Uganda has been considered one of Africa's few "success stories" over the past decade, an example of how a country can be transformed through a committed state bureaucracy. The thesis questions this view by looking at the experiences of development and change in a subparish in eastern Uganda. From this more local-level perspective, the thesis discusses the weakness of the state in the countryside, and incorporates the importance of religious and customary institutions. In place of a narrow view of politics, focused on reforms and policies coming from above, which rarely reach rural areas in a consistent or predictable way, the thesis describes political developments within a rural community. The thesis rests on two premises. First, that the state in rural Uganda has been too weak to support an effective bureaucratic presence in the countryside. Second, that politics at the local-level is an "open-ended" business, better understood through investigating a range of institutional spaces and activities, rather than a particular set of actions, or a single bureaucracy. Oledai sub-parish, which provides the empirical material for the thesis, was far removed from the idea of state-sponsored success described in the literature. Villagers had to contend with a history of violence, with recent impoverishment, and with the reality that the rural economy was unimportant in maintaining the structures of the government system. The thesis shows that the marginalisation of the countryside came at a time when central and local government structures had become increasingly reliant on funding from abroad. Aside from the analysing the weakness of the state bureaucracy, the thesis goes on to discuss broader changes in the life of the sub-parish, including the impact of a violent insurgency in the late 1980s. The thesis also looks at the role of churches and burial societies, institutions which have been largely ignored by the literature on political developments in Uganda. Religious and customary institutions, as well as the village court, provided spaces where political goals, such as settling disputes, building a career, or acquiring wealth, could be pursued.

This study is a comparative analysis of the survival strategies of two regimes: Jordan's King Hussein and Lebanon's Fu'ad Shihab. It is an exploration of the domestic determinants of foreign policy behaviour, and the relation between foreign policy behaviour and regime consolidation, legitimation, and survival in small, weak state actors located in a permeable regional system. The study advances an hypothesis of four explanatory variables to explain the success and failure of Hussein and Shihab's respective strategies. Husseinism's 'success'--as opposed to Shihabism's 'failure'--may be explained by a successful insulatory regional policy, the historical process of state formation, the availability of economic resources under state control, and the ability of the state to use its coercive resources without hindrance. This enabled the Hashemite regime to restructure state-society relations to consolidate social control, mitigate the effects of trans-national ideologies on the domestic arena, and achieve an acceptable level of national integration among the different segments of the society gaining the state allegiance from a sizeable number, or from strategic sectors, of the population.

This research measured the impact of decentralisation on the promotion of good local governance in the Lilongwe District Assembly. The study explored the condition of local governance by examining the status of the facets that underpin local governance namely participation, transparency and accountability, gender equity and efficiency. It highlighted dilemmas associated with implementing decentralisation in areas where there are no functioning local institutions and where tendencies of centralisation still loom large.

Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2002.

Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Toronto, 2004. / Adviser: Ian Lee.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Renmin University of China, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-250).

Thesis (doctoral)--Philipps-Universität zu Marburg, 1938. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. xi-xvi).

Thesis (doctoral)--Christian-Albrecht-Universität zu Kiel.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Giessen.