Security Exchange Theory is a novel approach to alliance behaviors in which a great power gives scarce security goods to a small state. This behavior is a puzzle for two reasons. First, it seems unlikely that a rational state would give away valuable resources without getting something in return, yet small states seem to have nothing to offer. Second, small states sometimes refuse great power offers, which would seem to indicate that "free" security goods impose some sort of cost. This theory addresses both of these puzzles. First, it argues that great powers evaluate small states on their ability to contribute to the great power's security agenda. The extent to which a small state can do so is its Perceived Strategic Value (PSV) in the eyes of the great power. Ceteris paribus, small states with higher PSV receive larger security exchanges. Second, it argues that small states face a wider array of threats than do great powers and array their forces to meet the greatest threat facing the regime. To the extent that the small state's security perspective mirrors the great power's, the level of security exchanges will be higher. However, because security exchanges impose costs on both parties, there are many cases in which either low PSV or an incompatible small state strategic agenda makes a security exchange unlikely. I test the theory using great power - small state interactions in the Middle East between 1952 and 1961 using qualitative methods and from 1952 to 1979 using statistical analysis. I find Security Exchange Theory is a powerful and parsimonious solution to the puzzle of great power - small state exchange behavior.

This study examines the role of intergovernmental negotiations in facilitating liberalization of finance in terms of market opening to foreign business. The theoretical focus is on the significance of the international network of financial officials. Recognized as a highly technical area, the financial issues have been often separated from other issue areas in trade negotiations, and administered by a small number of governmental financial experts. However, in reality, the exclusivity of financial officials on this issue largely resulted from their preexisting international network; these officials behaved strategically to maintain this exclusivity in such an institutional context. Yet, financial issues became politicized overtime and more actors, including politicians and governmental agencies other than financial authorities participated in the negotiations after the late 1980s. I argue that the structure of intergovernmental negotiations can have a significant impact on the outcomes of those negotiations. If negotiations are held exclusively among a small number of financial officials who share the understanding of the issues on the table and have long-term relationships with each other, the demands and offers in the negotiations tend to be more moderate and realistic, and the outcomes involve incremental changes. On the other hand, when the issues are politicized and more actors are involved, the demands tend to be tougher and the negotiations often break off. To assess this assertion, this study examines the United States-Japan financial negotiations, which were the world's first intergovernmental negotiations on financial liberalization, started in 1983. Initiated as bilateral negotiations, the financial negotiations were later incorporated into a multilateral framework, which changed the institutional settings. This study divides a series of bilateral negotiations into four periods. In the first period, the financial authorities started the bilateral negotiation. The second period followed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when the involvement of the American Congress had brought a considerable change in the nature and the outcome of the negotiation. In the third time period, the bilateral negotiations were held under the multilateral framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The case of financial services negotiations and that of insurance are compared in this period, as different sets of actors were involved in them. In conclusion, the study discusses the implications of the United States-Japan financial negotiations for the more recent developments in opening up the financial markets of newly industrialized economies.

This dissertation is comprised of three papers exploring the causes of the likelihood and distribution of corporate bailouts. The first paper explores why some distressed firms receive bailouts while others do not. It argues that political partisanship plays a key role: left-wing governments are more likely to authorize bailouts on average, and are particularly more likely to save employee-rich firms. The theory is tested using a new dataset comprised of financially distressed firms, a subset of which receive bailouts. The second paper examines why bailouts are concentrated in a particular subset of industrial sectors. The primary argument is again political partisanship: left-wing governments seek to protect firms in sectors that have the most employees. Alternative explanations, including the impact of globalization and alternative forms of social protection, are also considered. The theory is shown to hold using a new dataset comprised of comprehensive counts of bailouts by sector across the European Economic Area. The final paper examines the nature of public opinion regarding bailouts. The paper undermines the standing assumption that bailouts are largely unpopular by instead showing that public support varies by context and is in some instances supportive. Using observational data in conjunction with survey experiments, individual characteristics, including partisanship and material self-interest, as well as firm-specific characteristics, including the relevance of the firm to the national economy, are shown to drive public support for bailouts.

Why do rebel groups frequently fight each other rather than cooperating against their common enemy – the state? This dissertation presents a theory of inter-rebel war and tests it with a combination of case studies and statistical analysis. The theory conceives of inter-rebel war as a calculated response by rebel groups to opportunities for expansion and threats generated by the civil war environment in which they operate. Insurgent organizations attack weaker coethnic groups when government forces only pose a limited threat (i.e., when they face a window of opportunity), so as to eliminate potentially threatening rivals and acquire more resources to be used against the state. Additionally, rebel groups resort to force in desperate attempts to deal with a mounting threat posed by coethnic groups or a drastic deterioration of their power relative to other groups (i.e., when they face a window of vulnerability). Rebel groups’ cost-benefit calculus about infighting is powerfully influenced by whether they are facing coethnic insurgent organizations. Coethnic rebel groups’ overlapping mobilization bases make it possible for an organization to take over the resources (in particular, recruitment pools and tax bases) of defeated rivals and consequently improve their chances in the fight against the government. Thus coethnicity amplifies both defensive and aggressive motives for inter-rebel war. This dissertation adopts a mixed-method approach, combining case studies and statistical analysis. My three main case studies are the Kurdish rebellions against Iraq (1961-1988), the Eritrean war of national liberation (1961-1991) and the insurgencies in Ethiopia’s Tigray province (1975-1991). These case studies combine secondary literature with primary sources collected during fieldwork in Iraq, Ethiopia and several European countries – including fifty-four semi-structured interviews with forty former insurgent leaders, their memoirs, and archival materials. In order to assess the generalizability of my argument across a variety of historical, geographical and political contexts, I also conducted shadow case studies of the civil wars in Lebanon (1975-89), Sri Lanka (1983-2009) and Syria (2011-), and analyzed an original panel dataset of all dyads of rebel groups pitted against the same government in multi-party civil wars in the period 1989-2011.

This dissertation contends that in 1940 and 1941 the makers and shapers of American foreign relations decided that the United States should become the world's supreme political and military power, responsible for underwriting international order on a global scale. Reacting to the events of World War II, particularly the Nazi conquest of France, American officials and intellectuals concluded that henceforth armed force was essential to the maintenance of liberal intercourse in international society and that the United States must possess and control a preponderance of such force. This new axiom constituted a rupture from what came before and a condition of possibility of the subsequent Cold War with the Soviet Union and of U.S. world leadership after the Soviet collapse. Thus this dissertation argues against the teleological interpretations of two opposing sets of scholarship. The first set, an orthodox literature in history and political science, posits a longstanding polarity in American thinking between "internationalism" and "isolationism." So conceived, internationalism favored global political-military supremacy from the first, needing only to vanquish isolationism in the arena of elite and popular opinion. The second, revisionist camp suggests the United States sought supremacy all along, driven by the dynamics of capitalism and the ideology of exceptionalism. By contrast, this dissertation uses methods of intellectual history in order to show that policy elites scarcely envisioned U.S. supremacy prior to 1940. Instead they widely identified with "internationalism," understood then as the antithesis of power politics, not of isolationism. Prewar internationalists, in short, sought to replace armed force with peaceful intercourse in world affairs. The narrative begins, in Part I, with the decline of traditional ideas of internationalism, at first gradually in the 1930s and then decisively eight months into World War II in Europe. When the Nazis steamrolled France in May 1940, stunning the world, they swept away the old order and with it the assumptions of American internationalism. Now peaceful intercourse, far from replacing armed force, seemed paradoxically to depend upon armed force to undergird it. In official and especially semiofficial circles, American postwar planners scrambled to map the international area required to safeguard U.S. geopolitical and economic interests. They swapped continents in and out before concluding, by the autumn, that America's living space spanned the globe. Simultaneously, the Axis powers shattered the fundaments of British imperial power, presenting the opportunity for the United States to take the lead. Out of the death of nineteenth-century internationalism and British world leadership, U.S. global supremacy was born. In 1941 policy elites conceived how to achieve world leadership, the subject of Part II. At first they hardly wished to set up a new world organization to replace the failed League of Nations. They preferred a permanent partnership with Great Britain and its white Dominions, a vision that President Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed. Projecting a postwar cold war between the Anglosphere and a Nazi-dominated Europe, planners thought the "English-speaking peoples," America chief among them, would police most of the world. Soon, however, planners perceived a problem. U.S. supremacy, especially in partnership with Britain, sounded imperialistic. If asked to play power politics, the American people might refuse to lead. Preoccupied with domestic public opinion, policy elites launched a campaign to legitimate U.S. political-military preeminence. From 1942 to 1945, as Part III recounts, they achieved what they conceived. They popularized a narrative that turned armed supremacy into the epitome of "internationalism," redefined in opposition to their newly coined pejorative "isolationism." Then they revived world organization after all, less to eliminate war or promote law than to cleanse U.S. power in the eyes of the American public as well as foreign states. Harnessing the resonance of prior efforts to end power politics in the name of internationalism, the United Nations Organization became an instrument to implement power politics.

China increasingly integrates into the international system, but has the social capitalist China been effectively contained by the Western-led liberal order? Most current literatures assume China’s ratification of international treaties as the signal to its full adoption of international norms, and scholars such as John Ikenberry thus argue that China is getting contained by the Western liberal order. However, a new wave of norm diffusion scholars suggests that even the ratified norms may not have the expected domestic impacts; the implementation process is decisive to the real changes ‘on the ground’. Following this vein, this thesis studies China’s implementation of international liberal norms in order to understand how the liberal world contains China in its order. This thesis compares the implementation of two WTO trading norms namely anti-dumping duty and countervailing duty in China as the representative case studies. The analysis suggests that these two norms have made important changes to China’s legal system, institution-building, field-level practices and its domestic discourse. By employing political comparative methods, it proves the WTO implementing instruments as effective in promoting the progresses of this implementation process. However, the analysis further suggests that the cultural match of these two international liberal norms with China’s social capitalist traditions also contributes to strong domestic resistances to the implementation process. The consequences of this dis-match are largely reflected in China’s field-level practices of and its domestic discourses over these two norms. This thesis provides a complex answer to the question raised at the beginning. As the case studies illustrate, although anti-dumping duty and countervailing duty conflict with China’s social capitalist traditions, China chooses to play by the rules because of its ‘problem-solving’ concerns and because of the pressure from the WTO and its members. China, both the state sectors and non-state actors, values its identity as a member of the international society, and is willing to act as the defender of the current international order. Even though, China is not a passive receiver of the liberal normative structure. The dis-match between the liberal norms and China’s social capitalist tradition inevitably results in the internal resistance to the tendency of China being fully contained by the international liberal order. This resistance will not be eliminated by any external pressure.

This thesis explores young boys' and girls' perceptions and experiences of their schooling in the small island developing state of Mauritius. It brings to the forefront problems related to cultural and structural violence that can hamper a peaceful schooling in three state secondary schools: a single-sex girls' school, a single-sex boys' school and a mixed school which also promote the educational theories of M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. The findings reveal that there can be a 'fideistic' attitude to Gandhi and Tagore in this context, which highlight the need for a critical peace education that question taken-for-granted assumptions. It also shows that in schools, problems can be hidden and not discussed. The methodology was based on a participatory worldview that asserts the importance of a 'holistic inquiry' and learning from the 'Other' for peaceful coexistence. In this regard, there can be serious ethical challenges for a 'native' researcher to conduct participatory research with young people in a small-connected community like Mauritius. The research also brings together various philosophies of education and peace for the promotion of peace education. It builds on commonalities from the East and West to highlight the importance of the 'holistic' in peace education. It promotes the concept of 'wholeness' as much emphasised in the East. The research was informed by M.K. Gandhi's, Rabindranath Tagore's and Maria Montessori's educational theories for peace. It was also gender-sensitive and promoted a 'peace-focused-feminism', which is grounded in the Eastern philosophies of 'Yin' and 'Yang', 'Shakti' and 'Shiva' and 'Prakriti' and 'Purusha'.

With the overall aim of contributing to the peace efforts in Cyprus and facilitating transformative peace on the island, this thesis explores the relationship between (de)securitisation, ontological security and reconciliation in protracted conflict environments. The theoretical framework is built upon this trilateral nexus and uses Cyprus as a single case study for its application. In line with the overall aim, the thesis improves to the theorisation of institutionalised securitisations by complimenting the Copenhagen School with the Paris School, enriches the concept of (de)securitisation with ontological security literature and broadens the dual-ethnic approach to the Cyprus Problem by adding the Turkish settlers/immigrants to the empirical analysis. Underpinned by both theoretical and empirical contributions to the relevant literature, the thesis provides a more nuanced understanding of identity and friend-enemy configurations by analysing the securitisation dynamics that go beyond the primary self to include other-others, other-selves and othered-selves through a strategic blend of quantitative and qualitative methods. Finally, the thesis suggests that we need to couple the concept desecuritisation with ontological security considerations in order to fully understand and explore its potential as a facilitating tool for transformative peace. More specifically for the case of Cyprus, the thesis argues that securitisation of Turkish immigrants as a threat creates ontological dissonance and peace-anxieties for the two main communities in Cyprus; thus, calls for their desecuritisation and inclusion in peacebuilding efforts.

This thesis examines what political conditions must be established and what obstacles overcome, nationally and internationally, in order for the five 'official' nuclear weapon states (NWS) under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT)— China, France, Russia, the UK and the US—to abolish their nuclear weapons. In order to assess the explanatory power of existing mainstream and realist perspectives regarding the causes and consequences of NWS nuclear possession and disarmament, a substantial evidence base is utilised. Academic, advocacy and government documents, as well as interviews with a range of practitioners in this field, are drawn on to develop an institutional-historical analysis of nuclear politics in and between NWS. From this assessment of the existing literature, it is argued that whilst mainstream and realist works have some value, there are several gaps in and problems with their analysis that need to be addressed. For example, such works do not provide a full account of nuclear politics because they mainly focus on the international level, so that the role domestic politics plays in nuclear matters is not properly considered. In order to rectify this deficiency, I adopt a critical and normative approach and develop the domestic politics model of nuclear possession to better imagine the political causes and consequences of nuclear disarmament. The approach adopted, which I term institutional democratisation, proposes that if nuclear weapons are to be permanently eliminated then legitimate forms of power, including popular, democratic movements driven by principles of equality and justice, need to be developed in NWS that are capable of controlling and eliminating the bomb. This is necessary because the behaviour of nuclear weapon decision- making elites across NWS—and the institutions they inhabit and maintain—present the principal barrier to meaningful progress on eliminating nuclear weapons. Nuclear disarmament will thus both contribute to reformed domestic, regional and international political orders and benefit from wider, progressive change at each of these levels.

The ‘eastern question' of the 19th century is conventionally understood as the power-vacuum created by the decay of the geostrategically important Ottoman Empire in the context of a highly competitive and expansionary European inter-state system. Conventional approaches to International Relations argue that the eastern question was solved by creating multiple, legitimate, sovereign national states in lieu of Ottoman rule as the outcome of an expanding European modernity, replacing the outdated, illegitimate and despotic rule of Oriental princes. However, this assumption entails a tension between the supposedly universal scope of European modernity and its fractured, multi-national form of transmission. This contradiction, implicit in International Relations theory, is the subject of this thesis. Examining this problem in the light of the eastern question, this thesis offers a historical sociological reconstruction of the social transformations that produced the supposedly ‘modern' geopolitical ‘order' in Southeastern Europe. The critical re-reading and positive reconstruction of the Ottoman trajectory from the end of territorial expansion in 1683 to the Greek secession in 1821, problematizes in how far territorial fragmentation of political rule can be understood as the ‘logical' result of the expansion of ‘modern' social and political relations. It is argued that, instead of understanding these developments as a teleological and predetermined process of Westernization, the key for understanding the emergence of the post-Ottoman state system lies in deciphering the dialectic between a ‘domestic' social struggle among pre-capitalist classes and an intensifying pan-European geopolitical dynamic. Hence, rather than understanding the process of nation-formation as the inevitable result of the expansion of ‘modern' international relations, it is necessary to emphasize the specificity of the Ottoman, like any other transformation. This in turn helps illuminating the unnatural and malleable nature of ‘modern' territorial inter-national ‘orders'. Rather than implementing a just, natural or finite domestic and geopolitical order, ‘national' fragmentations result from specific, materially conditioned social struggles. This raises generic problems with static and ahistorical understandings of social and geopolitical relations. It is suggested that a theoretically open historical materialist sociology of International Relations can provide a remedy. In consequence, it is argued that the ‘eastern question', far from being solved by the formation of national states, still remains open to this day.