Disasters are responsible for main disruptions in individuals and communities' lives, affecting their prosperity. The research on this topic is motivated by the increasing number of natural hazards deteriorating into catastrophic events as a result of antropogenic factors. By focusing on how institutions, their decision-making processes, and procedural arrangements, affect multi-actor coordination in international and national disasters, with a three-paper structure, this work represents a systematic investigation of the role of institutions in disaster operations. The second chapter investigates the decision-making process of the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) about the strategy of coordination to adopt when civilians and militaries are involved in humanitarian operations in disaster-affected countries. The results of the archival research, content, analysis, and interviews, show that in insecure settings, such as where the disaster affected-country has low state capacity, civilians and militaries are more likely to merely coexist in the field rather than cooperating. The third and fourth chapters explore the role of political representation and electoral competition in the United States (US) and how differences in the political status between States and Territories can affect their emergency management capabilities in the preparedness, response, and recovery phases. Chapter three investigates political representation via content analysis and interviews, showing how the limited representation and no voting rights at the Congress can prevent Territories in advocating for emergency management legislation and budgeting. Chapter four investigates electoral competion via statistical and spatial analysis, showing how being a State or a Territory, does not matter when it comes to the federal public assistance, and what it does is the electoral competitiveness of the county/municipality and whether it hosts government's offices.

Yes / International Relations (IR) has increasingly paid attention to critical pedagogy. Feminist, post-colonial and poststructuralist IR scholarship, in particular, have long been advancing the discus-sions about how to create a pluralist and democratic classroom where ‘the others’ of politics can be heard by the students, who can critically reflect upon complex power relations in global politics. Despite its normative position, Critical Security Studies (CSS) has so far refrained from join-ing this pedagogical conversation. Deriving from the literatures of postcolonial and feminist pedagogical practices, it is argued that an IR scholar in the area of CSS can contribute to the pro-duction of a critical political subject in the 'uncomfortable classroom', who reflects on violent practices of security. Three pedagogical methods will be introduced: engaging with the students’ lifeworlds, revealing the positionality of security knowledge claims, and opening up the class-room to the choices about how the youth’s agency can be performed beyond the classroom. The argument is illustrated through the case of forced migration with specific reference to IR and Pol-itics students’ perceptions of Syrian refugees in Turkey. The article advances the discussions in critical IR pedagogy and encourages CSS scholarship to focus on teaching in accordance with its normative position. / The research was partly supported by HM Government funding to MK Dhami.

This dissertation explores how partisan polarization among the political elites (the President and key Members of Congress) impacts national security decision-making. The research examines the relationship over time beginning at the start of the Cold War through 2014. In doing so, the research tests several hypotheses to determine the nature of the relationship and what the implications might be for future U.S. national security policy-making. There are three different approaches used in the research centered on the same theory of partisan polarization. The first approach examines changes in the level of polarization and defense budgets each year. The second explores the impact of partisan polarization on the outcome of key roll-call votes on national security legislation. Lastly, the third approach studies the changes in polarization relative to the Presidents' decision to use force. Poole and Rosenthal (1984) argue that political polarization has increased among the political elite since the 1960s and the Republicans and Democrats continue to move further apart ideologically (Gray et al. 2015). I argue that the combined effect of polarization and a growing ideological divide between the two major political parties puts our collective national security at risk. Using analytical regression time series models and a qualitative analysis, the findings suggests that rising partisan polarization presents a clear and present threat to our national security.

This thesis is situated at the intersection of Feminist International Relations, Critical Security Studies and Gender Studies. It takes as its starting point – and offers a challenge to – the feminist contention that soldiers cannot be peacekeepers due to hegemonic constructions of military masculinity associated with the skills and practices of combat. It problematises this assumption by investigating whether involvement in the practices of conflict resolution on Peace Support Operations (PSOs) influences the construction of military masculinities. The thesis also questions the rather monolithic accounts of masculinity which are found in feminist arguments that peacekeeping soldiers reinforce neo-imperial oppression, and argues that such critiques neglect the potentially more progressive aspects of employing soldiers as peacekeepers. Using the British Army as a case study to explore these conceptual issues, the thesis utilises a novel methodological approach derived from R W Connell’s framework of gender relations and social constructivist discourse theory. It analyses both official and unofficial sources of British Army discourse on PSOs, including military doctrine, recruitment material and autobiography, and finds evidence to suggest that ‘peacekeeper masculinity’ offers a challenge, albeit incomplete, to the hegemonic masculinity associated with combat. The thesis argues that, despite the limited nature of this challenge, peacekeeper masculinity represents an important development because the privileging of conflict resolution practices it embodies involves disruptions to traditional gendered dichotomies and the construction of ‘regendered soldiers,’ with important implications for both international peace and security and gender relations. Finding conflict resolution practices such as negotiating and building consent, moderating the use of force and humanitarian activities manly rather than emasculating is crucial if soldiers are to take PSOs as seriously as they do war. Moreover, associating masculinity with practices that require building relations of sensitivity, mutual respect and empathy has implications beyond the success of PSOs. Such associations not only challenge current models of hegemonic masculinity in the military, but – through replacing relations of dominance with more democratic relations – challenge the entire hierarchical structure of gender relations in western culture and language. As such, in exploring the concept of regendered soldiers, this thesis contributes significantly to theories of change in gender relations as well as to feminist International Relations scholarship on military masculinities, peacekeeping and security.

The debate concerning face veiling has been brought in to view by several governments in Europe. Luca Mavelli studies the debate regarding the burqa using the concept of securitization and from that the objective of this study is to analyze the medial- and the political discourse in Sweden regarding the burqa. The formulated questions drawn from this is; who are the securitizing actors? According to the securitization actors, who can de defined as a referent object? Wherein is the threat according to the securitizing actors? Is it possible to recognize a difference between the medial and the political discourse? Furthermore the paper adopts the theoretical framework that is the concept of securitization, formulated by the Copenhagen School of security. The methodological foundation is based on a social constructivist approach and consequently uses Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analyzes as an analytical tool. Conclusions show that the two discourses often express similar results but a difference is apparent in how the debate is presented. Representatives of the political parties are defined as securitizing actors and to a certain degree so is the media. Furthermore, according to the securitizing actors the referent objects are Swedish traditions and culture, the threat lies in the values that are attached to the burqa.

China has become an increasingly important economic, and more recently, political force in the Middle East. Coupled with the perceived reduction in American power, this has caused Middle East states closely tied to the US to hedge in response to increased strategic ambiguity. Their strategies are characterized by simultaneous attempts to capture the economic and political gains of cooperation with China, while minimizing the risk of a continued dependence for their security on a US perceived to be disengaging from the region. This has resulted in a self-reinforcing regional dynamic of ambiguity that has incentivized these states to draw closer to China and thereby increase Chinese influence in the region. To test this theory, this paper examines the case of Saudi Arabia before discussing the effects of this strategy on the region’s dynamics. Hedging can create a self- fulfilling prophecy that reduces the power of the established hegemon, increases the power of a rising state, and increases the probability of a new systemic structure emerging.

This is a study of regional security in the Middle East from a Critical Security Studies perspective. The main aim of the thesis is to provide an account of the pasts, presents and futures of regional security in the Middle East cognisant of the relationships between the three in one's thinking as well as practices. This is achieved through the threefold structure of the thesis, which looks at Cold War pasts (Part I), post-Cold War presents (Part II) and possible futures (Part III). The thesis also has a set of more specific aims. First, it aims to present a critique of prevailing security discourses in theory and practice with reference to regional security in the Middle East and point to unfulfilled potential immanent in regional politics. Second, the thesis aims to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions and theories and practices of security. And finally, it aims to show how Critical Security Studies might allow one to think differently about the futures of regional security in the Middle East. The overall thesis is that the Critical Security Studies perspective presents a fuller account of regional security in the Middle East; it offers a comprehensive framework recognising the dynamic relationships between various dimensions and levels of security, as voiced by multiple referents.

As Kingsley Davis stated, ‘the study of population offers one of the unique and indispensable approaches to an understanding of world affairs’ (Davis 1954, p.vii). In the discipline of International Relations, valuable security and political implications have been yielded by examining how population growth constitutes violent conflicts in traditional security studies (e.g. Choucri 1974; North and Choucri 1971). Non-traditional security (NTS) also develops its own problem-solving approach, e.g. human security, to solve demographic-related issues encountered by humankind such as famine and unemployment (UNDP 1994). Despite both traditional and NTS studies having established their material approaches, the ideational relationship between security and population dynamics has yet to be studied in detail. Specifically, this dissertation examines how ideational relationship is/can be established by ‘securitising’ population dynamics, i.e. how to rhetorically make population dynamics a security threat. The thesis adopted a combined analytical framework of the Copenhagen School and the Paris School in the case of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to identify how the ideational relationship between security and population dynamics was established. It first adopts the securitisation framework to examine how the PRC rhetorically constructed population growth as a security threat and introduced its emergency measure, i.e. the one-child policy. The dissertation then reveals the politics of the prolonged securitisation by evaluating the one-child policy as a technique for governmentality of unease and demonstrates how this constitutes the shift from securitising population growth to population decline. This dissertation argues that population dynamics can be constructed as (the cause of) numerous security threats through a successful securitisation. With the case of the PRC, the thesis demonstrates the de facto politicisation of population growth before the late 70s, and how the de jure securitisation was adopted in a Communist manner to legitimise the world’s strictest population policy, i.e. the one-child policy, as its emergency measure to solve various existential threats posed by population dynamics. In addition, the study of politics of securitisation in the case of the PRC further unfolds the struggles of priorities among different actors, which brings us political, practical and relational implications about this governmentality of unease that lasted for almost 4 decades. A deeper understanding of how our ideas of demography shape what we call ‘security threats’ sheds lights on how states formulate comprehensive security agendas by taking population dynamics into account due to its immense importance to threat construction. Other security actors such as international organisations, private sectors, and even individuals can more easily convince relevant audiences to legitimise the securitisation of the specific demographic-related threats they are facing. As Sciubba put it, ‘population dynamics could be a challenge or an opportunity’ (Sciubba 2011, p.3). Accumulating knowledge of the ideational connections between security and population dynamics increases the ability of various security actors to confront these challenges through a successful securitisation, which contribute to preventing numerous demographic-related threats from happening or at least easing these pains of humankind.

Graphene-family nanomaterials (GFNs) have attracted a great deal of attention both in academia and in industry for a range of applications relevant for homeland security. In this thesis, an array of graphene-based hybrid materials and aerogels are synthesized for use as novel thermo-electrochemical energy harvesters and for ascorbic acid biosensing devices. The graphene-family nanomaterials include graphene oxide-GO, thermally reduced GO-rGOth, nitrogenated functionalized graphene-NFG, graphene aerogel-GA, nitrogen-doped graphene aerogel-NGA, multi-walled carbon nanotube aerogel-MWCNT, single-walled carbon nanotube aerogel-SWCNT, graphene and nanotube combined ‘hybrid’ aerogels-Gr:(SW/MW)CNT of various ratios, along with multilayered nanostructured architectures such as gold (AuNP) and silver nanoparticles (AgNP) decorated NFG coated with a thin layer of polyaniline (PANi). Precursor aerogel materials were also analyzed to demonstrate the effect of mesoporous architectures and the interplay of various components in augmenting physical-chemical properties. These precursors were combined through multiple deposition schemes including electrodeposition, hydrothermal synthesis, and freeze drying techniques. This project was developed in an effort to enhance electrochemical properties through modification of the morphology, surface and structural properties, making them more suitable for thermal energy harvesting and bio-sensing applications. Hydrothermal synthesis created chemical bridged interfaces, interconnectedness, and improved electrical conductivity besides increasing the surface area of mesoporous aerogels created by freeze-drying. This causes an increase in the number density of electrochemically active sites. The surface morphology, lattice vibrations, and electrochemical activity of the materials were investigated using electron microscopy, micro-Raman Spectroscopy, and electrochemical microscopy techniques [namely cyclic voltammetry (CV), alternating current electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (acEIS), amperometric techniques, and scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM)]. For thermoelectric and thermoelectrochemical power measurements, a custom-designed set up was made for creating a temperature gradient across two legs of a thermocell and experiments were performed in various device configurations (a) symmetric and asymmetric, (b) single thermocells, and (c) multiple (“in-tandem”) thermocells. Interestingly, we observed changes in conducting behavior from Ohmic to semiconducting and polarity shifts from positive to negative or vice versa on introduction of the redox electrolyte solution. The parametric correlations (thermopower and resistivity or conductivity) are established and the results are discussed in terms of the polarity switching behavior observed for some of the aerogels combinations.

This thesis discusses how local forces, despite being the weaker actor in a proxy relationship, manipulate external powers’ support to pursue their own objectives. Three factors – practical advantage, relative will, and diverging objectives – explain this counterintuitive power dynamic. First, local forces have better local knowledge, more extensive networks, and greater legitimacy, which give them leverage and make them desirable partners. Second, local forces' involvement is often existential rather than selective; unlike external powers, local forces are thus unconstrained by domestic political vulnerabilities. This enables them to close the significant power gap with external powers. Third, local forces' objectives may diverge from their sponsors', creating incentives for exploitation and manipulation of external support to pursue their own agenda, regardless of the external powers’ interests. These three factors effectively explain the dynamic between the Soviet Union and Cuba during the Angolan civil war and the relationship between the U.S. and the Kurds in the fight against ISIS. Cuba mostly operated within the Soviet strategic parameters, while at the same time manipulating Soviet support to forward its own interests in Africa. The Kurds manipulated U.S. support while fighting ISIS to acquire territories and to pursue autonomy and independence, goals inconsistent with US interests. Further research is still needed to identify under what conditions local partners will wield this counterintuitive power, since there also are cases in which this does not take place.