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In a time when 'the Western idea' is increasingly challenged, when the creation of meaning is contested globally, this dissertation seeks to illuminate how Russian and EU foreign policy discourses interact. It is building upon the insight that Russian and European debates do not exist in isolation from but are entangled with each other. Going beyond one-dimensional studies of Russian and European identity formation, this project seeks to capture the EU-Russia relationship as an intersubjective one. Such a context, it is argued, requires an approach that does not reduce the Other to an object of discursive othering but appreciates it as an acting subject in its own right, articulating an alternative political project. It seeks to understand how this social context of discursive struggle positions Russia and the EU towards each other, how this positioning may pose constraints on the foreign policy discourses they articulated, and thus, how it conditions both subjects' (discursive) agency. To this end, this dissertation proposes a non-deterministic intersubjective analytical approach. Its theoretical framework marries poststructuralist thought with insights from critical approaches to Hegelian recognition dialectics. Adding the latter's social ontology to the former's constitutive logic, it fleshes out how the intersubjective dimension conditions Russia's and the EU's articulation of contingent discourses. The empirical discourse analysis takes a comparative perspective, focusing on articulations by key figures and institutions of foreign policy-making both in Russia and the EU. Based on more than 550 primary sources, it traces the structure of Russian and EU antagonistic foreign policy discourses on seven contested events (floating signifiers) between 2004 and 2021 and illuminates how they engage with each other in a competition for hegemony. This study draws a detailed empirical picture of discursive dynamics between Russia and the EU. Tracing the evolution of how both subjects relate to each other discursively, it illustrates how the discursive struggle between Russia and the EU intensifies. At the same time, it is argued that neither the EU's nor Russia's foreign policy discourses have changed substantially. Their structure, as well as their patterns of interaction have exhibited striking continuity. This interaction is an asymmetrical one with Russia's articulation remaining much more conditioned by the EU's discourse than vice versa. Harnessing insights from recognition dynamics, this dissertation argues that the EU is more independent in sovereignly articulating an interpretation of the world, whereas Russia continues to face constraints in the formulation of an autonomous political project, ultimately limiting its agency in the articulation of discourse. Conceptually and methodologically, this dissertation contributes to the existing literature by providing a comprehensive analytical framework to capture discursive interaction in an intersubjective setting free of preconceived structural assumptions. Empirically, it offers a detailed account of the mechanics of how Russian and EU discourses compete for hegemony, substantially contributing to an understanding of the discursive dynamics in the two decades preceding Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

This thesis analyses the subjective reasons for the migration of wealthy Chinese to four Western democratic countries in the past two decades. It explores the subjective social, economic, political, and environmental factors that influence the migration decisions of those wealthy Chinese. The study uses qualitative data from 60 semi-structured interviews with mainland Chinese migrants to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and analysis of the resulting data shows that wealthy Chinese move abroad due to a combination of subjective reasons that include securing better quality of education, cleaner air, personal freedom and wealth security, and a comfortable and more autonomous lifestyle in Western democratic countries. The thesis illustrates that no single theory can explain the reasons behind the emigration of wealthy Chinese due to the multi-faceted characterstics of the process. This study shows that wealthy Chinese migrants pursue the goals of increased freedoms and improved political status in the country of residence by taking advantage of their economic privilege in their country of origin. Moreover, the study resonates with Hirschman's argument that poor governance and limited access to rights in undemocratic countries are important factors driving people to leave their home countries (Hirschman, 1993), even when these countries have achieived rapid economic growth. The findings contribute to the literature on Chinese migration in three ways. Firstly, they explain that the perennial problems associated with China's single-party communist rule remain significant in pushing the wealthy class to relocate to Western democratic countries. The findings also add nuance to earlier research results by revealing that the introduction of the Social Credit System, the 'original sin' problem[sup]1 , 'just one voice', and the perceived likelihood of political regression under Xi Jinping's leadership, together with weak protection of private property are identified by private entrepreneurs interviewed in this study as the most important drivers for leaving China. These political issues driving wealthy Chinese to leave their home country have been largely overlooked by prior research. Secondly, the present study illustrates Chinese migrants' heterogeneous demographic characteristics and unearths empirical evidence on the intergenerational dynamics surrounding the migration of wealthy Chinese. Thirdly, this analysis suggests that the correlations between the effects of air pollution and migration decisions may be related to the geographical region of migrants' hometowns and the specific year of migration. In short, the recent migration outflow from China has been politically motivated together with education, environmental, and lifestyle considerations.

The resurgence of the populist radical right (PRR) across Europe and further afield has been the focus of much scholarly and media attention in recent decades. In the German context, the election of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the German federal parliament in 2017 represents a major turning point in the country's domestic politics, where, since the end of the Second World War (WWII), the PRR and broader far right have largely been relegated to the fringes of the political mainstream. The high visibility of women in the AfD itself as well as the large numbers of women who appear to have voted for the party across Germany's sixteen federal states has led to questions about what it means to be a gendered political subject in a changing world. Given the party's seeming popularity among women, this thesis investigates the relevant socio-cultural, political, and historical factors which underpin their support for the AfD. Viewing women's AfD support through a critical feminist poststructuralist lens, this thesis uses Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) to interpret the testimonies of 9 female AfD members interviewed in 2019, as well as relevant documentary sources. The thesis unpacks not just how and why women come to support the AfD, but where and when this support is located. In contrast to the dominant assumption that women do not find the ideas of the PRR appealing, this thesis shows that women's AfD support is complex, multi-faceted, and located within a distinctly German discursive ecosystem. The thesis underlines the argument that it is important to engage directly with women in order to gain a deeper insight into their reasons for supporting the PRR, as well as assessing the influence of time, space, and place when it comes to navigating the tricky epistemological terrain of subject motivation.

The purpose of this thesis is to understand how populism understands its own core constituency of 'the people', and how this understanding relates to the history of political thought. A central claim of the thesis is that 'the people' is a persistent and permanent feature of political thinking, regardless of whether that thinking is 'populist', but that populism has thrown into sharp relief the tension surrounding the question of who 'the people' is composed of. In the introductory chapter, the two main challenges through which the thesis works are identified: how does populism understand the identity of the people? And second, what are the conditions that make populism a realisable phenomenon? The thesis thus avoids presenting a clear definition of populism until the concluding chapter. This is because, as the literature review shows, the definitions of populism presented usually reflect the normative commitments of those defining. Instead, the concept of 'the people' in the history of political thought is examined to established the traditions and conditions of thought that have allowed what analysts call 'populism' to emerge. Thus, whilst the literature review reveals a broad consensus on the study of populism in the present literature, and therefore useful points of reference to use when discussing 'populism', no single definition is adopted to avoid prescription. As a result, this thesis offers a definition of populism 'through' an analysis of 'peoplehood'. This is done by undertaking a conceptual analysis approach to a broad number of political theorists, and how they have theorised 'the people' in relation to politics, subdivided into three distinct categories: spatiality; temporality; and corporality. These categories are identified in the introduction, which also shows that analyses of peoplehood - populist or otherwise - typically make the error of privileging one of the three categories, either subsuming the other categories under that privileged category, or neglecting the others altogether. Thereafter, the thesis proceeds along the following structure: a chapter is given over to each category delineated, of each of which the internal structure includes discussions of genealogical developments to identifying latent 'schools' of thought in each category, followed by the 'populist' interpretation of each category thus far. A final chapter then discusses the developments analysed thus far, and summarises the preceding arguments, to make room for an analysis of populism in relation to each of those categories identified in order to arrive at a theoretical understanding of this phenomenon, and how populism understands the people's relation to politics. A new framework of peoplehood is offered, drawing on the morphological work of Michael Freeden, which creates space for an understanding of all forms of peoplehood, be they populist, democratic, or otherwise, but in this thesis allows for an innovative, unique, and highly flexible definition of populism to be presented.

In the end, there are seven decisive Peruvian and South American novels by Mario Vargas Llosa that emblematically portray the emergence of Vargas Llosa's world view - from his socialist convictions as a writer in exile from 1959 until 1971, towards the moderation in his philosophy in the 1970s to mid-1980s, as well as maturity since the 1990s of his, by then, liberal and cosmopolitan thought. Independent socialism, rationalist pragmatism, and globalised liberalism are just the key terms for the main transformations in the author's intellect and literary reflection in his essays and writings, in particular for Vargas Llosa's political and historical fiction. These novels are: La ciudad y los perros (I), Conversación en La Catedral (II), La guerra del fin del mundo (III), Historia de Mayta (IV), El héroe discreto (V), Cinco esquinas (VI) and Travesuras de la nin͂a mala (VII). Starting off with his renowned critique of an authoritarian and militarist education system in the Lima-based La ciudad y los perros - turning seemingly rebellious class behaviour into fundamental criticism against the leading social and cultural authorities of Peru during the early to mid-50s -, Vargas Llosa continues, in his subsequent novels, to criticise socially as well as politically authoritarian behaviour on a - however, this time - society-wide scale. In Conversación en La Catedral unjust political government as well as the radical questioning of the oligarchic and socially conservative status quo is portrayed. However, with the abandonment of the author's radically left-wing side, in both his political commitment and his work, a new, much more critical literary portrayal can be observed in his fiction, regarding the neglect of Sartrean positions and the adoption of Camusian and Popperian criticism regarding revolt, revolution, or ideological destruction. In both La guerra del fin del mundo and Historia de Mayta utopia and revolution are condemned, and a universal path towards humanity and a rationalist approach to societal conflicts is proposed. With socialism's ultimate failure at the very end of Historia de Mayta - signalling a programmatic shift of Vargas Llosa's world view from social-democratic towards liberal convictions -, individual liberty is promoted as an integral part of human freedom and cosmopolitanism for the future generations of Peruvians - politically, by the embodiment of main figure Julieta in Cinco esquinas, and economically as well as morally, by either the main figures Felicíto and Ismael in El héroe discreto, or Lily and Ricardo in Travesuras de la niña mala.

This thesis develops an account of how ideologies change by examining two case studies of an established phenomenon of ideological change, the neoliberalisation of centre-right parties. These two case studies, the ordoliberalisation of the Christian Democratic Union of post-war West Germany, 1945-1949 and the rise of Thatcherism in the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, 1970-1979, present different national contexts, ideological families and periodisation, differences that facilitate analysis of the cases independently, comparatively and transnationally. The case studies are approached through the historical/archival method read through an amended conceptual morphology. I trace a number of conceptual constellations in the ideological discourse of each case, examining how the contestations of the various concepts relate to a wider phenomenon of ideological change as well as the political developments of the cases. Such a study links ideological morphology to conceptual, intellectual, social and political histories as well as insights from the political sciences and discourse theory. I argue that ideological communities are bound to political parties and that ideological change happens through the internal, intraparty contestation of concepts by competing forms of an ideological type. These contestations draw on existing ideological affinities, making contestation not just competition between forms but also part of the collaborative formation of new decontestations and ideological coalitions. Such an account presents new narratives for the individual case studies, including analysis of the transnational influence of German ordoliberalism on Thatcherism, the general phenomenon of neoliberalisation and notions of ideological composition and change in ideology theory.

Though political conflict is inevitable in democratic societies, it has garnered little attention in political philosophy as a phenomenon sui generis. In this PhD thesis, I survey the landscape of approaches to conflict and develop a critical-phenomenological basis for a more thorough philosophical understanding of the phenomenon. A key assumption is that the structures of conflict experience manifest in context-relative modalities shaped by power. To bring out these differences, I conducted qualitative interviews with political actors-politicians, civil servants, activists-which I analysed with the tools of phenomenology and critical theory. My dissertation reveals that agents can perceive the same conflict differently, at times drastically so, and explores how this variability impacts the suitability of practical proposals to resolve conflict. The dissertation is organised into five parts: (1) discusses a dominant paradigm in political philosophy, i.e., Rawlsian political liberalism. By uncovering its conflict typology, I show how intractable conflicts remain a problem in Rawls's well-ordered society. (2) addresses Modus Vivendi Theory, i.e., a realist alternative approach. While I argue that the theory can potentially tackle a wider array of conflicts, it still remains too indeterminate to provide normative guidance. (3) marks a shift from immanent critique to a critical phenomenology of conflict. Focusing on the role of space and location in conflict, and combining phenomenology with feminism, the chapter shows how (a) variations relating to spaces matter for the viability of practical solutions to conflict; and (b) how power asymmetrically structures scopes of possible action in these spaces. (4) combines phenomenology and critical philosophy of race to illustrate the role of the body in conflict-both as the vehicle of action and as the object of social perception. (5) elaborates the normativity of the political world, developing a phenomenologically-informed understanding of political conflict missing in the literature.

This dissertation deals with the political uses of anger, focusing on those cases in which anger is mobilized against socially structural forms of injustice (henceforth, "radical anger"). The author provides a philosophical defence of the legitimacy and usefulness of this kind of anger, together with a set of conceptual tools for distinguishing among different instances of anger in the political realm. The text consists of seven chapters, an introduction and a short conclusion. The first chapter offers a genealogy of the pathologization of radical anger, investigating the linguistic and conceptual entanglement of rage and rabies. The following chapter reviews a few cases in which oppressed groups successfully reclaimed radical anger in spite of widespread pathologizing and criminalizing tendencies, drawing mainly from the radical feminist and antiracist traditions. Special attention is also paid to the relationship between anger and violence, as well as to the opportunity for structurally discriminated groups to politically embrace anger. The metaphor of a ballistics of anger is introduced to heuristically distinguish among specific occurrences of political anger. The third chapter outlines the essential features of a political philosophy of radical anger, starting from a re-reading of Michel Foucault's interpretation of ancient Cynicism which emphasises the angry character of the latter. After asking whether radical anger can be considered philosophically true and reactionary anger defined as untrue, three possible arguments in favour of an affirmative answer are considered. Since the first two arguments, based respectively on the works of Rahel Jaeggi and Giorgio Agamben, prove unsuccessful, a third alternative, relying mainly on the works of Foucault and Hannah Arendt, is proposed by the author. Chapters from 4 to 6 look for contemporary reprises of Cynical anger, proposing a philosophical reading of the lives and works of three figures who angrily confronted several kinds of structural injustice: Valerie Solanas, Malcolm X and Audre Lorde. The dissertation shows that each of them can offer useful additions to the political philosophy of radical anger already sketched. In particular, Solanas can help us thinking the connections between anger, negation, utopia and abolition; X testifies to the importance of the link between radical anger and the notion of care of the self (ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ); Lorde allows us to understand the deep implications of the use of radical anger and paves the way for an erotic conception of this feeling. Finally, Chapter 7 presents the international trans-feminist movement Ni Una Menos-Non Una di Meno as an example of the practical and theoretical strengths of radical anger.

The study grew out of a desire to examine how it feels to be denied what Hannah Arendt famously referred to as the 'right to have rights,' including the right to disobey. More specifically, this study seeks to understand how people living under particular regimes of power-characterised by distinct politics of fear, uncertainty, and silence-feel, define, and express themselves in relation to power, whether in the form of submission or resistance. In other words: How do authoritarian power dynamics affect individuals' perception of self and how does it play into and shape the everyday life of the individual? At the heart of this inquiry is the notion of the subject, which forms both the conceptual foundation and the central focus of this study. The study draws primarily on the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Hannah Arendt on the interplay of power, resistance, and subjectivity. To frame the discussion, a socio-historical examination of post-independence power practices in Egypt and their impact on the constitution of the political subject is conducted. Research data is generated through an art-inspired qualitative research approach, primarily using Egyptian novels as a source of data to uncover the nuances and interiorities of the process of subject formation. Through a dialogue between Western social theory and Egyptian literature, the study provides an understanding of power practice in Egypt from 1952 to the present, particularly at the level of the inner panorama of the self in society and expands it into a reading of social and political theories on the question of power, subjectivity, resistance, and agency. The study is divided into six main chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. Each empirical chapter of this study tells the story of a particular episode in time and is somewhat self-contained, yet all chapters are connected into a large coherent reading of modern Egyptian power practices. Just as the novels examined in this study tell a story with their words, so does my research. The study concludes that the process of subject formation in Egypt should be understood as an artefact of historical continuity that connects the past to the present, not necessarily in a linear fashion, but in a way that gives it a genealogical context, and as a dynamic process of shifting subject positions. The study further argues for the limitations of the status conception of citizenship as a defining framework for the state-society relationship in the context under study and proposes instead the use of the power-subject framework as a substitute. Last but not least, the study suggests that the connection between theory and method, expressed in the very structure of the research, reveals the epistemic relevance of literature to the conceptual imagination, contributing in a sense, to the discussion of the decolonisation of knowledge production. In some ways, this interdisciplinarity underscores the sheer breadth and hybridity of the concept of subject formation that has become apparent throughout this analysis.

In this study, I examine the presence of Kenyan women in the film industry through the lens of postcolonial African feminism. Situating the study in this theoretical framework heightened the awareness that ideologies of womanhood and struggles against gender oppression intersect and cannot be analysed without considering the contextualisation of womanhood. Postcolonial African feminist theory reflects that issues that affect women in each place and time are different (former colonies and western regions). This study explores and uses the afro feminist lens to analyse the responses by Kenyan women filmmakers to comment on filmmaking in Kenya. The film industry offers an important arena where manifestations of African feminism can be explored, as espoused by the women filmmakers in this study: Matrid Nyagah, Jinna Mutune, Ng'endo Mukii, Wanuri Kahiu, Judy Kibinge, Dommie Yambo-Odotte, and Anne Mungai. By adopting a qualitative research design using face-to-face semi-structured interviews, I examined the filmmakers' career paths, motivations, perceptions, challenges, and barriers to getting into and remaining in a male-dominated industry. The thesis reveals that the level of Kenyan women's representation in the film industry on the global scene was proof that the women were empowered, competent, talented, and able to tell their stories through their lived experiences. The study also identifies barriers and challenges that impede their reach to a wider audience. Key among them were the lack of proper film schools in Kenya that teach the requisite content, the ongoing patriarchal system, the lack of defined film culture, a lack of a government policy on film, lack of government support, lack of funding, and poor marketing and distribution channels, among others that seem to truncate the full potential of women in the film industry. I argue that Kenyan women filmmakers have excelled, given an excellent account of the stories they tell from their lived experiences. These filmmakers' films not only deal with women's issues, Africa, war, famine, disease, and the girl child alone but also seem to focus on neo-feminism (as defined by Obioma Nnaemeka) and tackle subjects on sexuality, female emancipation, mother-daughter relationships, HIV/AIDS, drugs, science and technology, postelection violence and terrorism. Neo-feminism offers space for women filmmakers to work alongside men since it advocates for negotiating with them to achieve hard ideals. The study found that though women in the Kenyan film industry did not agree they were working within a feminist framework, they objected to the western attitude toward feminism. It is also found that whereas some of the women filmmakers trained locally, the training they received abroad contributed to their being better filmmakers. Indeed, the Kenyan film industry has offered mixed signals as regards supporting its women filmmakers. While the government has faltered, the women filmmaker's grit and sense of purpose have helped them stamp their presence in the film industry both locally and internationally. Also, the study revealed that despite the important role women filmmakers play in the film industry, there was a lack of support from the government. However, family members continued to provide both financial and emotional support to the women filmmakers to live up to their dream. In addition, the lack of a national film policy to regulate the film industry meant that gender was not mainstreamed in it. Women filmmakers continue to negotiate for space through their passion, supporting and mentoring each other, recognising other women's efforts in the industry through film awards and establishing funding opportunities specifically for women but also for men.

Existing research offers several explanations for why states apologize for past wrongdoings. However, these explanations have not been tested systematically. To fill this gap, my dissertation makes a three-fold contribution to the field. Drawing on a scholarly consensus in the field, I first propose a simple and fungible definition for identifying a political apology. Second, I use this definition to compile a new dataset that covers the universe of political apologies in the context of armed conflict. Third, I conduct empirical investigations to find out which theoretical explanations matter for an apology. I complement my quantitative analyses with two qualitative ones. First, I conduct an expert interview with a political leader who issued an apology. Second, I compare two detailed case studies. My results from the statistical analyses reveal that political apologies depend on the regime type of the perpetrator state. I follow up on these results with the interview and the case-studies to show the mechanisms related to a state's calculus for apologizing.

Wrongful short-termism results in undue discounting of the future in political decisions. As a result, the future is wronged because too little is spent on disaster preparedness, climate mitigation and other long-term risks. In response, various proposals have been made to re-form democracy and install institutions for the future (F-Institutions). This thesis makes two arguments. First, it argues that installing F-Institutions can be justified on the basis of justice, democracy, and sovereignty, and secondly, it argues for specific criteria, methods, practices, strategies, and proposals for F-Institutions design. The thesis considers three normative grounds for installing F-Institutions. First, a common approach argues that future people are entitled to representation in decisions that affect them. Due to theoretical and practical difficulties, the thesis rejects this argument but suggests that future people are owed consideration and justification. Second, the thesis argues that there is a duty to ensure that the future enjoys democracy and, third, a duty to ensure intertemporal distributive justice. Installing F-Institutions is justified to reduce wrongful short-termism and thereby ensure compliance with these duties. Drivers such as uncertainty, various biases, and the election cycle all contribute to wrongful short-termism. F-Institutions need to address these drivers to reduce wrongful short-termism. Four criteria are suggested for designing F-Institutions: Effectiveness, feasibility, institutional sustainability, and moral legitimacy. Further, a novel citizens' assembly approach is suggested for identifying the best F-Institutions. As a single F-Institution is unlikely to overcome wrongful short-termism, a strategy is suggested to install multiple F-Institutions and transform democracy step by step. Lastly, a starter set of seven F-Institutions is proposed that is more effective and legitimate than many proposed alternatives. This set would make it more likely that policies are understood as intertemporal investments instead of intratemporal redistributions, thus raising the chance that wrongful short-termism will be overcome.

Many people feel that the stark political and economic divides which characterise contemporary capitalist societies are unjust. Political philosophers have responded to intuitions like these by defending a series of alternative institutional arrangements - social democracy, property-owning democracy, liberal socialism - which they claim could radically reduce these inequalities. What is currently missing from the now voluminous normative literature on alternatives to the political-economic status quo, however, is a theory of political transition: an account which specifies the actions that might play a desirable role, under present political conditions, in making a less starkly divided society of some kind a more realistic future prospect. Justice & Class Consciousness argues that one particularly attractive strategy for realising a fairer economy (and a fairer world) is that of raising class consciousness. This idea is a familiar one in Marxist thought but is seldom invoked in contemporary debates about social justice, with many philosophers fearing that it relies on questionable class-reductionist assumptions or has little relevance in post-industrial economies. This thesis shows how a reframed conception of class consciousness - understood as a complex of robustly action-guiding beliefs and desires about power hierarchies in economic production - can overcome these worries. It also makes a case for why raising this type of class consciousness can be what it calls a "feasibility-enhancing outcome", increasing the chances of realising radical economic transformations. The final chapters then highlight the valuable role that political practices such as democratic municipalism, organising conversations, and activist-led education can play in effectively and permissibly achieving this raised consciousness. The result is a partial answer to the familiar refrain which often greets proponents of a radically more just society: "but how do we get there?".

Over recent years, contemporary political, international and moral theorists have neglected to defend the relationship between morality and war, terrorism and violence. The assumption has largely been that the application of morality to warfare (primarily thought the JAB/JIB) has been a universally good thing and has helped restrain the worst excesses of violence. This thesis examines this assumption more closely, looking at three major critical perspectives of morality in conflict: Machiavelli and realism, Schmitt and Legalism and Nietzsche and Amoralism. For each tradition, I look closely at the critique of JWT, LOAC and morality to offer a critique of the dominant moral theory of conflict, just war theory. As such, the thesis is a genealogy of the main amoral approaches to conflict and their key conceptual criticisms of morality, with the aim of reflecting more critically on the relationship between moral principles and their application in conflict and to highlight the validity of a new approach to conflict: the aesthetic approach, found in the continental tradition, is as a better explanation of conflict than morality while creating the beginning of a different philosophy of conflict, beyond realism and just war theory.

This thesis examines how European Left Parties reacted to the digital revolution in the 2010s, a decade that recent literature theorised as one of 'crisis' for the Left. Meanwhile, critical theorists claimed that platform societies provide new routes for transformative Left-wing politics. However, there is a lack of research on how Left Parties tapped into these dynamics. This gap set the rationale for developing a Gramscian framework through which I explored the core attributes of the hegemony in platform societies. On this ground, I conducted empirical research on how six left-wing parties in Italy, France and Spain sought to navigate or transform 'digital' hegemony. By looking at how parties conceived platform capitalism and platform politics, I theorised the emergence of three left-wing 'digital' ideologies: the neoliberal Techno-Third Way, Post-Social Democracy, and Platform Socialism. I analysed parties' official discourses and original evidence from 37 elites' interviews to advance understandings of how Left parties 'fit' into the confrontations for hegemony in platform societies. The empirical findings develop the thesis's central argument, namely that the politics of the digital revolution provided Left parties with potential essential resources to exit their ideological crises, but in opposite directions that (re-)polarised the Left. Indeed, while parties embracing Techno-Third Way could elaborate ideas and strategies to organically represent the ruling classes of platform capitalism, Platform Socialists found new ways to empower resistance around the field of the 'digital commons'. Conversely, the thesis argues that Post-Social Democracy demonstrates the ongoing crisis of the 'arbitrary' attempts to revive Social Democracy under impossible structural conditions.

'Anti-gender' actors constitute a loosely connected network of mobilisations with a transnational dimension. They seek political goals through their opposition to common feminist and LGBTQ+ issues, including sexual and reproductive rights, gender-based violence legislation, same-sex marriage and adoption, and progressive sex education at schools. However, not all anti-gender actors defend the same issues; furthermore, these movements do not occur in isolation but are mostly part of wider neoconservative and (far-)right movements with often authoritarian aims. In this thesis, I provide an in-depth qualitative account of anti-gender mobilising in the Spanish context, based on extended empirical research carried out over a period of nine months in Madrid and beyond. During my research, I spent significant time at different types of events - including seminars, conferences, demonstrations, and film screenings - as well as carrying out in depth interviews. Given the ethical implications of doing research with groups towards which the researcher harbours a personal dislike, I provide a detailed reflection on what I argue is a crossroad between ethics and safety. In light of my findings, I commence by unpacking the Catholic framing of an opposition to gender and sexuality via references to 'nature' and 'tradition', as well as argue that behind such oppositional practices there lies an aim to preserve the 'traditional' family. I then analyse how Spanish anti-gender movements interact with other exclusionary narratives and suggest that the Spanish Right turns toward a monopolisation of nationalism at the hands of the (far-)right to construct an enemy within. Shifting then to the role of affect, I suggest that anti-gender actors create collective moods of anxiety, love and hate through an appeal to both nostalgic contemplations of the past as well as a temporality of decay projected into the future. I conclude that Spanish anti-gender actors generate a national rhythm that dictates what is both morally acceptable, 'traditional' and in the 'interest' of the nation.

The purpose of this thesis is to propose that there is a new way in which the iconography of the Julio-Claudian dynasty can be read by historians. I propose that the mechanism which can be applied to the iconography of the Julio-Claudians is that of the 'doctrine of capacities'. The 'doctrine of capacities' suggests that a ruler has 'two bodies', that of their physical, natural body and their 'political' body, or the image which represents the political position they held. Reading the iconography of the Julio-Claudians using this prism suggests that they were adept at using their public image to display a 'political' body. That is, a public image which reflected the manner in which they wished to be portray themselves to those they ruled. Through careful examination of the literary and material evidence available, it is clear that not all of the members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty possessed 'political' bodies, and of those who did, it is clear that each member of the dynasty amended or adapted the 'political' body for their own benefit and to meet their own political needs. This thesis also suggests that the 'doctrine of capacities' is both flexible and adaptable when the images of the Julio-Claudians are examined, not only does the concept allow rulers to deal with a range of issues. Those assessed in this thesis are age, disability, gender and political inexperience. In order to bring this fully to the fore, I have made comparisons to more modern political leaders and, in this way, hope to show the effectiveness to the 'political' body which the Julio-Claudians were able to fashion.

This thesis traces the lineage of nonviolence discourse in Hong Kong's democracy movement, focusing on the Umbrella Movement in 2014, the Anti-Extradition Movement in 2019 and the period between. Drawing on various materials, including in-depth interviews, footage of public assemblies and related documents, I examine how different actors contested with each other on their imaginations of activism through the signifier of wo lei fei, the Cantonese abbreviation of 'peace, rationality, and nonviolence'. While the signifier of wo lei fei remains central in the discussion of activism during the periods examined, its usage and meaning nonetheless changed upon contestations. Based on the discourse-theoretical approach formulated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which emphasizes the open-ended nature and contingency of meaningmaking, I contend that cultural change (in this thesis, the change in the nonviolence discourse) involves a complex interplay of dislocation and articulation, where dominant norms and agency come into play. This contrasts with the extant literature where culture change is conceptualized as the substitution of 'old' frames (or repertories) with the 'new', and agents are free to choose between ready-to-use frames (or repertoires) at their disposal. The construction of wo lei fei from the idea of nonviolence in the Umbrella Movement illustrated how the idea of nonviolence was contextualized in Hong Kong, where elements of Westerncentric political philosophy were met with Chinese political thoughts, colonial legacies, and local experiences of activism. By examining the collective memories of the Umbrella Movement, I demonstrate how transformative events contribute to the dislocation of previous structures of meanings and open up the space for new meaning(s) to be constructed through re-articulation. The thesis also demonstrates how changes in the nonviolence discourse shape the relation between the moderate and militant factions in the pro-democracy camp, which was crucial for the formation of movement solidarity in the Anti-Extradition Movement. This thesis aims to blend the insights from the discourse-theoretical approach into the studies of culture in social movement research and provide a more dynamic approach in understanding the process of cultural change.

This thesis focuses on two questions: Who are stateless peoples and what are their rights. It starts with Hannah Arendt's "methodology" of political theory so as to develop a method suitable for elaboration on these issues. With the method, the thesis finds that there is a significant lacuna in most of the existing research on statelessness and rightlessness. That is, it seems not able to account for the stateless-as-rightless problem in terms of a collective. Hence, this thesis reconsiders the problem. It contends that a stateless/rightless people, as a collective formed by its members promising to act in concert politically, is excluded from interactions with other peoples around the globe. In this way, stateless peoples refer to those peoples who perform actions under the pervasive global exclusion, e.g. Somalians, Somalilanders, Taiwanese, and the West Papuans. Their actions, nonetheless, are often misunderstood as the right to self-determination. The thesis contends that the concept of self-determination could neither fully account for the peoples' actions nor do justice to their circumstances. Therefore, it redefines such actions, reading them as the right to have rights. That is, as what I call, to perform actions as a way of life in relation to other peoples in equal and liberal terms. In such a way, the thesis argues that (1) stateless peoples are those who act politically under the circumstances of global exclusion, and (2) their right is a performative right to live, equally and liberally, among other peoples on the Earth. The thesis aims to contribute new understandings not only to the existing literature of (human) rights theory, international legal studies on statelessness, and international political theory but to the stateless/rightless problem.

The objective of this thesis is to construct a theory of international politics. Because all extant theories of international politics are untestable, they cannot be regarded as scientific in terms of the nomological-deductive (Popperian scientific) method or supported by observations. Although several existing auxiliary theories provided by neorealists and neoliberals are testable, they cannot be considered truly scientific since they are neither consistent nor logical. Given that no extant theory meets the criteria for science of the method, a novel theory is needed. Thus, this thesis proposes a scientific theory in terms of the method. That is, the theory put forward in this work is firstly testable or capable of being supported by empirical evidence. Secondly, because the theory transforms the idea derived from game theory, a branch of mathematics, into the universal law of international politics, it is also consistent and logical by the virtue of mathematics. This research suggests the following general law: States in a given situation are restricted to behave in certain ways by the situational logic defined in terms of their preference orderings over the available situational outcomes. Accordingly, a crisis escalates into war since states involved are led to go to war by the logic of the crisis situation. To test the theory, this thesis applies the law to three Balkan crises and compares the application to the actual happenings. The result of the case studies is as follows: Two of the crises did not develop to war as the interested states were driven to settle the crises peacefully by the logic of the crisis situations, whereas the other crisis escalated into war since the relevant states were forced to go to war by the situational logic. Therefore, this theory is empirically supported by the historical cases, and thus, at least temporarily acceptable.

Automation, or technology that substitutes labour in production, is central to most advanced capitalist democracies. As an important factor of productivity growth, it benefits most in society over the long-term by helping to taper over existing inequalities all the while making strenuous, tedious and low value added jobs redundant. However, in the short-term automation often proves injurious to individuals or even groups of workers who see their skills devalued or their jobs destroyed. This combination of economic potential and sociopolitical peril has sparked much research on the topic over the last decades. As a result, social scientists have offered a range of different theories to understand the development of this process. These existing accounts predict labourreplacing technological change should thrive in liberal economies, where there exist few barriers managerial power and labour is relatively unorganised. In this dissertation I shed light on these claims by analysing the relation between institutions, politics and automation in advanced capitalist democracies. Over the course of three papers, I use of a range of different methods, from comparative case studies to multivariate statistical analysis to untangle this relation. I show that automation is not simply a market-driven process, filtering routine tasks out of the economy, but is deeply rooted within institutionally defined models of growth and redistribution. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I find that systems where capital has to share its political power with labour often automate more not less. What is more, my findings show that when automation is an institutionally negotiated process its short-term adjustment costs are distributed more fairly, leading to lower levels of anti-incumbent voting. As such, this thesis contributes to debates in comparative political economy by demonstrating the embeddedness of automation within capitalist growth models and by highlighting how this type of technological change cuts across the perennial tensions between capitalism and democracy.

Lacanian psychoanalysis has received increasing attention in the last few decades for its relevance to thinking about politics, mainly as a result of its key role in the work of the post-Althusserian philosophers of the Ljubljana School. This, however, has resulted in a portrayal of Lacan's position with respect to Marx that can seem obvious and uncomplicated, and that elides the complexities of the historical narrative of psychoanalysis's interaction with Marxist thought. This thesis offers a more complex historical picture of how Lacan relates to Marx. It argues that the political possibilities opened up by psychoanalysis, in particular with respect to its response to Marx, cannot be understood extraneously to this historical dimension. The thesis carries out readings of key texts in twentieth-century philosophy, science, and political theory associated with Marxist thought to construct this intellectual history. It finds that, at each moment of its development, Lacan's work responded to conceptual impasses precipitated by the legacy of this tradition. What also emerges, though, is a view of Lacan that cannot be reduced to a Marxist framework, precisely because of the pressure-points within it that he exploits. There is a history conditioning Lacan's position with respect to Marx that has been forgotten, and that haunts attempts currently being made, in the half-century after his work was completed, to come to terms with it. This thesis begins a study of the contours of this history, in order to register the political possibilities that Lacan opened up.

In this study, I re-frame the concept of post-truth as political discourse, dissociating it from the mainstream conceptualisation with misinformation and supremacy of emotionality influencing public opinion. This study performs four tasks. First, I steer the discussion on post-truth away from the 'misinformation' and 'objective facts' dichotomy, disassociating it from the overemphasis on misinformation and the fixation of 'post' to be something after truth which is inherently negative. Second, I delineate a theoretical framework contextualised within the ambit of political theory, and ideology and discourse analysis, to conceptualise post-truth discourse. Third, I develop an operational definition of post-truth discourse to be tested empirically. Fourth, I apply my theory to Pakistan as a case study, whereby I implement two empirical analyses: the first identifying post-truth discourse in newspaper reporting, and the second an experimental design investigating the effect of post-truth discourses on political behaviour. I argue that post-truth discourse has significant effects on political ideologies' polarisation, manipulation of public policy, and endangering democratic institutions' trust. Among the main implications of my research, I describe how these behaviours have the potential to start democratic backsliding processes or undermine democratic institutions. Furthermore, I highlight the far-reaching implications of conceptualising post-truth as a political discourse for developing countries where political polarisation can have striking impacts on the field, such as elections, regime stability, and regime-society relationship. This study has attempted to re-conceptualise post-truth in a manner where the novelty of post-truth is questioned, the element of truthfulness is examined, and the conceptualisation of post-truth discourse is empirically tested. The shift in thinking about post-truth as a political discourse advances our understanding of post-truth and expands the scope of empirical work in the field. It provides us with new tools with which researchers can dissect the populist discourses of our times.

The thesis explores the nexus of gender and war in modern society in the wake of the recent removal of the combat ban on women in the British Armed Forces. Building upon works on nontraditional bodies who transgress the normative boundaries of masculine/feminine, it investigates the 'inbetweenness' of female soldiers and the ambiguous spaces occupied by them. Setting as a focal point a sense of discomfort, it focuses on representations of women in the military, discourses through which their subject positions are constructed and rendered (un)intelligible. The thesis seeks to recover representations of female soldiers in the media and identifies a hermeneutical lacuna in the articulation of their existence and experiences. By conducting a discourse analysis of the media, the study also postulates that the incongruity between the perceived femininity of women and the masculine-coded profession of soldiering engenders a sense of discomfort, which, in consequence, coaxes women into 'their place'. The thesis analyzes Soldier as well as four major British newspapers and argues that while women are now allowed to hold every role in the British Armed Forces and are ostensibly represented as equals to men in the military discourse, the sense of discomfort in recognizing women in military settings is manifested in subtle and nuanced manners in the civil discourse. 'Female soldier' is rendered an oxymoron as the social construct of 'woman' is not an appropriate subject of violence, and the representations of female soldiers in the media discourses continue to obscure the discursive structure of gender subordination.

Drawing on findings from three years of ethnographic fieldwork and two years of Participatory Action Research (PAR) projects, this thesis investigates the various ways in which the authority of the police is cultivated, challenged and disrupted in an inner-city London Borough. Working and researching alongside youth practitioners, community activists, local politicians, police officers, senior police leadership, and a small cohort of young people who see themselves as both 'overpoliced' and 'under protected', I explore the contestation of the police's 'right to power'. Observing what Beetham (1991, p. 20) has termed 'legitimacy deficits', I suggest that contestations of the police's 'right to power' in these contexts are characterised by large 'discrepancies' between the shared beliefs/values of policing authorities and the shared beliefs/values of 'policed' populations. I also explore the way in which young, policed populations contest the authority of the police through a series of what I term 'delegitimation practices', that is, practical acts that express a withdrawal of consent from the legal system and the state. In addition to these findings about policed young people, I also explore the ways that police officers and police leadership attempt to cultivate legitimacy in the face of these challenges to their authority at the interorganisational level, in a setting beyond the street and between power-holders. Building on in situ observations and first-hand recollections about the cultivation and contestation of legitimacy, I argue that the police's 'right to power' in these contexts cannot be understood solely in isolation as a set of abstract or quantifiable beliefs, values or behaviours. Rather, I advocate for an understanding of legitimacy as embedded within wider social processes of meaning-making. These processes, I argue, take shape following the uneven distribution of policing power across intersecting racialised, classed, gendered and place-based forms of social stratification.

Audio technology in the popular imagination had an ambiguous role in the culture and politics of the Weimar period, being both a medium of progressive modernism in the jazz-age, and, under Nazi control, an instrument of repression and conformity. The aim of this study is to understand the role of audio technology - the radio, gramophone, electronic musical instruments, sound film and their associated and interconnected ecosystems - in the musical, cultural and political ideas of the Weimar republic (1918-33) and the subsequent impact of these ideas on the transition to the Nazi State (1933-45). Studies of the culture and politics of the Weimar and Nazi period are largely delineated by genre: arts, music, literature, politics and their respective artefacts which position technology as the end result of a historic processes. In contrast, this study focuses on audio technology as a socio-political actor in the development of a broad range of cultural and political concepts of the time. I will argue that a primary driver of social change was the symbiotic relationship between technology and the social, political and economic ideas of the period - a relationship that had an often unintentional and unpredictable impact on German society. In contrast to the received image of the Weimar period where audio technology is depicted as a medium of progressive modernity, this study finds that it had a much more ambiguous disruptive influence on the era. Methodologically, this research is supported by secondary literature and primary sources: contemporary journals, literature and archival research and audio recordings. By analysing primary sources and secondary literature I demonstrate that in contrast to the received image of the Weimar period, audio technology had a much more ambiguous disruptive influence that contributed to the emergence and acceptance of totalitarianism.

Sustainable public procurement is an integral part of sustainable development that seeks to harmonise and evaluate public expenditures of goods and services through different contracting authorities to fulfil public procurement objectives. While the contribution of the sustainable public procurement sector is receiving increasing attention in developed societies, the role of sustainable public procurement is muted in developing communities. There have been many studies exploring the role of public procurement for sustainable development in the local government areas in the western context. However, there is no empirical study of this nature in developing countries such as Nigeria. Hence, this study aims to explore the various mechanisms through which local government authorities in Nigeria utilise their public procurement functions to foster sustainable development regarding the economic, social, and environmental benefits The study reviewed policy documents and practitioner documents on public procurement and sustainability available through the bureau of public procurement, which is the designated commission for public procurement in Nigeria. Adopting a qualitative approach, thirteen local government areas were utilised to explore the challenges and opportunities for addressing sustainability imperatives through public procurement. Using semi-structured interviews, this study conducted twenty-four interviews of public procurement professionals to gain in-depth knowledge of the extent to which sustainability is incorporated into current public procurement practices and how sustainable public procurement can be used as an instrument for sustainable development. This study confirmed some of the challenges that have been reported in the literature. In addition, the study found contextual factors such as lack of autonomy, nepotism, absence of e-procurement, reluctance to change, and absence of the rule of law that add to the challenges of achieving sustainable public procurement in Nigeria. This study also has practical implications for practitioners through the application of the proposed theoretical framework to achieve sustainability in public procurement. This will also help the local government meets the sustainable development goal 12 (responsible consumption and production) target 7 (which is sustainable public procurement).

International law and the territorial controls of non-state armed groups in Yemen and Libya (2011-2015) This thesis examines the paucity of international legal and theoretical frameworks that are applicable to the governance and overall status of the territorial enclaves of non-state armed groups (NSAGs), and the territorial fragmentation of Yemen and Libya by and through such actors in the years immediately following the Arab Uprisings (2011-2015). In addition to increasing our knowledge about the complex interplay between 'sovereignty,' 'territoriality,' and 'self-determination' on the one hand, and the state-centric nature of such prominent conceptual frameworks on the other, the thesis puts the fate of populations living within the territorial enclaves of NSAGs centre stage. This thesis thus seeks to offer an alternative to the heavily securitised lenses of studying NSAGs and their territorial enclaves in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and beyond, underscoring instead the devastating humanitarian outcomes. Beyond any ethnic claims to 'self-determination,' the thesis highlights that the historical subdivisions of already established states such as Yemen and Libya are often exploited by external players in a manner that evidences the continuation of colonialism by other means. Informed by the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) and 'postcolonial' IR theory, the thesis therefore proposes the utilisation of the conceptual framework of 'terra nullius' in our study of the territorial enclaves of NSAGs to 1) overcome deficiencies arising from readily available frameworks such as 'self-determination,' 2) accentuate the prominence of Great Power politics in all such situations of civil war and the continued existence of divisive colonial politics such as 'terra nullius' in our contemporary international affairs, and 3) address their largely unaccounted for humanitarian outcome. The thesis further responds to the call to 'decolonise' the curriculum, and by implication the generation of knowledge itself, pioneering in its methodological approach the qualitative analysis of 43,492 news reports from Yemen and Libya (18,759 reports from Yemen and 24,733 reports from Libya) using 'NVIVO'.

Although disaster management has become an effective approach through which the security of society can be secured, it has produced failure and conflict in some circumstances. The academic approach given to this phenomena has often been criticised, namely in relation to how attention is given predominantly to technical and positivist means and thus how social and political dimensions are not adequately considered. Importantly, these neglected factors play a crucial role in determining the success and/or failure of disaster management. Drawing upon Poststructuralist Discourse Theory, this thesis develops a new conceptual framework to critically explain the politics of disaster management, thus revealing the issues that are embedded in the construction of, and political practices involved in responding to, disaster management. It further analyses the politics of disaster management surrounding the 2014 Chiang Rai Earthquake of Thailand. At the national level, the thesis characterises disaster management via four key logics - security, bureaucracy, managerialism and hybridity - showing how their merging in a hybrid form has caused failure/conflict. The discourses that surfaced in this context are demonstrated to have manifested a political space in which local residents used logics of the community to politicise issues and to challenge the state. Conversely, logics of uncertainty and professionalisation were used as de/re-politicisation mechanisms by provincial agencies to regain authority. This thesis considers such disaster management as contested political terrain where political strategies were implemented through anti- and pro-central disaster management projects. The thesis contributes to Disaster Management Studies in three ways - by offering an alternative means of conducting research as to disaster management politics, exemplifying the benefits of applying a logics approach in explaining the political practices involved in disaster management and calling for further analysis to be given as to the role of subjective desires and the affective register in this field.

The Green Belt is probably England's most popular and longstanding planning policy commanding widespread political support locally and nationally yet it is regularly critiqued as one of the main causes of England's Housing Crisis by academics, think tanks and housebuilders. More broadly, following Hall's seminal work The Containment of Urban England (1973), it is often argued that it contributes to wider inequitable outcomes in the planning system, which is disproportionately skewed in favour of campaigners and homeowners. This thesis critically evaluates the extent to which the Green Belt contributes to the housing crisis and whether the policy needs reforming. The broader question of power in planning is addressed through exploring why and how the public and campaigners support the Green Belt and oppose housebuilding generally. It therefore aims to add nuance to, and move forward the often polarised Green Belt debate by focusing principally on the views of planners, which are often under-represented in the Green Belt debate, despite being the main actor in the planning system. The study focuses on the importance of space through a geographically based case study of the West Midlands. The thesis finds that the housing crisis is a complex, multi-faceted problem consisting of multi-scalar factors although the Green Belt exacerbates the crisis in particular locations, especially on the edge of conurbations. It argues that the policy should not be abolished but modified for the 21st century with a focus on sustainability, especially recreation and environmental improvement, and that there should be national conversation on the policy's overall spatial extent and purpose, perhaps as part of a national plan. The study also finds that people primarily support the policy because of popular planning principles and place attachment rather than house prices. There is a gap between the attempted exercises of power and effective power of campaigners with significant circumscription and modulation of power in the planning system. Finally, many of the issues associated with the Green Belt and community opposition to development generally are related to the lack of strategic planning in the current system so the thesis underlines the need for integrated, strategic planning to protect the environment and meet housing need.

As political crises and social unrest proliferate worldwide, the appeal of populism grows steadily in various fora, including academic fora. In this respect, an abundance of scholarly publications has sought, through the study of populism, to unravel important aspects of contemporary political and social dynamics. Discourse theory scholars, in particular, have played an important role in pushing the boundaries of populism studies forward. They have challenged objectivist perspectives in the (social) sciences by foregrounding the role of meaning-making and by treating populism as a discursive logic that better characterises the political (dis)articulation of social reality. In situating its analytical focus at the frontier of populism studies, this paper-based dissertation contributes to this literature from both an empirical and a theoretical point of view. Through the four papers which make up this thesis, I contribute to discourse theory by presenting three main lines of analysis in the study of populism in Brazil, a case that is frequently referenced but which remains under-explored. Firstly, by exploring Brazil's fourth republican period (1946-1964), this thesis shows how populism is best understood as both a concept and a signifier, revealing the way the dynamic interplay of populism discourses shape our sense of social reality. Secondly, by studying a leading magazine with an upmarket readership in Brazil (Veja), I explore the affective force running through anti-populist discursive articulations, affirming the value of the category of fantasy from an empirical and analytical point of view. Thirdly, by focusing on the collective candidacy of the Bancada Ativista in the Sao Paulo State elections, I explore the potential of the concept of populism, conceived as a logic, to shed light on aspects of political life beyond populist phenomena. Finally, in recognising a gap in the literature in relation to the constitutive role of desire in social meaning-making processes, the fourth paper constructs, through the psychoanalytic category of hysteria, an approach to knowledge production informed by desire, which constitutes the main theoretical contribution to the discourse theory tradition. By paying close attention to Brazilian politics, this thesis explores some of the distinctive virtues of a discourse theoretical approach to populism by drawing out the normative, ideological, and politico-strategic implications of complex political dynamics and social meaning-making processes within and beyond the study of populist phenomena.

This thesis explores the origin and development of anticolonial ideas within Basque radicalism from the late nineteenth century until 1936 through a close examination of Basque periodicals. It argues that from the emergence of the movement in the late nineteenth century, anticolonialism became a recurrent element of the Basque radical nationalist agenda. Basque radicals framed the situation of Euskadi as a colonial one and advocated the end of colonialism. I argue that despite the constant presence of Basque anticolonial ideas within Basque nationalism, this did not mean that Basque radicals were driven by a genuine hatred for colonialism. Instead, Basque anticolonialism responded to the needs of the movement and was motivated by the goals of internationalising the movement and legitimising Basque independence claims. Assessing the evolution of Basque anticolonialism invites the exploration of other crucial aspects of the Basque nationalist ideology, including violence and race. This is because the Basque nationalist belief in being part of an anticolonial insurrection prompted Basque radicals to consider different strategies used in colonial settings, including violence, and forced analogies between the Basques and other colonised nations. Colonialism, violence and race are the main themes of this thesis.

This thesis seeks to establish a productive contrast between the political philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and the Liberal tradition. I conceptualise the latter as a historical development uniting theoretical and political practices justified by models of subjectivity or of harmonious intersubjective association, from which they draw principles of individual freedom and subjection taken to apply in general. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's politics of 'problematisation', by contrast, is focused on the singular and the potentials embodied by concrete individuals and collectives, and so cannot be reduced to formal institutional practice. I develop the opposition through a series of problems which highlight these different approaches: freedom, sovereignty, revolution, law, and security. In each case, I argue that Liberal philosophies formulate and solve such problems via general and abstract principles, whilst Deleuze and Guattari insist they be reopened by actual individuals and communities as part of their development of new ways of thinking, acting, and living. Further, I use Deleuze and Guattari's work to contextualise the Liberal tradition within the history of state and capital, arguing that the 'universal' principles of subjectivity or association it produced have been internalised by the populations of capitalist democracies, separating them from their capacity to constitute problems and providing nation states with a pliant citizenry and adaptable labour force. I argue that Deleuze and Guattari's 'minor' socialism enables concrete populations to produce their own conception of what it means to be subject to capital, lending itself to internationalism and continuous experimentation with new values and orientations. The original contribution of this thesis lies in its presentation of a Deleuze-Guattarian perspective on Liberalism, which complements existing studies of their conception of the development of the state and capitalism, as well as in its development of 'problematisation' as a politics and ethics of the singular.

The thesis investigates the reasons that led to a continuation and furthering of neoliberal policy-making (particularly fiscal austerity and labour market flexibilisaiton) in European countries after the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-11. The existing literature has often interpreted this process as the result of the pressures coming from markets' speculation, European institutions or ruling classes within different countries. Italy has been considered a paradigmatic case in this regard, given the fact that, in the midst of the crisis, the country resorted to a technocratic government with the mandate to implement the policies asked by European institutions, while structural reforms were understood as constituting an implicit conditionality for the European Central Bank bond-market intervention. Conversely, labour organisations (particularly left-wing political parties and trade unions) are often depicted as victims of the process. The validity of such positions is assessed by exploring the debates over seven key reforms characterising post-2011 Italian political economy: the Save Italy decree, the insertion of the balanced budget clause in the Italian constitution, the Fornero labour market reform, the Jobs Act, the Dignity Decree, Quote 100 and the citizenship income. I employ interviews with left-wing politicians and unionists as well as content analysis of left-leaning newspapers to assess the level of consensus these groups accorded to the furthering of neoliberal measures. The thesis cautions against the tendency to place unnecessary emphasis on the external impositions coming from the European Union and government elites at the national level. These have had a tangible impact only in so far as there was consensus or acquiescence over the policies at hand, crucially accorded also by potentially opposing groups. On the other hand, in the occasions in which such consensus was lacking, Italy was capable of straying in a significant manner from the policies championed by European institutions and financial markets. In order to make sense of the thesis findings, I draw from Open Marxist and Neo-Gramscian approaches to International Political Economy. Capitalist society in general, and the neoliberal era in particular, are characterised by the always potentially present struggle between those groups that push to enhance profits and the ones that want to reaffirm the protection of people's basic needs and desires. Yet, the extent to (and the specific forms in) which such potentiality realises itself in practice is a matter of empirical enquiry and cannot be assessed a priori. The increasing acquiescence of labour organisations vis-à-vis neoliberal policies since the 1980s emerges here in all its relevance. In analysing this process, the thesis also investigates the specific reasons for which the Italian Left resorted to neoliberal policy-making. These were mainly threefold: i) the need to ensure, maintain or protect Italian anchoring to European integration, ii) the criticism of part of the Italian political class, which heavily relied on clientelistic spending in order to increase consensus, iii) the conviction that Italy had to solve its long-term macroeconomic issues (particularly, high debt and labour market dualism).

This thesis engages with the concept of populism through an interdisciplinary framework combining politics and performance studies. Exploring the tension between form and substance, it interrogates the intersection between populism and exclusionary nationalism by developing a comparative case study analysing the 2016 and 2017 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. The thesis begins by tracing the origins and most widespread uses of populism in the literature. Placing itself in the lineage of the discursive approach inspired by the work of Laclau, it however departs from the notion of discourse by emphasising the performative dimension of populism as a way of doing politics. Adapting an approach developed by Moffitt, this work conceptualises populism as a political style, embracing the interdisciplinary inputs of performance studies both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, it defines populism as a repertoire of performances comprising three performative clusters: performances of identity, transgression, and crisis. Methodologically, it adopts a combination of deductive and inductive methods to engage with a corpus of curated political performances from each campaign. In addition to critical thematic analysis, it uses an original questionnaire to conduct a performance analysis of the corpus. The thesis then successively explores the three clusters of the populist style. Considering performances of identity, it looks at the way Trump and Le Pen performed the people, the elite and themselves as leaders. Using the concept of transgression, it engages with the way the two political actors disrupted interactional, rhetoric and theatrical norms. Finally, it examines the crisis narratives developed in their campaigns by distinguishing their nativist and anti-establishment components. After a summary of the comparative differences between Trump and Le Pen, the thesis concludes by highlighting the relevance of style in politics and the importance of engaging with populism critically and contextually.

Birmingham was known as the 'city of a thousand trades' because of its diverse industrial base, but one of these trades, brass manufacturing, has barely been explored by historians. This thesis examines the origins of the industry, explores its expansion throughout the eighteenth century, outlines the development of a national political presence through a network of brass founders, and places the trade within an international context. Using personal correspondence, Parliamentary records, trade cards, travel diaries and printed primary sources, this research provides the fullest picture of the development of the Birmingham brass industry to date. It reveals that the success of the industry was dependent on increasingly sophisticated organisational methods and political strategies, developed by a group of local industrialists. The collective political activities of Birmingham brass manufacturers enabled local businessmen to assert their interests over and against copper and brass businesses elsewhere in Britain, as well as continental Europe. This was achieved by using manipulative propaganda, lobbying politicians, and the dismantling of opponents' arguments. By 1801 the brass founders of Birmingham had established their trade as a significant local industry. Crucially, they had also successfully asserted Birmingham's economic interests on the national stage.

This thesis presents an original account of an important period for regional governance and strategic spatial planning in the UK from 1998 to 2010, and the reasons for its demise. The reasons and processes whereby regional assemblies, Leaders' Boards and regional spatial strategy were abolished are examined. The thesis addresses a gap in the literature through an innovative case study of the West Midlands Regional Assembly based on an insider perspective and informed by in depth interviews with managerial, professional and political actors who played different roles in regional governance and planning until its demise. The author's insider experience has allowed the distinctive methodological development of 'participant observation in retrospect'. Thirty interviews with professional and political actors from within and outside the Assembly were conducted between 2012 and 2014, allowing a high level of recall soon after abolition. A mosaic of theory is used, based upon three new institutionalist theories anchored against principal actor groups: historical path dependency, rational choice theory and the population ecology model, together with elements of Complexity Theory. Critical Theory provides the foundational background perspective. Theory of private sector organisational demise is also developed to explore public sector demise. The political rhetoric used to justify the abolition of assemblies and RSSs is challenged by in-depth analysis, over four periods, of the inter-relationships of the key actor groups and the Government's growing hegemony over its 'devolved' regional partnership project. At the heart of the demise lay flawed (mis)understandings and changing attitudes over the credibility of the regional project by regional and national political actors. The WMRA's foundation as a young organisation was embedded in the much older West Midlands Local Government Association. This was seen by the WMRA as a strength but led to an increased vulnerability on both accounts as it proved to be unable to adapt to an increasingly hostile political environment. Despite the Assembly's political unanimity of support for its planning for housing policy stance against the Government, this failed to protect the organisation. Despite New Labour's regional reforms after 2009, the toxic organisational environment rendered the Assembly's survival under the Coalition Government impossible. New Labour's approach to regional planning and governance presents a revised perspective on planning in England. Tensions between central and local actors, between the traditions underpinning the planning profession and practice, and economic growth agendas are emphasised. A further contribution is made by explaining aspects of the Regional Housing Board's relationship with Government housing agencies and regional planning. The theoretical approach to understanding public sector demise indicates its potential for development in situations where public sector organisations cease to exist. A view held by some political actors that regional working was a European Union attempt to weaken the British nation state was not given credence by those interviewed, nor did it explain the demise. Assemblies and their brief lived successors, Leader's Boards, represented an ideological tier of governance incompatible with Coalition Conservatives' 'small-state'. The thesis builds on existing Critical Theory and responds to Davies (2011) plea for further substantive accounts to validate and illustrate this literature. The thesis's focus on governance in the spatial tier between Central and local Government remains relevant to current housing and planning agendas, to managing sub-regional housing markets, to address public health crises and the current Government's aspirations for 'levelling up the regions'.

This thesis examines the rise of evidence-based policing (EBP) in the UK over the last two decades. EBP is a 'what works' initiative, claiming to offer benefits to policing policy and practice based on scientific research graded as 'evidence'. EBP has exerted growing influence in British policing in parallel with attempts to 'professionalise' policing through the development of the College of Policing, imitating the medical 'royal colleges' model. The College is but one example of observable institutional changes occurring to take account of, and so reinforce, the EBP project. The burgeoning hegemonic status of EBP is met with almost no challenge, despite fierce debate about 'evidence-based policy' in other fields. Drawing on post-structural theoretical perspectives after Foucault, this thesis reports discourse analytical research into selected EBP texts illuminating its 'smaller practices' to reveal relations of power, presented around story-lines, subject positionalities, and institutional modification. This thesis interrogates EBPs central claims of being a neutral, science-based producer of 'knowledge' as a force for 'policing improvement'. EBP is repositioned as doing political work, sharing genealogical heritage with other socio-political projects of late modernity, particularly managerialism and neoliberalism.

The IR literature often overlooks one category of states - small states that sit in-between centres of geopolitical gravity and have highly asymmetrical relations with them. Conventional theories and most non-conventional approaches expect such states to bandwagon systematically with the dominating power, especially when geopolitical tensions rise. However, empirical observations indicate that this is rarely the case. This presents an interesting research puzzle, which the thesis addresses by conducting structured and focused comparative case study analysis of Armenia's and Belarus's foreign policies in 2008-2020. The research draws on the theoretical framework of neoclassical realism to develop a novel model of foreign policy hedging, which improves existing models of strategic hedging by introducing a sophisticated operationalisation and identification mechanism. The thesis claims two main theoretical findings. First, growing geopolitical tensions produce among small in-between states' elites an overarching perception of uncertainty, which they associate not only with heightened risks but also with opportunities. Second, they respond to geopolitical uncertainty by foreign policy hedging. Importantly, once structural tensions escalate to the level of an all-out confrontation, small in-between states tend to either reduce their hedging portfolios or drop them altogether, as under such conditions uncertainty about risks and opportunities evolves into certainty about immediate threats. The thesis contributes to the growing literature on (strategic) hedging by developing a new model of foreign policy hedging with a two-layered identification mechanism. It also presents an innovative interpretation of the sources and limitations of foreign policy hedging by small in-between states. Finally, the thesis introduces hedging to post-Soviet studies.

This thesis is concerned with creative responses to the 2015-16 Calais Jungle and the 'refugee crisis' in Europe. Departing from studies that approach the Jungle as a 'state of exception', it draws instead upon the overdetermined notions of 'refugee voice' and 'refugee storytelling' to consider how 'humanity' has been negotiated, granted and revoked in Calais. I argue that creative representations of the Jungle signal a new chapter in refugee humanitarianism: one in which the 'human' of human rights, and the 'human' of humanitarianism, have become discursively entangled. I chart an emergent language of grassroots refugee solidarity through texts, plays, documentaries, films, installations, exhibitions, and visual artworks produced about the Jungle between 2015 and 2020. I demonstrate the ideological role that refugees and asylum seekers have played in shoring up the spatiotemporal boundaries of the European nation during the 'refugee crisis', via a rhetorical process termed here 'the affective economy of hopes and dreams'. Finally, the thesis argues that the Calais Jungle was not the edge, limit or 'other' of Europe. Rather, for British and European citizens, the camp has played a pivotal role in rethinking Europe as a geopolitical construct, and 'Europeanness' as a cultural concept, in the post-Brexit age.

This thesis consists of three chapters investigating some of the interactions between the media and both voters and politicians. In chapter 1, I analyse how the introduction of an open data initiative can affect budget allocations of local administrators in the context of Italian municipalities. I find that mayors react to the disclosure of their own data on expenditure and public good provision by improving the published indicators. We find that they sustain the cost of such improvement by worsening other indicators which are not public. These results contribute to the literature by providing the first causal estimates of the effect on mayors' budget choices of their own data being disclosed. In chapter 2 I exploit mayors' online activity on the same open-data platform, OpenCivitas, to reveal a network between mayors which is relevant for tax and yardstick competition. I find that mayors in this network are different from the average on several dimensions and that they do not engage in tax competition with neighbouring municipalities as all the other mayors do. Mayors in the network compete with each other, despite the physical distance, by interdependently setting their property tax rates. We also show that this network existed before the website opened, but that the behaviour of mayors in the network changed after data disclosure. This chapter contributes to the literature by showing a previously unknown framework in tax competition. Chapter 3 investigates, in the context of US counties, how a decrease in the number of local newspapers, or the complete disappearance of them, affects splitticket voting, a commonly used proxy for voters' knowledge of candidates in local elections (Governors, Senators, Representatives). Surprisingly, I find that more exits of local newspapers are associated with higher share of split tickets in the county. Additionally, I find no evidence that losing the last newspaper affects party-line voting. These results are new in the literature and partially in contrast with previous evidence.

Today, the 1960s are fondly remembered as a time when higher education in Britain was understood as a public good. University was free for students, paid for by the state. This expenditure was to provide equality of opportunity, especially for those of lower classes and women. Since the 1990s by contrast, higher education has been based on a marketised funding regime. Self-interested students choose to purchase useful 'skills' from higher education providers in order to earn higher wages in the future. Much of the existing historical literature sharply distinguishes this 'neoliberal' era from the 'social democratic' era of the 1960s. The historiography of post-war Britain increasingly challenges such 'rise-and-fall' narratives of social democracy and instead emphasises its dynamism and flexibility. This thesis shows there is much greater diversity than hitherto appreciated in ideas of social democratic policy and pedagogy. Universities in particular were less conservative or complacent in their ambitions than they have been perceived. This includes a complicated relationship with the place of personal flourishing in liberal thought. Education for citizenship and education for consumerism are not so easily disentangled. This thesis explores the university 'student' as imagined by a vanguard of reformist university leaders. It begins with neoliberal economist Lionel Robbins, chairman of the famous Committee on Higher Education (1961-63). It examines how the choice of the individual citizen consumer student was made central to determining the pattern and size of higher education. This followed Robbins' conviction that the freedom of choice was central to the 'good society' and human flourishing, but that it must be secured by state intervention. To educate this student, university pedagogies were redeployed to meet the new challenges of the Cold War and modern technological society. Through liaison with industry, reformists imagined a university education would provide students with a holistic understanding of society. They would learn how to best apply their specialist knowledge in the service of liberal capitalism. This philosophy found its way into the pedagogy and built environment of the new universities, including York, Warwick, and Stirling. Throughout the expanding British higher education system were a series of complicated alliances between the priorities of the consumer and the market and the values of the fair, free, 'good society'.

The thesis proposes prefigurative constitutionality as a novel approach to the production of constitutional and political theory and the study of non-state political actors in the context of strategies for radical democracy. Prefigurative constitutionality requires a bespoke understanding of prefiguration itself, as a transversal complex of types and functions of political action, applicable far beyond the limits of 'prefigurative politics' narrowly conceived. It opens constitutional theory to the constitutive, self-valorising practices of movements and parties, discovering in their prefigurative constitutional practices both implicit critiques of mainstream constitutionalism, and emergent constitutional models of future democracies to come. It poses the vital challenge for prefigurative practices to recognise and refine their constitutional practices. It reflects back onto questions of methodology, demanding a novel adaptation of grounded theory methods within a critical theoretical framework. The prefigurative-constitutional lens is here applied to the experience of 'new municipalism' in Madrid, from its roots in the 15M movement, to the separate constitution of municipalist platform Ganemos Madrid, left populist party Podemos, and their attempted confluence in Ahora Madrid, the formation that would ultimately contest and win Madrid's 2015 municipal election. Reading Ganemos' asambleario constitutionality through the work of Antonio Negri, and Podemos' populist constitutionality through the work of Ernesto Laclau, reveals novel constitutional models as well as offering deeper insight into the logics of their respective political strategies. Simultaneously, the key concepts of prefiguration and hegemony are critically developed. In seeking to explain the weakness of Ahora Madrid's constitution, the concept of leadership becomes crucial. Beyond its explanatory function, leadership also constructs the theoretical ground on which prefiguration and hegemony, Negri and Laclau, Ganemos and Podemos all most productively intersect. The analysis culminates in the discover of prefiguration and hegemony's complementarity, and the need for their confluence in a unified theory.

This thesis investigates the arguments of the political meritocrats, such as Daniel A. Bell, Tongdong Bai, Joseph Chan, Ruiping Fan and Qing Jiang. The political meritocrats argue that core positions of political authority should be allocated by merit rather than popular elections, because contemporary democratic politics is deficient in many ways. To that end, they argue, the democratically elected officials of the core executive and/or legislature should be constrained if not replaced by some meritocratically selected officials. Their proposed merit-based mechanisms for selecting public officials include, for example, examinations, interviews, peer recommendations and assessments of bureaucratic performance. This thesis has three aims. First, contra the political meritocrats, I argue that an individual might not merit political power, even when she has some personal attributes helpful for improving political decision-making quality. Second, in line with the political meritocrats, I argue that a political system need not distribute political power equally to be morally justified, at least when we focus on some familiar conceptions of equality, stability and acceptability underpinning democratic arrangements. Third, pace the political meritocrats, I defend the democratic-sortitional model of meritocracy. The model envisions a core legislature composed of two chambers, the first elected, and the second meritocratically selected. Unlike the existing models of meritocracy, however, those occupying the meritocratic chamber of the democratic-sortitional model are chosen by sortition. The democratic chamber is responsible for designing the eligibility criteria for the meritocratic chamber, according to citizens' deliberative conclusions on what skills, expertise, interests and so on merit political representation. Interested citizens fulfilling those criteria will be randomly selected for the meritocratic chamber. This thesis will not just enhance our understanding of various conceptual and normative issues related to the idea of political meritocracy, but it will also shed light on how meritocratic political systems should be evaluated and designed.

Since the 1980s, many Western European countries have witnessed the rise of the radical right. Much has been written on the ideology of these parties, the tactics they adopt, the sorts of people that vote for them, and the reasons behind their electoral success. The growing electoral success of these parties represents a serious electoral challenge to major political parties or 'principal parties' and yet comparatively little has been written on how principal parties respond to the radical right and even less so on the impact that this has on the electoral success of radical right parties. Indeed, what has been written tends to focus on either a small number of parties or a particular party family. What is thus far lacking is a comprehensive comparative account of how principal parties have responded to the radical right and to what extent these strategic responses have been successful. This thesis seeks to address this gap by adopting a multi-method approach that combines cross-case comparative analysis with qualitative case studies in order to identify the various strategies that principal parties employ and the degree of success, if any, they have. By building on the existing literature, it develops an enhanced model of party competition which is subsequently tested in an mvQCA analysis and two in-depth, qualitative case studies: France and Sweden. In doing so, this thesis will identify what strategies principal parties adopt, how successful they are, and whether or not a 'silver bullet' exists that can be employed against the radical right.

This thesis aims to rework Foucault's care of the self so that it can be understood as a political activity that opens the possibility for a new type of subjectivity. I develop and exemplify this claim through an analysis of the digital. Firstly, I focus on Foucault's ethical work, which I articulate and defend by reading the care of the self through the notions of body, critique and limits, thus envisioning a political activity from which a new subjectivity can emerge. Ultimately, I understand the care of the self to be an embodied critical practice that aims at transgressing the limits of imposed truths and forms of life. The exercise of the care of the self, thus, permits for a conversion of power, which signifies the passing from a moment of subjection to one of subjectivation. Secondly, I employ such arguments in a more practical manner and analyse the digital and the subjection process it enacts. I argue that the digital, which I take as the exacerbated use of the internet through gadgets, is a complex tool-like space characterized by quantification, seclusion and symbiosis, and that such notions arise as a result of the mechanisms that uphold the digital: discipline, mediation of discourse and biopower. However, my interest here is not in these characteristics and mechanisms per se but about the subject they create. I claim that the digital serves to exemplify the making of the useful and docile bodies of the twenty-first century: depoliticized in their utility and docility insofar as they are made to take for granted the imposition of a contingent truth. Thirdly, I then explore how my political reading of the care of the self serves to 'fight' the depoliticized digital subject, where I claim that our attention should be directed towards the mundane, the everyday, and the regaining of it through thought exercises, which allow for the subject to rethink that which was once taken for granted and regarded as incontestable. In doing so, I argue for the value of the uncertain and the political possibility that rests within.

Recent political events in the United Kingdom have given rise to an explosion of interest in the use of the concept of populism. These applications overwhelmingly take populism as a form of ideology and in doing so make several essentialist assumptions that betray the usefulness of the term and which reduce it to a mere descriptor of particular phenomena. This work seeks to re-establish the analytical and critical value of populism using a refinement of Laclauian discourse theory via the 'Logics' framework of critical explanation. This piece contributes to theoretical debates by showing that populism is best understood as a political logic that organises a discourse in a particular configuration, one in which other political and fantasmatic logics must be accounted for in order to unearth and preserve the context-specificity of populism in a given case and produce an overarching substantive-critical account. In applying this framework to the case of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), this work also makes a methodological contribution to the field by providing a means to identify populist logics by coding patterns of articulation with a particular focus on 'equivalence' and 'difference'. What is demonstrated is the adoption of a populist political logic by UKIP from 2011 to 2016 and in doing so extended the affective reach of a traditionally nationalistic programme. This reading expands current understandings of UKIP which overstress the 'weighting' of populist and nationalistic aspects against one another, and instead provides a multifaceted, diachronic portrayal that explicates, amongst other things, points of friction and symbiosis between populism and other logics such as nationalism. It is then shown how these logics were appropriated in the Brexit referendum by the 'Vote Leave' campaign. Finally, these cases are utilised to re-evaluate ongoing theoretical debates in populism research.

This thesis addresses three main questions concerning the relation between state and religion: What is the secular state? Is the secular state coherent? Is the secular state morally desirable? Specifically, this thesis claims that some significant characteristics of the political philosophy of John Rawls could be articulated as a particular version of secularism - Rawlsian secularism. This thesis argues that Rawlsian secularism should be used as the definition of the secular state, and proposes to deal with those three questions by examining Rawlsian secularism. This thesis argues that Rawlsian secularism is incoherent. The premise of Rawlsian secularism is that for the state to be religiously neutral it must be neutral toward all reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or not. In other words, it would fail to be religiously neutral if it fails to be neutral toward any comprehensive doctrine even if it does not endorse any particular religion explicitly. This thesis claims that, in constructing his political conception of the person, Rawls cannot avoid some controversial debates about human characteristics. And, in dealing with fundamental political questions, he cannot avoid some metaphysical or comprehensive moral questions, which go beyond the limit of Rawlsian public reason. This thesis also argues that Rawlsian secularism is morally undesirable. Rawls' idea that the state should leave people's actual comprehensive identity and doctrine aside when deciding on a matter of justice is morally undesirable. His idea may be desirable in some cases, but it may be not in some other cases. Rawlsian secularism rules out the possibility for the state to engage in some controversial moral issues in the first place, which is morally undesirable in some cases.

Societies recovering from armed conflict and other episodes of widespread violence face major socio-economic challenges. They must deal with the material deprivation and exclusion that often affect large numbers of people directly as a result of violence. State authorities must also address the plight of other disadvantaged people, not directly affected by violence, whose economic and social rights (ESR) have not been fully guaranteed. All this frequently occurs in contexts of scarce resources, where deprivation, status-based discrimination and socio-economic inequalities are acute. This thesis examines two normative frameworks to address the ESR of people affected by widespread violence and explores what each of them has to say about the plight of other disadvantaged people. This issue includes discussing the establishment of priorities between victims and non-victims in ensuring ESR considering cross-cutting patterns of poverty, social inequalities and discrimination. According to the first framework, which will be dubbed here the 'offending state-victimised individual paradigm', the state is a threat to the individual. In shaping the scope of state responsibility, this approach emphasises a retrospective evaluation of the state authorities' conduct regarding the occurrence of violations in terms of duties to respect and protect rights. This paradigm privileges the situation of those who found their lives disrupted by violence, namely victims, who are deemed to be entitled to special access to socio-economic goods and other monetary resources that are usually used to cope with daily life, as a means of redress. The second approach is forward-looking and understands the state as an active guarantor of rights in contexts of poverty and exclusion. In the aftermath of widespread violence, positive duties to fulfil ESR are foregrounded and existing socio-economic shortcomings are addressed on their own merits. Reparations play a secondary role in the context of this approach and are considered as a means to ensure ESR. This study is carried out from the perspective of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the African human rights system and the Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR Committee). The first part of the study examines the framework that portrays the state as a threat to the individual, drawing on the case-law of regional human rights bodies. The second part uses the work of the ESCR Committee to explore the alternative that understands the state as an active guarantor of rights. The possibilities and limitations of each approach will be examined by focusing on the moral views that underpin them, deontological ethics and consequentialist morality. If, as argued in this study, the second normative framework is preferable in (post)conflict settings, acute distributive challenges arise in terms of the weight that should be accorded to victimisation, material deprivation, discrimination and socio-economic inequalities when guaranteeing ESR. To address these issues, a framework is developed to balance competing claims and establish priorities, using the ESCR Committee's work as a bridge to introduce distributive justice theories in (post)conflict settings. These theories are egalitarianism, the doctrines of sufficiency and the priority view.

This thesis examines what I call 'urban social aesthetics', which, I contend, is an 'urban Marxist' tendency in contemporary art, characterised by 1:1 scale engagement with the social urgencies of urban sites as a means for anti-capitalist agency and resistance. It is my contention that, within contemporary art scholarship, instances of this urban Marxist tendency are often not individuated from the mass of other existing urban art productions. Despite engaging with the most pressing urgencies of our contemporary moment (i.e. housing, gentrification, homelessness and contemporary forms of racial segregation), there is arguably a lack of debate that singles out and underscores this urban Marxist tendency. How can art theoreticians and scholars pinpoint this urban Marxist category of contemporary practice? How can such intellectual actors individuate this practice from the multitude of other urban art productions and approaches so that it may acquire critical, discursive independence? In this thesis, I suggest that the discourses and practices of 'Situationism' and 'experimental institutionalism' could contribute to this task. This thesis' overarching aim is to contend that the urban-centric debates and praxis of the Situationist International and experimental institutionalism could contribute to the examination of contemporary art's urban Marxist tendency ('urban social aesthetics'). The Situationist International was a predominantly European art collective that sought to resist capitalism and transform urban experience. On the other hand, experimental institutionalism is a field of curatorial practice, institutional reform and debate concerned with the art institution's potential transformation into a socially responsible agent. I argue in this thesis that said field's socially responsive approach to instituting and curating tends to engage with decidedly urban conditions. Conferring with the major hub for experimental institutionalism that is the L'Internationale museum confederation (as well as its collaborators and partners), this thesis asks-is it the urban post-Marxist theory of the Situationists that could lend to an examination of urban social aesthetics or the ongoing debates/praxis of experimental institutionality?