moderated by party ideology. I find that women are more likely to be appointed to 'masculine' portfolios where a party's voters have more progressive gender attitudes. Considering the policy implications of women's appointment to ministerial positions, I examine the circumstances under which government reforms of parental leave for fathers follow the 'dual-earner/dual-carer' model of family policy. I find that women's active engagement in paid work is a necessary condition for the most gender-balanced forms of parental leave. The sufficiency pathways arising from a qualitative comparative analysis suggest that left-wing female ministers are 'entrepreneurial' in pursuing progressive family policy, while male right-wing ministers require pressure from public attitudes. The sufficiency pathway for leftist ministers also includes a left-dominated Parliament.

It is widely believed that the current world order is undergoing fundamental changes. One of the main alleged challenges comes from non-Western states, most notably China. As China continues to rise, in what ways is it challenging the U.S.-led international order? This question has generated a plethora of scholarly books, articles, and reports that examine how an increasingly powerful China is engaging with the world, and what this means for the global order. In particular, China's role in global governance has begun to occupy the centre stage of International Relations literature. This dissertation examines China's engagement with international normative order by investigating why China selectively complies with international norms. Utilizing three international norms as case studies: nuclear non-proliferation in the case of UNSC Resolutions on the DPRK, Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities (CBDR-RC) in climate change mitigation, and international adjudication in the South China Sea dispute, I show that China's compliance with international norms is not straightforward but differs from norm to norm. Rather, we see varying degrees of compliance: from full (CBDR-RC), partial (nuclear non-proliferation), through to non-compliance (international adjudication). By building on critical constructivism that treats norms as flexible and socially constructed, I not only challenge the binary distinction between norm takers and norm makers that continues to recur in norms diffusion and socialization literature, I also illustrate our understanding of what constitute norms compliant behaviour is inter-subjective and may differ due to norm ambiguity. Normative clarity might seem to be a virtue, but it is rarely achieved in practice. Instead I argue that norms are left ambiguous to generate inter-subjectivity amongst different actors. But it is this very form of ambiguity that leads to inter-subjective disagreement over a norm's specific elements, thereby triggering various forms of contestation. The case studies draw attention to China's broad acceptance of the validity of international norms in principle, but it engages in applicatory contestation that 'challenge' the norm's applicability or the type of situation to which the norms apply, because of its divergent normative interpretations and understandings. In light of this, to access China's own interpretation of ambiguous norms and what it considers to be compliant behaviour, I examine how norms are constructed and represented at the state level. These representations, I suggest, are informed by the identity narratives that conceptualize China's state identity discourses.

This dissertation develops a political theory of sense against the background of a synthetic reading of Gilles Deleuze's post-structuralist philosophy and Niklas Luhmann's sociological systems theory. The aim of this exploratory theoretical project is two-fold: firstly, it seeks to provide an innovative "third way" perspective on onto-epistemological genesis designed to escape the ontological aporias of the linguistic turn and those of the new materialisms by identifying the production of the world as it can be made sense of as ungrounded and relationally immanent. Secondly, this perspective is to be made productive to analyse the functionality of contemporary politics. The arguments developed in this dissertation are grounded in and unfold from a conceptualisation of sense as an ungrounded, self-productive relationality which is always already composed of the creative singularities of both matter and signs. Having established the synthetic quality of productive sense in Deleuze and Luhmann by retracing their respective uses of Leibniz's monadology, I suggest that this conception of sense allows both thinkers to subvert any strong notion of ontological foundationalism in favour of thinking onto-epistemological genesis as relationally self-grounding. Through Husserl and Nietzsche, on whom both Luhmann and Deleuze draw as philosophical sources of inspiration, I explore how sense is grounded in nothing but relations of time. These relations of time, on their part, also operate self-productively, relying on the eternal return of the event as a moment of rupture to transform circular time into a contingent, but continuous flow of past-future lines. While conditioned by its necessary position within the process of onto-epistemological production, Deleuze's and Luhmann's Whiteheadian event is yet a moment of creative complexity in which a particular future is opened in the relational nexus of sense. Against this background, the relationally emergent decision which selectively continues a particular line of sense in the eternally returning evental rupture is identified as the operational hinge of a contemporary politics whose legitimacy is no longer based on effective steering power, but rather on the provision of self-observations in sense for society as a whole. It is argued that politics is tied to evental multiplicity in a double-bind: it needs the former to reproduce itself in the decision on the continuation of sense but it must also keep its threatening complexity at bay in order to make this decision possible in the first place. Understood as the operational logic of contemporary institutional-democratic politics, I show how self-productive, recuperative sense-making functions in a way which not only mirrors the functionality of but is also socio-historically intertwined with the rise of capital identified as a mode of social relationality with Marx. Against this background, the proposed political theory of sense firstly makes it possible to critically unpack how the recuperative autopoiesis of a politics of sense functions through complexity-reducing forms such as the crisis. But it secondly also identifies the socio-politically conditioned sense-event as a realm of immanent openness which can be accessed and employed to actualise a different sense of the world.

This research aims to explore why Russia and China have been more successful in establishing economic cooperation with post-Soviet Uzbekistan than the Western major powers. It will be based on the following key interrelated questions: Why do Russia and China win this so called 'New Great Game'? What is the role of Russia's attempt to reclaim its 'Great Power' status since 2000 and President Putin's attempt to build and expand the Eurasian Economic Union? What were the Chinese competitive strategies that shifted its attention towards Uzbekistan? What is the role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in China's expanding trade relations with Uzbekistan? How do domestic politics, economics, and culture, formed historically, contribute to shaping Uzbekistan's international engagement? How can we conceptualise Uzbekistan's own post-Soviet foreign economic policy and its decision-making? To address these questions, the research will examine the role of the state and globalisation in Critical International Political Economy (CIPE), utilising mainly a neo-Gramscian approach, and analyse the interaction of various domestic and international factors. Based on these analyses I will show why Uzbekistan has sought to forge a lasting cooperation with the major powers like China and Russia rather than with the West.

The conflict trajectory in the cases of Madagascar features highly unstable dynamics composed of various shifts (and no shift) of conflict stages. With nine main successive episodes of conflict spanning a long period of time (the colonial period to 2016), dynamics of escalation, de-escalation and stability (where the level of conflict remains the same) are building up the cycles of peace/conflict processes in this country. The present manuscript studies conflict recurrence in Madagascar and mainly argues that peace is multi-leveled throughout the cycles. Starting from that viewpoint, the concept of conflict transformation is used in explaining the ebbs and flows at play constructing the conflict trajectory. An innovative as well as original conceptual and methodological approach to the study of conflicts, weaving together Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and in-depth narrative analysis was applied. Reactive and non-reactive methods were used to collect the data, which, after being tested with fsQCA, Tosmana and R software, were examined by conducting conflict analysis, semiotics, public policy studies and critical discourse analysis. The Units of analysis in the research design allowing the study of the dynamics of conflict recurrence in Madagascar were the structural factors and parts of the mechanism pertaining to :a) conflict dimensions (cultural, socio-demographic and economic, political and global external), b) repertoires of action the conflicting parties used throughout the shifts (or no shift) of conflict stages, c) their framings of the conflicts, d) the boundary construction of the self/the other and e) the accommodation policies as well as f) the metanarratives and local narratives. On the whole peace and conflict processes in Madagascar.

This thesis argues that in order to understand more fully the engagement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with the United Nations-specifically NGOs that express a religious or faith-based commitment-we must consider both their actions and the rationale behind them, the what as well as the why. To study the underlying rationale, the thesis introduces the concept of the organizational substrate, which offers a new analytical tool to draw out this undertheorized dimension of religious NGOs (Chapter 2). The substrate complements the analytical tools currently deployed by social scientists and goes beyond descriptions of organizational behavior to examine the internal rationale underpinning the behavior. The internal rationale is explored through a focused analysis of the Bahá'í International Community's United Nations Office (BIC). This organization is selected because of its reputation as a valued and effective contributor in UN fora; its seventy-year history of engagement (1945-2015); and its scriptural engagement with questions of politics and world order. The thesis also contributes to the nascent scholarship about UN-accredited religious NGOs outside of the Christian tradition. Having identified the constitutive elements of the BIC's organizational substrate, using a hermeneutic and historical approach, the thesis develops a distinct periodization of the BIC's engagement from 1945-2015. The periodization provides a historical framework (though not a historical analysis) for examining the manner in which the substrate shapes action across different historical circumstances. Each of the four historical periods offers evidence of the salience of the organizational substrate for understanding the operation of the NGO. The first period, 1945-1970 (Chapter 3) enables us to see the manner in which the substrate frames the BIC's rationale for engagement with the UN and its understanding of the UN in the context of the broader processes of civilizational, social and political evolution. In the second period, 1970-1986 (Chapter 4), the thesis demonstrates the pivotal role of Bahá'í authoritative structures in articulating, elucidating, and socializing the substrate of the organization. Between 1986 and 2008 (Chapter 5), the substrate-based analysis reveals a distinct epistemology and methodology-associated with the conception and pursuit of peace. During the final period, 2008-2015 (Chapter 6), the substrate undergirds the shift to an explicitly discursive, organic approach to engagement in UN processes, and a reconceptualization of the terms of engagement with the UN. This thesis goes beyond social scientific approaches to the study of religious actors at the UN, to demonstrate that knowledge and action require understanding of the distinct rationality of each NGO. It is by identifying and observing the operation of the organizational substrate that this pivotal and foundational element of NGO engagement at the UN comes to light.

The Iraq War is one of the most widely documented wars in history. The repercussions are still being felt to this day, and the real reasons behind the war remain unclear. Bringing democracy and human rights to free the Iraqi people from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein was the United States of America's promise. However, many would say theory did not meet practice, and therefore the question arises of whether the war had an alternative or hidden agenda. For this study, the question is whether the decision-making elite of the United States of America (US) intended to dominate and control Iraq in both the short and long term for the benefit of their own interests, or whether the US decision-making elite intended to bring democracy and a system which protected the rights of Iraqis as broadcast to the world. The doctrine of elite theory argues that in every society there is inevitably an elite minority of the population in existence, who dominate and exploit decision-making to serve their own economic interests. This dominant elite minority cannot be controlled by the majority regardless of the democratic mechanisms that exist. Once elites are in decision-making positions, combined like-minded individuals, regardless of internal division, work together to dominate the decision-making process. Elite theory comprehensively describes the actualities in the war, occupation and legacy of democracy in Iraq. Elite theory explains the actions of the US elite decision-makers who went to war and occupied Iraq using democracy promotion as a cover for serving their own interests. Additionally, elite theory explains the political system of Iraq that came as a direct result of the US intervention. The US elites had two main goals in Iraq; firstly, to privatise the Iraqi state through creating a new free-market friendly constitution. Secondly, the US elites intended to outsource the rebuilding of Iraq to US corporations of which they were directly associated with. To facilitate the process with legitimacy inside Iraq, the US had pre-selected a group of Iraqi elites to govern Iraq in the interim and to write Iraq's new constitution. The Iraqi elites would represent Iraq's diversity, whilst maintaining support for US elite interests. However, the intended plans did not come to fruition. The US elites managed to outsource the rebuilding of Iraq to corporations they were associated with for as long as they could but failed to achieve their primary aim in establishing a functioning free-market democracy. One of the reasons for the failures of the US in Iraq was the great resistance that formed against the selection of Iraqi elites by the US elites, which subsequently forced them to immediately rethink their decision-making. Once the Iraqi populace understood the US privatisation agenda and their lack of commitment to democracy, an insurgency began and eventually forced the US into an early exit. In the process US elite decision makers benefitted directly from the war and occupation whilst great detriment was bought to Iraqis who were left with a new authoritarianism. Iraq's new political system would be dominated by the original Iraqi elites that the US had supported before the war and undemocratically selected into the Iraqi Governing Council. Elite theory will be used to establish whether the backgrounds of US elites who made decisions in Iraq affected not only their pathway to their decision-making position, but also more importantly, their decision-making processes. An important question is whether there was a self-serving elite that dominated US foreign policy regarding Iraq and if so, who were they? How did their backgrounds affect their decision-making process? Based on studying the decision makers, what would I expect them to do on the ground in Iraq, and what did they actually do on the ground in Iraq? Did they have common interests in Iraq and if so, how and why? What does the existence of this elite mean for democracy in the US, and democracy promotion in Iraq? Another momentous question is whether the decision makers regarding the Iraq War directly benefitted financially from the war. If so, is US foreign policy corporate foreign policy? This study will examine whether the 2003 Iraq War and occupation was a case of elites serving their own self-interests or whether they were committed to democracy promotion as they declared to the world in selling the war. Media-projected intentions and realities broadcast to the world by the US were completely different to the actual reality on the ground in Iraq.

This thesis examines the role of History and Nostalgia in shaping the modern Tea Party movement, which emerged across the United States of America in early 2009. Inspired by the seminal work of Professor Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes, this thesis attempts to further investigate the Tea Party movement and their unique relationship with the past: from the social movement’s links with other conservative historical organisations such as the John Birch Society, to the Tea Party movement’s adoption and exploitation of the history of the American Revolution as a means of gaining political legitimacy. This thesis contextualises as well as details the historical origins, organisations, and ideologies behind the social movement. In the process of this task, the thesis has employed an experimental methodology which attempts to fuse together the philosophy of History with the discipline of History – an idea that was inspired during the experience of carrying out the thesis research at the time. This thesis highlights: the influence of the Internet over Tea Party movement, the Tea Party movement’s historiography of the American Revolution, as well as the similarities and differences of historical experiences shared by the Tea Party movement and the generation responsible for the American Revolution.

Private credit money forms are debt instruments that co-exist alongside publicly provided forms of money and emerge de-centrally out of the lending activities of banks or non-bank financial institutions. In normal times, they are easily convertible into higher-ranking forms of public or commodity money. Throughout history, however, private credit money forms have repeatedly become subject to a run by investors who all at once tried to convert their private credit money balances into higher-ranking money. Such runs are an integral and unavoidable feature of the modern credit money system, which in its essence is a self-referential network of expanding, yet instable debt claims. To keep up the stability of the monetary system, governments had to react to these runs and in a range of instances decided to drag the private credit money form under the control of the state by ensuring that they do not break away from par. This study examines this process of 'accommodating' private credit money. It establishes a functionalist theory about the transformation of the modern monetary system. To understand how and why such accommodation occurred, it develops an ideal-typical model of private credit money accommodation and applies it on three cases in the respective centres of the global financial system: the 1797 Bank Restriction in England that accommodated bank notes; the 1933 Emergency Banking Act in the U.S. that accommodated bank deposits; and the realignment of policies by the Fed and the U.S. Treasury in the 2008 crisis, which accommodated overnight repurchase agreements and money market fund shares as ‘shadow money’. On the basis of those case studies, the study argues that today’s public credit money supply is made up of accommodated, formerly private, credit money forms.

The thesis seeks to develop understandings of dynamics in federal political systems in crisis, the nature of the relationship between crisis and process, and the range of tools available for conflict reduction that extend beyond those available in the constitutional frameworks of each system. The dissertation explores these through a comparative study of a small n of cases that meet the criterion of a period of crisis as the independent variable: the Staten Island secession crisis in New York City, the existential crisis of Quebec's relationship with the rest of Canada, and the crisis of the UK and European integration at the time of Maastricht. The data collection process for each is framed on a temporal basis, within the duration of crisis as defined, and spatially, within the territorial extent of the system. The thesis uses data gathered from primary and secondary written sources based on the relevance to the research questions and conceptual framework. The analysis, located in the comparative section, identifies a number of important findings that contribute to theoretical understandings of federalism. The evidence gives support to, and extends the understanding of, federalism by demonstrating that the crisis potential in each case becomes evident because of challenges to some communities' values that arise from the process-based nature of federalism, through identifiable demands and counter-demands made by actors. Moreover, it highlights how the constraining nature of constitutional frameworks makes the use of extra-constitutional arrangements essential, in particular with the use of instrumentalities. The thesis also develops an understanding of how federal power sharing evolves post-crisis with flexible understandings of the division of competences, and the potential for a return to crisis in systems in the absence of a deeper understanding and application of federal principles by political elites.

Scholars of traditional Western donors have frequently asked, 'Why is aid given?' With the emergence of numerous new donors after the end of the Cold War, this question has a new significance. One group of these new donors are the countries of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. Within the literature that has developed in recent years to analyse their foreign aid programmes, Poland is surprisingly understudied despite being the most significant international actor in the region. This thesis addresses this gap by investigating the origins and development of the Polish foreign aid programme since 1989. This focus on a single country enables a comprehensive longitudinal analysis so far also missing from the literature. The thesis develops and applies an analytical framework that focuses on the diffusion of international norms and policies into the national policy-making process. Through this framework, the thesis identifies the sources of foreign aid policies, the mechanisms through which sources exerted influence on the policy-making process and Polish opportunities to influence the international agenda. The thesis applies the framework to foreign aid policy-decisions across the post-Cold War period and enables an assessment of the extent to which Poland's 'return to Europe' provided opportunities and constrictions for foreign policy-making. The analytical framework looks beyond the focus on the 'EU factor' prevalent in the CEE donor literature, while maintaining comparability with these studies' findings. The focus on competing explanations is a central contribution that results in several original findings. The thesis demonstrates the substantial influence of the United States on Polish thinking about aid provision. The evidence also suggests that direct interaction between countries is crucial for the implementation of international norms and policies. Highlighting the importance of interaction between member states contributes a novel perspective not just on EU policy-making about development cooperation, but also on foreign policy. This leads to the conclusion that Poland as a donor has been a 'good pupil of bad behaviour', learning from the examples of traditional donors that non-compliance and national preferences are acceptable. The thesis also introduces the argument that CEE donors are not as different from traditional donors as so far portrayed by the literature. Non-compliance with international commitments is prevalent among Western donors and national foreign-policy considerations motivate their aid flows. However, traditional donors have the advantage that their foreign policy priorities are easier to reconcile with the priorities of development cooperation. The main difference lies in the insufficient domestic capacities of Central and Eastern European donors to use aid as an effective foreign policy tool due to the legacy of the communist era.