This thesis assesses neoliberal urban developments in post-civil war Lebanon. It does so by focusing on the reconstruction of Downtown Beirut, which contributed towards: firstly, increasing a public debt that was burdening the country at the time; and secondly, reproducing sectarian divisions in Lebanese politics and society. To explain this outcome, this thesis analyses the policies of specific agents who were involved in, and in control of, the reconstruction process. The agents being referred to were led by the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri until his death in 2005. When analysed, these policies are found to follow the neoliberal logic of the late prime minister, but also to have been designed and implemented in a way to create and extract as much rent as possible for the benefit of those with invested interests in the reconstruction process. In this regard, it is argued that rent-seeking activities and behaviours heavily influenced the decision-making processes in key institutions concerned with reconstruction matters. Rent-seeking is used to refer to a wide range of social activities. In the case of Lebanon, we find a clear overlap between rent-seeking and two other processes that are endemic to the country: corruption and clientelism. The overlap between rent-seeking and these two other processes is a significant demonstration of how the nation-state and local politics shape the development and implementation of neoliberal economic policies, so that ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ is highly uneven from one region to another, and even from one country to the next. Because agency is placed at the centre of the analysis, this thesis adopts an approach that is more sociological in nature. It also makes use of two sets of literatures: those of liberal peacebuilding and new urban governance. This allows concepts and explanations to be used from both, in turn, complementing the analysis when delineating the patterns of neoliberalism that are specific to post-civil war Lebanon.

With the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set to expire in 2015, focus has turned to a new framework which might replace them. Heavily influenced by the Human Capabilities Approach (HCA), the MDGs reflected a relatively static, liberal understanding of what ‘human development’ is meant to signify (prioritising notions of freedom, individual capability and justice). Not an evaluation of the MDGs per se, this project suggests instead that critical reflection on the ethical underpinnings of any approach is key to articulating a future vision for development. I argue for a contrasting line of ethical thought, the ethics of care (which prioritise notions of context, vulnerability and relationship), suggesting how it could be more fully embodied in development practices. I further suggest that an emphasis on human empathy would serve to strengthen the values of responsibility and responsiveness which care (and development) ethicists champion. To this end, I first describe the ethical context (the HCA) within which the MDGs have operated; I then challenge its rationalistic or agentic biases and highlight the importance of human vulnerability, relationship and trust. I outline key elements of care theory (responsibility to ‘the other’, relational agency and ‘context’) and further argue that empathy should take a more central place in it. I finally describe empathy in practice (i.e. those programmes which foster empathic learning and understanding) and empathy in promise (by combining lessons drawn from the discussions above with deliberative democratic theory). Across these connected arguments, therefore, I describe a collaborative-expressive, praxeological ethics of international development; an ethics based in expressed need over abstract right, in the pluralism of development goals, in empathic deliberation on these needs and goals, and in the fostering of relationships of care and trust; necessary for any meaningful, future vision of human development – of ‘self’ and ‘distant other’ – to take form.

The role of ethics in international politics is highly contested. Despite this contestation, there is a widespread assertion that multilateral aid organisations (MLOs) are more likely to be driven by ethical considerations than bilateral aid organisations (BLOs). However, this claim has not been systematically established or examined. To address this gap, this thesis first develops a framework for analysing the importance of ethical considerations, and, second, applies it to the introduction of a ‘new’ norm – Women/Gender and Development (WID/GAD) – into three organisations with different organisational characteristics: UNDP, EC/EU and ODA/DFID, using the method of comparative heuristic case studies. The analysis aims to establish the extent to which norm integration was driven by ethical considerations, and if this was influenced by organisational characteristics. The thesis finds that ethical considerations played a minor role in all organisations, suggesting that organisations as such are generally not likely to be driven by ethical considerations. However, the analysis also finds that people within the organisations seemed likely to be driven by ethical considerations, and, when given the freedom, power, and resources to act, they could drive norm integration and have their ethical commitments reflected at organisational-level. The level of freedom, power, and resources of these individuals was significantly influenced by organisational characteristics. Specifically, characteristics typical of MLOs are found to provide a restrictive environment, while characteristics typical of BLOs, if combined with a committed decision-maker, provide an enabling environment for committed actors to drive norm integration. However, BLOs are volatile and, without a committed decision-maker, are likely to take no action at all on a new norm. MLOs, due to their high susceptibility to scrutiny, are more likely to always take some action on a new norm – just not action driven by ethical considerations. These findings question MLOs’ claim to substantive moral legitimacy and provide a potential explanation for weak integration of WID/GAD in many development organisations.

This thesis offers a study of British policy towards Poland from 194 to 1947. It traces the British attempt to negotiate a postwar political settlement for Poland that would met he expectations of both the Polish government-in-exile, to which Britain had committed its support in return for Poland’s substantial wartime military contribution, and the Soviet Union. During the last year and a half of the war, British policy makers struggled to mediate between the two sides and accommodate their competing demands. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, which saw the former prime minister of the exile government, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, return to Poland at he end of the war to join the provisional government. Mikołajczyk agreed to return on the basis of a British commitment to provide ongoing support in reconstituting a sovereign Polish state and establishing a democratic government. This thesis charts the outcome of that commitment, from the negotiations for the formation of the new Polish government under the auspices of the Three Power Commission in the summer of 1945, to the Polish referendum of June 1946, and the elections in January 1947. It shows that British policy makers struggled to met the commitment to Poland within the changing context of the postwar international system. In the circumstances of the emerging Cold War, as the reality of the Soviet resolve to absorb Poland into its sphere grew clearer, Britain’s political promises to the Polish democratic opposition became increasingly difficult to fulfil. Not al sections of the British policy making establishment were immediately prepared to accept heir dramatically circumscribed power to influence the shape of the Polish political settlement. Whereas the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin reconciled himself to the new circumstances with pragmatic sped, the Warsaw embassy, and many of the Foreign Office Northern Department officials, were less wiling to abandon the original terms of the British commitment. Thus, while some diplomatic and Foreign Office officials continued to lend support to the democratic Polish opposition parties, Bevin increasingly sought to limit Anglo-Polish relations to bilateral issues, including negotiations for financial and trade agreements, the repatriation of former members of the Polish armed forces, the final demarcation of Poland’s western frontier, and the transfer of the German population from western Poland to the British occupation zone. The result of these different priorities was a lack of uniformity in British policy. Much of the scholarship on Britain’s early postwar policy towards Poland takes one of two approaches: either it assumes that Britain understood immediately in 1945 that Poland was ‘lost’ to the Soviet Union, or it sets a reprehensible cynicism in the British approach, without due acknowledgement of the limits which constrained British policy options. This thesis offers a different interpretation; it argues that Britain adjusted much more slowly and unevenly to its diminished position after the war, and that its limited capacity to shape the Polish political settlement was understood only gradually, and at different times in different parts of the policy making establishment, creating an overall inconsistency in policy.

This thesis examines the emergence of EU-level rules in defence industrial matters within the context of European integration and inter-state cooperation more generally. This is a remarkable development, as the defence industrial policy area has been viewed as a core of nation state sovereignty and appeared impervious to injections of “more Europe.” At the centre of this nascent policy regime is the increasingly institutionalised European Defence Equipment Market (EDEM). The first and most significant elements of EDEM to date have been the 2009 Defence Procurement Directive issued by the European Commission and the voluntary Code of Conduct on Defence Procurement launched by the European Defence Agency (EDA) in 2006. These sets of rules have materialised despite EU member states’ resistance to meaningful constraints of national autonomy in defence procurement, and a distaste for the involvement of the European Commission in particular. An analytical puzzle thus emerges: why have member states acquiesced to binding regulation in the shape of the Directive, having already enacted a soft cooperation mechanism represented by the Code? The thesis answers this question by pursuing three lines of inquiry, which correspond to three hypotheses and specify clear pathways whereby external adaptation pressures, such as the Euro-Atlantic defence budgetary trends, may result in states’ acceptance of particular constraints. Firstly, the project examines the lobbying activity of the EU’s major transnational defence firms in pursuit of a larger, more integrated “home” defence equipment market. In addition, this thesis evaluates the success of the European Commission as a determined “policy entrepreneur” in securing member states’ acquiescence to unprecedentedly binding defence procurement rules. Finally, the development of an EU security and defence policy as a source of “vital policy rationale” for an EU defence equipment market is also investigated. The tension between the supranational and intergovernmental modes of organising the defence industrial field constitutes a central theme of this thesis, while the “policy cycle” framework is used to order the causal significance of each hypothesis.

This PhD investigates the impacts of taxation on state capacity and accountability through comparative case studies of Angola and Mozambique between 1975 and 2013. Extremes of violence and economic dependency dominate the postcolonial histories of Angola and Mozambique. These cases provide an ideal setting for comparative analysis of how civil war and single resource dependence influence the links between taxation and statebuilding. The thesis demonstrates, in contrast to bellicist notions, that civil war did not strengthen the tax systems or create stronger states. Rather, transitions from the colonial capitalist regimes to socialism and then towards market capitalism, as well as the availability of autonomous income sources, were the central drivers of change in extractive processes. The research establishes taxation as both a critical explanation for development trajectories and a reflection of state capacity and accountability. Existing research on taxation and statebuilding in contemporary developing countries tends to treat tax as a catalyst for democracy, but I find that it provides political regimes with an equally powerful tool to expand power through neopatrimonial networks and consolidate control over the state. Analysis of the case studies concludes that, driven by extraverted elite accumulation strategies, vast oil resources in Angola and large-scale foreign aid in Mozambique worked similarly to disconnect state finances from society and undermine the potential links between revenue collection and redistribution, thereby reducing the possibility of enhanced state capacity or accountability.

This thesis argues that American exceptionalism is a necessary, but insufficient, way of reading U.S. foreign policy. Exceptionalism is employed by different ideologists in different ways and in differing contexts. This thesis employs the contextualist methodology of Quentin Skinner to challenge proleptic, static understandings of American exceptionalism and, in doing so, uncovers American grand strategy as a keenly contested ideological battleground. In each constituent case study, the thesis identifies the ideological innovators of American strategic policy and the key moments of ideological innovation, and examines why ideological innovations became conventional, or not. The analysis proceeds with an introduction to the composition of grand strategy, continues with an examination of Quentin Skinner’s version of Cambridge School contextual analysis, and then places Skinnerian contextualism within the broader framework of International Relations theory. This analysis illustrates the methodological advantage of Skinnerian contextualism, which allows the reconstruction of the context in which past generations of ideological innovators operated and conceived of the world and the place of the United States within it. This specific type of analysis demonstrates ideological innovation in practice at four pivotal moments in American foreign policy: first, the emergence of containment as the cornerstone of the Truman Doctrine at the outset of the Cold War; second, détente and the supposed injection of realism into American foreign policy; third, President Clinton’s strategy of enlargement and the place of American exceptionalism in the aftermath of the Cold War; and, fourth, the Bush Doctrine and the interaction between American exceptionalism and neoconservatism. The thesis concludes by stressing the particularities of historical context, having demonstrated that, although exceptionalism has rarely been the only causal dynamic of American grand strategy, it has consistently provided the context with which innovating ideologists have been required to engage in order to create their own version of grand strategy.

By 1991, Britain retained responsibility for 14 overseas dependent territories. A policy of accelerated decolonisation that took shape under British Governments between the early 1960s and the late 1970s had, by the early 1980s, given way to what Drower has called an ‘era of colonial permanence’.1 This was because territories such as Bermuda refused to take the hint and move towards independence. This thesis examines the way in which Britain appeared to lose control of the process of decolonisation. It will do this by studying power-sharing dynamics in Bermuda between 1963 and 1977. It is argued that Britain did not exercise full control in Bermuda in 1963; her role was characterised by London’s dependence upon Governors who accommodated themselves to the dominant white minority both for pragmatic reasons and out of shared cultural and racial affinities. It was this dynamic that suffused three forums of Anglo-Bermudian collaboration: constitutional reform in 1963-1968; the internal security state in 1968-1973; and the colonial justice system in 1973-1977. This period saw a rapid diminution of British power in Bermuda, a process accelerated by proliferating constitutional ambiguities and metropolitan decline. In contrast, the power of Bermudian conservatives was entrenched via electoral advantages and enhanced local autonomy.

This thesis consists of three essays, on the causes and consequences of violent conflict. It focuses on two factors that are thought to play a role in violent conflict, natural resource abundance and the media. The thesis exploits quasi-experimental variation to investigate whether natural resources and violent conflict are related, and if so, through which mechanism. It finds that evidence from cross-country studies indicating that natural resources (as a single category) cause violent conflict is not as robust as popularly believed. Proxies for natural resource abundance used are potentially endogenous to conflict, and addressing this issue changes the results obtained radically. Agricultural resources are found to be negatively related to civil war onset. In the case of diamonds specifically, evidence is found that primary diamonds, but not secondary diamonds, are related to violence. Both results provide support for income (or opportunity cost) as mechanism connecting natural resources and violent conflict. Policy documents assert that media can play a state-building role in conflict situations. However, media could also induce anxiety, and there has been increasing interest in the role of anxiety in the formation of political attitudes. This thesis investigates the impact of intensity of exposure to radio broadcasts on fear of victimization and the impact of fear on political attitudes, in South Sudan. It concludes that individuals living in areas with better radio reception display a higher level of fear, and that anxious individuals are more likely to support a local militia and less likely to support the government army. The latter could be considered the opposite of state-building.

This study examines the role of culture, investigating to how China policy-research experts socially construct ‘American-ness’ through ‘China’ as the Other. I posit the following overarching research question: “How and why are social and cultural boundaries of ‘American-ness’ dialectically drawn by China policy-research experts within U.S. think tanks through their social construction of narratives on ‘China’ as the Other?” The empirical foundation is comprised of 40 face-to-face, in-depth interviews with China policy-research experts across 26 internationally leading think tanks in Washington, DC, and New York, USA, as well as four interviews with relevant experts (i.e. State Department and academia). Additional methods encompass participant observation, contextuality, triangulation, informal conversation, descriptive statistics/database, and collection of written material. The multimethod, ethnographic research strategy is coupled with a social constructionist epistemologically driven study, and deploys Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice and the embedded conceptual “thinking tools” as the theoretical framework (including cross-tabulation and ethnographic/interpretivist contents analysis). The engagement with Bourdieu is also dialectic in its own right, herein allowing obtained field-data and ‘native categories’ of the research subjects to unveil new lines of inquiries as well as to expand and nuance Bourdieu’s conceptual “thinking tools” themselves in a “bottom-up” fashion. This study contributes to the Bourdieusian sociological ‘turn’ in International Relations (IR) research (in particularly, making the non-state, individual level the focal point of the inquiry, in addition to contesting the assumptions concerning immateriality/construction innately preceding materiality/physicality – within the IR constructivism research programme), and to the specific think tank literature by propagating a third ‘school of analysis’, i.e. conceptualising the thinking of policy-researchers. More broadly, this study provides an important perspective on a key bilateral relationship (U.S.–Sino relations) in U.S. Foreign Policy (and for the world) as well as a prominent category of key players in U.S. Politics.