This thesis is an examination of human rights and constitutional development in Tanzania Mainland. The colonial and post-colonial history is used to analyse the development of human rights struggles, as well as institutions such as the Bill of Rights in the recent development of multi-party democracy. The thesis intends to establish that in spite of global factors such as pressure for democratisation from international institutions, the achievement of the Bill of Rights in Tanzania Mainland is part of a wider rights struggle of the people of Tanzania. The effective legal and political implementation of specific rights such as the right to vote, freedom of association and assembly reflect the state of that struggle. The thesis further seeks to establish that while the government sponsored the enactment of the Bill of Rights in 1984 and the re-introduction of multi-partism in 1992, it has always preferred to exercise extreme control over the enjoyment of political rights. This has often involved curtailing the establishment and free operation of institutions of popular democracy. The thesis goes on to suggest that unless a democratic culture and civil society are restored in the country, the success of the rights struggles of the people will be far-fetched. Together with the above it is argued that the struggle for rights could be enhanced by working from what is provided as legal rights, all interested parties pushing for the expansion of the human rights field. This can only be attained if the majority of Tanzanians are made aware of the existence of such rights through legal literacy programs.

Hindu women's right to independent ownership of property has been established in India since 1956. Given that legal rights have not brought about a significant increase in women's ownership of land, this thesis explores the factors that affect women's effective claim to land ownership. Taking the particular case of Hindu peasant women in small farming households in Western Orissa, it analyses their ability to claim land ownership as the outcome of bargaining. The bargaining approach, as developed by economists, and by Amartya Sen and Bina Agarwal in particular, is adopted to analyse women's access to land as an effect of women's perceptions of self-interest and perceptions of women's contribution. The thesis evaluates the legal framework as it incorporates and reflects these perceptions. It argues that law constructs women's claim to land as a right addressed to 'Hindu' women, located within the family (through succession) and informed by religious ideology. It further argues that recognising women's interests as a basis of their claim to land ownership, as 'peasant' women, located within the household and affected by their work and role within agricultural production, would widen the scope of legal analysis. This would be a starting point towards a deeper understanding of the ways in which law impacts upon women's access to land.

This study Is concerned with the Federal National Council (FNC) in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) under the 1971 Constitution. In selecting the U.A.E. as a case study, a historical and socioeconomic perspective is adopted. The thesis analyses the U.A.E. traditional society and the effect of external factor namely its relation with Britain, and internal factor, viz, the advent of oil wealth, on the power structure in the emirates. Both factors increased the concentration of central power and decreased popular participation. The study provides a theoretical appraisal of the role and functions of the legislature in developing countries. It examines the constitutional functions namely legislative, political and financial. The study suggests new roles that the legislatures performs in Third World countries. The thesis examines the historical development of the U.A.E. constitutional system. Such development ended In 1971 when the emirates adopted a "Provisional Constitution" to the requirements of the rulers. The study explores the 1971 constitution with particular emphasis on the role of the National Council. It analyses the composition, functions, role and constitutional arrangements of the National Council In the U.A.E. The study provides an analysis of the major political and constitutional cases, In which the FNC was a part, in order to examine the practical working of the constitutional provisions in reality. Finally, the thesis attempts to explain the limitations, Imposed on the National Council, present in the existing constitutional framework and suggests some improvements to the status quo. The coimnon ground throughout the thesis is that a constitution with a democratic tendency does not necessarily establish democratic institutions and that it would be more acceptable in a developing country to introduce evolutionary rather than radical changes to its constitutional system. However, the study clarifies the difficulties of concentration of central power in developing countries.

Situated within a global context of political unease over Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, this thesis challenges views of Russian foreign policy as enigmatic and unpredictable. It examines the relationship between identity politics, conceptions of security, and the foreign policy preferences of the Russian political elite. It shows how particular aspects of Russian identity that are dominant in different international contexts work to structure policy preferences. This contributes to the pursuit of apparently contradictory objectives across these settings, and to inconsistencies between the rhetoric and reality of Russian security policy. Previous studies have looked into the impact of Russian identity on its policy preferences, but most have taken a limited, instrumentalist view of identity as a tool that is mobilised by political elites to further their existing policy preferences. By contrast, this thesis argues that conscious elite mobilisation of identity provides only part of the picture. Visions of Russian identity (and consequently of its international role) are constrained by institutional factors. These include the linked historical development of the Russian military, economy and education/research sectors. Following a discursive understanding of institutions, they also include the limited number of ways in which identity has previously been represented. These factors produce subconscious constraints on the imagining of Russian identity. This limited conceptualisation of Russian identity has become even more specific in the Putin era, due to the political elite’s frequent repetition of one, highly restrictive, narrative of a ‘usable’ history, presented as the factual background to policy discussion. This narrative foregrounds favoured events, associating them with preferred identity themes. Resultant ‘truths’ of Russian identity then provide a framework for foreign policy. Particular elements of this framework dominate Russia’s relationships with different multinational bodies, impacting on the type of policy cooperation pursued. In relations with the EU, focus on Russia’s equal contribution to European civilisation brings normative incompatibilities between the parties to the fore and acts as a barrier to compromise. With contrasting visions of their identities in their shared region, of what security there should look like, and of how it should be achieved, Russia-EU cooperation has been most effective when undertaken in a specific, sectoral manner. Anticipating the ‘West’s’ relative decline in global influence, Russia has gradually downgraded EU relations whilst pursuing a ‘multivector’ foreign policy that emphasises alternative partners. Capitalising on its identity as one of the BRICS rising powers, Russia has been able to pursue a joint challenge to the contemporary structure of the international order, facilitated by members’ shared convictions of the inequities of the existing system, and of their subordinate positions within it. Here, Russia’s identity as a cultural bridge has been emphasised, giving it a unique possibility to negotiate between the old and the new global powers. Most recently, Russia has built upon its identity as a continent-straddling regional leader, and a supposedly natural representative of Eurasia. In developing the Eurasian Union, Russia seeks to use its privileged regional role to ensure continued global relevance during an anticipated, and desired, transition to global multipolarity. This is a new reading of Russian ‘great power’, in which Russia’s multiple international roles are combined to give it the greatest possible level of influence in determining new global structures.

The question of horse domestication have long been debated and discussed amongst scholars. There have been serval theories about when and where horse domestication first took place and when horses became our loyal companions that we build a lot of our society around. The Eurasian steppes have long been subject of these discussions. Within recent years a lot of DNA- studies have been done on the subject to try to answer these questions. In 2018 a DNA-study showed that the prewalski horse, who have been thought to be the last wild horse on earth, is ancestors to the horses found at Botai. The Botai culture has long been thought to be the origin of domesticated horses. In 2021 even more shocking discoveries came to light. It was revealed that all modern day horses comes from the same genetic line called DOM2. The DOM2 linage originates from the lower Volga-Don region and started to spread across Eurasia around 2000 BC. These revelations made people reevaluate previous assumptions concerning early use of horses, like the Yamnaya culture expansion to Europe which was previously believed to have taken place on horseback. This study aims to address the impact of new DNA studies on our understanding of horse domestication and its spread, analysing various theories, DNA research, and archaeological findings. / Frågan om hästdomesticering har länge debatterats och diskuterats bland forskare. Det har funnits flera teorier om när och var hästdomesticering först ägde rum, och när hästarna blev våra trogna följeslagare som vi byggde mycket av vår samhällsstruktur kring. Den eurasiska stäppen har länge varit föremål för dessa diskussioner. Inom de senaste åren har många DNA- studier gjorts om ämnet för att försöka besvara dessa frågor. År 2018 visade en DNA-studie att przewalski hästen, som man tidigare trott var den sista vilda hästen i världen, är en ättling till hästarna som hittats vid Botai. Botaikulturen har länge förmodats vara ursprunget till domesticerade hästar. År 2021 fördes ännu mer chockerande upptäckter fram i ljuset. Det avslöjades att alla moderna hästar kommer från samma genetiska linje som kallas DOM2. DOM2-linjen har sitt ursprung i nedre Volga-Don-regionen och började sprida sig över Eurasien cirka 2000 f.Kr.. Denna upptäckt fick människor att omvärdera tidigare antaganden kring tidig användning av hästar, som yamnayakulturens expansion till Europa som tidigare trotts ha skett till häst. Denna studie syftar till att adressera de nya DNA-studiernas påverkan på vår förståelse av hästdomesticering och dess spridning, analysera olika teorier, DNA- forskning och arkeologiska fynd.

This thesis consists of two objectives which divide it into two parts. Thus, part one explores the cyclicity of protest mobilisation in post-Soviet Kazakhstan in the 1992–2009 period and part two investigates the relationship between protest mobilisation and democratisation in the 1990s, a decade marked by early progress in democratisation followed by an abrupt reversal to authoritarianism. Acknowledging the existence of numerous competing explanations of protest cyclicity, the first part of this study utilises four major social movement perspectives – relative deprivation (RD), resource mobilisation (RMT), political opportunity structures (POS) and collective action frames (CAF) – to explain variances in protest mobilisation in Kazakhstan over time and four issue areas. Adopting a small-N case study and process-tracing technique, the thesis’s first research question enquires into which of these four theoretical perspectives has the best fit when seeking to explain protest cyclicity over time. It is hypothesised that the ‘waxing and waning’ of protest activity can best be attributed to the difficulties surrounding the identification and construction of resonant CAFs. However, the study’s findings lead to a rejection of the first hypothesis by deemphasising the role of CAFs in predicting protest cyclicity, and instead support the theoretical predictions of the POS perspective, suggesting the prevalence of structural factors such as the regime’s capacity for repression and shifts in elite alignments. The second research question revolves around variations in protest mobilisation across four issue areas and explores the reasons why socioeconomic grievances mobilised more people to protest than environmental, political and interethnic ones. According to the second hypothesis, people more readily protest around socioeconomic rather than political and other types of grievances due to the lower costs of participation in socioeconomic protests. While the regime’s propensity for repressing political protests could explain the prevalence of socioeconomic protests in the 2000s, the POS perspective’s key explanatory variable failed to account for the prevalence of socioeconomic protests in the early 1990s, resulting in the rejection of the second hypothesis. The second part of the thesis attempts to answer the third research question: How does protest mobilisation account for the stalled transition to democracy in Kazakhstan in the 1990s? Based on the theoretical assumption that instances of extensive protest mobilisation foster democratic transitions, the study’s third research hypothesis posits that transition to democracy in Kazakhstan stalled in the mid-1990s due to the failure of social movement organisations to effectively mobilise the masses for various acts of protest. This assumption receives strong empirical support, suggesting that protest mobilisation is an important facilitative factor in the democratisation process. The thesis is the first to attempt to employ classical social movement theories in the context of post-communist Central Asian societies. Additionally, the study aims to contribute to the large pool of democratisation literature which, until recently (following the colour revolutions), seemed to underplay the role of popular protest mobilisation in advancing transitions to democracy. Finally, the research is based on the author’s primary elite-interview data and content analysis of five weekly independent newspapers.

'Thieves-in-law' (vory-v-zakone in Russian or kanonieri qurdebi in Georgian) are career criminals belonging to a criminal fraternity that has existed at least since the 1930s in the Soviet Gulag. These actors still exist in one form or another in post-Soviet countries and have integrated into transnational organised criminal networks. For reasons yet to be explicated, thieves-in-law became exceptionally prevalent in the Soviet republic of Georgia. Here, by the 1990s, they formed a mafia network where this means criminal associations that attempt to monopolize protection in legal and illegal sectors of the economy. In 2005, Mikhail Saakashvili, the current president of Georgia claimed that 'in the past 15 years ... Georgia was not ruled by [former President] Shevardnadze, but by thieves-in-law.' Directly transferring anti-organised crime policy from Italy and America, Saakashvili's government made reform of the criminal justice system generally and an attack on the thieves-in-law specifically a cornerstone of the Rose Revolution. New legislation criminalises the possession of the status of ‘thief-in-law’ and of membership of criminal associations that constitute what is known as the ‘thieves’ world’ (qurduli samkaro). Along with a sweeping reform of the police and prisons and a ‘culture of lawfulness’ campaign, Georgian criminal justice reforms since 2003 may be seen as the first sustained anti-mafia policy to be implemented in a post-Soviet country. It also appears to have been very successful. The longevity and sudden decline of the thieves-in-law in Georgia provides the main questions that the following study addresses: How do we account for changes in the levels of resilience to state attack of actors carrying the elite criminal status of ‘thief-in-law’? How has this resilience been so effectively compromised since 2005? Utilising unique access to primary sources of data such as police files, court cases, archives and expert interviews this thesis studies the dynamics of changing mafia activities, recruitment practices, and structural forms of a criminal group as it relates to changes in the environment and, in particular, the recent anti-organised crime policy.

This dissertation aims to explain how Soviet national historiographies were constructed in Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, in 1936-1953 and what the political and ideological reasons were behind the way they were written. The dissertation aims to contribute to current scholarship on Soviet nationality policies; on Stalinist nation-building projects; and to the debate on whether the Soviet period was a project of developmentalist modernization or not. This dissertation aims to examine the process of national history writing in three republics from the local point of view, by using the local archival sources. For this research, archival materials that have been overlooked by scholars up to this point from the archives of the communist parties, academy of sciences, and central state archives in Kiev, Ukraine, Baku, Azerbaijan, and Almaty, Kazakhstan have been collected. The timeline starts with Zhdanov’s commission in 1936, which summoned historians and ideologues of the Communist Party in Moscow to write an all-Union history because a parallel campaign of writing national histories had been initialized by the local communist parties. The first two chapters cover the pre-war (1936-1941) period, when national histories were written after the demise of Pokrovskiian historiography. Although there was one ideology, there were different preferences in solving the problem of ethnogenesis, defining national heroes, and also different preferences among the sections of the past that national histories emphasized. The third chapter explains the construction of national histories during the war period (1941-1945). The chapter also presents how national histories were used for wartime propaganda. Finally, the last chapter is about the post-war discussions and the shift of emphasis from ‘national’ to ‘class’ that occurred in the non-Russian national narratives in the Zhdanovshchina period. While there was an ‘imperial design’ for the necessities of managing a multi-national state, the Soviet Union also appears as a modernization project for all three cases by constructing national narratives. Though non-Russian Soviet historiographies produced contradictory narratives in different decades, they also homogenized, codified and nationalized the narrative of the past. Regional, dynastic, religious, tribal figures and events incorporated into grandiose national narratives. Nations were primordialized and their national identities armed with spatial and temporal indigenousness within the borders of their national republics. Modern national identities of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Ukraine gained from this homogenization and codification by the Soviet regime. Although modernism is not only about construction of national narratives, the latter points out the developmental and modernizing character of the Soviet period.

Notre travail de recherche se propose d'étudier les ressorts qui sous-tendent les relations asymétriques entre les Etats-Unis et la Fédération de Russie depuis la fin de la guerre froide et la disparition de l’Union soviétique. Afin de comprendre la nouvelle relation bilatérale au cours du quart de siècle écoulé, il nous faut analyser l’héritage que laissent plusieurs années de rivalité idéologique entre les deux Etats-continents. Il nous faut comprendre la décision soviétique de renoncer à cette confrontation idéologique et le rôle qu’ont pu jouer les Etats-Unis dans cette décision. Depuis leur accession au rôle d'unique hyperpuissance, les Etats-Unis, tout en cherchant à développer leur conception de la « démocratie libérale », s’efforcent de faire obstacle à l'émergence de tout peer competitor sur la scène internationale et envisagent pour la Russie un rôle de junior partner régional en Eurasie. Cependant, cette dernière a développé, à travers le temps, un hubris de ''grande puissance'', une forme propre de « démocratie dirigée » et un messianisme particulier qui l'empêchent d’accepter le rôle prédéfini pour elle par les Etats-Unis car il ne ferait qu’exposer l’asymétrie de la relation bilatérale. Ainsi, il nous semble indispensable de nous demander quelles places tiennent les réalités géopolitiques et les composantes idéologiques et messianiques dans cette nouvelle relation asymétrique et à quelle(s) fin(s). / Our research aims at studying the asymmetrical relations between the United States and the Russian Federation since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In order to understand how the new bilateral relation has evolved throughout the past twenty-five years, our research analyses the heritage left by many years of ideological rivalry between these two continent-states. Our research also aims at finding out the reasons why the Soviet Union eventually decided to give up the ideological confrontation and what role the United States played in that decision. The United States has become the only remaining hyperpower trying to prevent any other peer competitor on the international scene from emerging and leaving Russia with only a regional power in Eurasia while developing and expanding its own concept of Liberal Democracy. However, throughout the centuries , Russia itself has developed its own hubris as a great power and as a managed democracy as well as some messianism that would not accept any role predefined by the United States. Thus, our research tries to consider the geopolitical as well as ideological components within the new asymmetrical relation between the two countries and to what end(s).

As the resource related conflict in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria escalates at a furious pace, it is becoming clear that traditional means of dispute resolution (such as litigation and violence) are no longer applicable. Research has also shown that no method of dispute resolution can be efficient, equitable and administratively practicable without the collective effort of all parties involved; individuals, institutions and non-governmental organizations need to work together to develop a countrywide ability to design an effective conflict resolution system. While there is a perceived need for a viable dispute resolution process, to date, no concerted effort has been made to harness relevant experiences and build a network of practitioners skilled in the management of such conflicts. The emerging Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) methods (which do not involve litigation) may offer opportunities to resolve disputes in the Niger Delta region more effectively than litigation-based means. In view of this, this research assesses indigenous dispute resolution processes in terms of their potential applicability as alternative dispute resolution processes for the Niger Delta conflict. The review also provides insights into the criteria used to support decision making as it relates to choosing the most appropriate dispute resolution process. To do this, this research advocates a hybrid model (an integration of both customary indigenous process and westernised mediation process). The choice of a hybrid model is predicated on the assumption that the Niger Delta is a hub for investors, where both locals (indigenes) and outsiders (foreigners) interact and relate together in pursuit of a common goal. Experience at the grass roots level in one community may also provide guidance for conflict resolution at similar levels in other communities.