This dissertation explores the notion of the Irish model of peacebuilding, and how the Northern Irish peace process can contribute to the transformation of other conflicts. It poses the research question, ‘How has the Irish model [of peacebuilding] contributed to peace in the Basque Country’? In adopting a conflict transformation approach to the research question, a conceptual framework rooted in conflict transformation theory (Lederach, 2005, 2003, 1997; Galtung, 1996, 1969; Vayrynen, 1991) considers whether the Irish model is a tool of conflict transformation for the izquierda Abertzale. The project adapts the psychological method of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as constructed by Smith, Flowers and Larkin (2009) as a means of thematic analysis to examine the Abertzale experience of interpreting and using the Irish model. The dissertation argues that the Irish model serves as a learning tool of conflict transformation for the izquierda Abertzale as they develop a unique process of conflict transformation. Out of this empirical investigation emerges the theory of ‘praxis-based transformation’, with praxis here as defined by Paulo Freire (1970/1996) to capture a form of action which is rooted in reflection. While still an emerging theory, it would appear that praxis-based transformation can be generalized to capture a process by which actors in one context draw upon international precedents of conflict transformation to develop their own unique process of transformation. In addition to explaining how the Irish model and other precedents of conflict transformation can contribute to peace elsewhere, praxis-based transformation highlights a gap in the existing peacebuilding literature. Praxis-based transformation cannot be fully captured by the libera, or communitarian peacebuilding paradigms, nor does it find a home in the emerging hybrid peace (Richmond and Mitchell, 2012; Mac Ginty, 2011).

This thesis examines two vastly different museums in Northern Ireland, the Ulster Museum in Belfast and the Museum of Free Derry in Derry/Londonderry, and questions what they do have in common: their museum visitors. The fieldwork supporting this thesis provides findings from visitor surveys, in-depth interviews, and discussion groups alongside an exploration of the historical, social, and political framework in which these museums are situated. These exhibits will be framed with the concept of the museum environment to reveal the ongoing and interrelated processes of meaning-making. It is the primary argument of this thesis that in order to understand the processes involved in the museum visitor's experience it is useful to frame the museum as a living environment. In turn this environment is composed of a variety of interrelated ecosystems (Edwards and Lien, 2014) that can be analysed by investigating their constituent parts. The scholarly lineage of this dissertation begins with sociologist Tony Bennett's (1988,1995,2006) exhibitionary complex and is further developed by looking at similar structural analyses of the museum, specifically the contact zone (Clifford, 1997; Dibley, 2005; Purkis, 2013; Pratt, 1991; Schorch, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013) and the assemblage/complex (Macdonald, 2013). Following Ingold's (2000, 2007, 2011, 2012) ecological approach it is the aim of this thesis to frame the museum space as an environment comprised of interrelated processes. The theoretical framework argued for in this thesis is supported by the results of fieldwork which include the findings of interviews, surveys, and discussions with visitors. The focus on museum visitors is intended to demonstrate the interrelated nature of how people function and feel within a particular museum environment, how they influence that environment, and how it influences them. The personal and individual trajectories of visitors and objects, the policies and practices followed by curatorial staff, as well as the social, political and historical framework in which each is situated are vital to understanding the visitor experience.

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Based on original ethnographic research, this thesis examines the complex relationship between politics, loyalty and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland during the so-called Decade of Centenaries. Drawing on the post-structural concept of ‘haunting’, deconstruction of Ulster Loyalist commemoration of the Battle of the Somme reveals its role in the intra-communal politics and symbolic (re)construction of the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist (PUL) ‘community’ in Northern Ireland, and the hauntological reassertion of Loyalist ‘knowledge’ in a politico-historical moment defined by ontological crisis. I discuss the central importance of empathy (though not ‘communion’) in the ethnographic encounter with this community, for whom the present is ‘out of joint’. I demonstrate that the ‘anti-politics’ of peacebuilding - as represented in newly dominant and ‘official’ forms of commemoration in Northern Ireland, the wider UK and the Republic of Ireland - is founded on particular, implicitly political claims about the nature, of history, memory and commemoration and the relationship between them. This ‘anti-politics’ and its ‘public transcript’ on commemoration during the Decade of Centenaries is experienced by Ulster Loyalists, as one aspect of a broader ‘culture war’. In a social, cultural, political and economic context defined for Loyalists by this ‘culture war’, commemoration represents attempts by Loyalists to restore the (imagined) ontological security of the past. The Somme represents Loyalism’s imagined ‘Golden Age’, the promise of which its commemoration both seeks to guarantee and acts to defer. If this process of differance renders the Somme’s promise irredeemable, then it also creates possibilities for the negotiation and articulation of progressive Loyalist politics based on an intimate familiarity with violence and its consequences. These politics, and the forms of knowledge about violence and the political on which they are based, are repudiated by the dominant historicist discourse on commemoration and ‘the past’ in Northern Ireland which attempts to deny its own political foundations.

"This conspiracy is the legitimate descendant of a series of conspiracies which have taken place from time to time (in North India) and which were originally organised by Hardayal in 1907 and 1908" This assertion, the opening statement in the police prosecutor's summing up of his evidence in the second Lahore Conspiracy Case on September 2nd 1930, could equally well serve to introduce this study. The picture it conjures up of a revolutionary movement showing considerable continuity over a thirty year period is essentially an accurate one, though the writer would dispute the claim that Hardayal was its sole progenitor. It is this movement that forms the subject matter of the present thesis. The scale of the movement was modest enough within the overall context of nationalist politics in North India. In between 1905 and 1935 approximately five hundred persons were prosecuted for revolutionary activities in ten major political conspiracy trials. Those actually brought to trial represented, of course, only the tip of the iceberg as far as the total number of people involved in-revolutionary politics was concerned. Many more escaped detection or else were considered by the police to be too insignificant to warrant prosecution. Probably the real figure was somewhere near five thousand, though it is impossible to give a truly precise estimate owing to difficulties with regard to the sources, which will be discussed in due course.

This project interrogates how the biopolitical rationale conditions our contemporary subjectivities, politics and ethics, in order to critique the ethical justifications of technology driven practices of political violence put forth in present counter-terrorism struggles. Employing the work of Hannah Arendt, and her insights into life-politics and technology to construct a biopolitical lens that adds to traditional Foucaultian analyses of biopolitics, my original contribution to knowledge is thus twofold in a) elaborating core aspects of an Arendtian theory of biopolitics, with which then to b) identify the theoretical underpinnings of biopolitically informed forms of ethics in emerging practices of technology-driven political violence. While a number of scholars have drawn on Arendt for the analysis of the biopolitical dimensions of contemporary violence, a systematic independent account of her work on biopolitical trajectories and technologies remains under-developed in current scholarship. In this work, I suggest that the Arendtian life-politics account allows us to recognise a duality at work in the biopolitical shaping of subjectivities: the politicisation and technologisation of zoe, on one hand, and the ‘zoeficiation’ of politics on the other. It is this duality that conditions the human, politics, and the role and justifcations of violence in modernity. Within these two umbrella categories, the project addresses the equally under-examined but pressing question of the ethics of technology-driven modalities of political violence in a contemporary context and argues that a biopolitically informed rationale of ethics occludes the possibility to engage with ethics as a perpetual and ever-anew arising and political demand that must be taken responsibility for. The analysis in this work unfolds in two parts to draw out and critically address the biopolitically informed ethical rationales of political violence. The first part engages closely with Arendt’s work to establish the theoretical framework of biopolitics for the project’s central analysis. The second part then departs from an exposition of Arendt’s work and draws on this framework to highlight and critique the implications of biopolitically infused subjectivities, politics, violence and ethics.

This thesis seeks to analyse and explain the role of the African Union (AU) in managing intra-state conflicts in Africa. It first identifies the key reasons for the establishment of the African Peace and Security Architecture, namely the failure of the UN and the international community to intervene in remote conflicts in Africa throughout the 1990s and the reluctance of the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. Then, it points to the gap between the optimism of the AU’s founders and its implementation record: in fact, the AU’s capability to stop conflicts in Africa has produced mixed results at best. Focusing on three different case studies – Burundi, Darfur, and Somalia – this thesis unravels the key factors behind the AU’s performance in promoting peace and security. More specifically, it argues that the AU’s effectiveness to achieve its goals is contingent upon four conditions: the internal process, the mandate of the mission, the commitment of AU member states, and external support. By developing this argument, this thesis highlights the importance of both organisational processes and external factors with the view to contributing to the general literature on effectiveness of international and regional organisations in managing intra-state conflicts.

This thesis argues that it is important to distinguish between two different phenomena in cyberpolitical spaces: First of all, between ethnic or religious groups fighting over in cyberspace, as they do in real life (Ethnoreligious cyberconflict) and second, between a social movement and its antagonistic institution (Sociopolitical cyberconflict). These different kinds of cyberconflict can be explained in the context of international conflict analysis for ethnoreligious cyberconflict and social movement theory for sociopolitical cyberconflict, while keeping in mind that this takes place in a media environment by using media theory. By combining elements of these approaches and justifying the link to cyberconflict, it is possible to use them as a theoretical light to look at the environment of Cyberconflict (CC) and analysis of incidents of CC. Consequently, this work looks at the leading groups using the internet either as weapon or a resource against governments, while also looking at networks, international organisations and new social movements. Searching for a satisfactory theoretical framework, I propose the following parameters to be looked at while analysing cyberconflicts: 1. Environment of Conflict and Conflict Mapping (real and virtual). The world system generates an arborescent apparatus, which is haunted by lines of flight, emerging through underground networks connected horizontally and lacking a hierarchic centre (Deleuze and Guattari). The structure of the internet is ideal for network groups, (a global network with no central authority) has offered another experience of governance (no governance), time and space (compression), ideology (freedom of information and access to it), identity (multiplicity) and fundamentally an opposition to surveillance and control, boundaries and apparatuses. 2. Sociopolitical Cyberconflicts: The impact of ICTs on: a. Mobilising structures (network style of movements using the internet, participation, recruitment, tactics, goals), b. Framing Processes (issues, strategy, identity, the effect of the internet on these processes), c. Political opportunity structure (the internet as a component of this structure), d. hacktivism. 3. Ethnoreligious Cyberconflicts: a. Ethnic/religious affiliation, chauvinism, national identity, b. Discourses of inclusion and exclusion, c. Information warfare, the use of the internet as a weapon, propaganda and mobilisational resource d. Conflict resolution depends on legal, organisational framework, number of parties issues, distribution of power, values and beliefs. 4. The internet as a medium: a. Analysing discourses (representations of the world, constructions of social identities and social relations), b. Control of information, level of censorship, alternative sources, c. Wolsfeld: Political contest model among antagonists: the ability to initiate and control events, dominate political discourse, mobilise supporters, d. Media effects on policy (strategic, tactical, and representational).

Russian conflict management has been understood as being ‘quintessentially Russian’. This project demystifies this reading. By exploring Russia’s approach from the early 1990s to the end of Medvedev’s presidency in mid-2012, the thesis answers the following question: to what extent has Russia’s behaviour corresponded with security governance as understood in the literature and practiced by other European actors? The argument is that Russia has selectively engaged in the norms and processes of security governance developed in European conflict management. This is driven by a policy that combines the defence of its sovereignty/national interests with a declared commitment to collective decision-making and policy implementation in European security governance. The framework of security governance is employed to examine Russia’s behaviour across its regional space and the wider European neighbourhood, and to ‘map’ its behaviour in accordance with the evolution of European security governance. Using multi-case study analysis and relying on documentary evidence, supported by semi structured interviews, the thesis makes the following contributions. First, it offers a thorough empirical inspection of Russian conflict management. Second, it contributes to the debate on Russia and European security governance, and adds to the discipline of Security Studies by demonstrating the conceptual purchase of security governance.

A proliferation of media discourse on the ‘phenomenon’ of violent women in 1960s and 1970s West Germany suggests that the violent woman is a troubling figure who provokes both fascination and fear. Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject provides a language for understanding and accounting for the complex mixture of emotions the figure elicits. For Kristeva, abjection is a violent revolt against something which threatens the subject, which may be both “other” or foreign, and familiar; we abject that which cannot be tolerated, cannot be thought or known, which provokes both desire and repulsion. Troubling about the violent woman, and what renders her culturally unintelligible or unimaginable, is that she takes life rather than giving it. In this study, I trace the various attempts made by the print media to assimilate the violent woman, to make her thinkable and knowable and, as a result, to defuse her threat. More frequently, she is made other, abjected either in the Kristevan sense or in the (related) more literal sense: ‘cast off,’ ‘excluded,’ ‘rejected’ or ‘degraded.’ West Germany of the 1960s and 1970s provides a good time-frame for the study: West German terrorism, which involved a large number of women, was at its peak in the 1970s, and a number of high-profile trials against non-politically violent women also took place during the period. In chapter one of the thesis, I look at how the violent woman is rendered the negative and ‘unnatural’ (m)other of the proper German woman and nation, the better to bolster hegemonic understandings of both woman and nation; in chapter two, how she is made hysterical and feminised so as to defuse the threat that she poses; in chapter three, how her crime is redefined as a crime against her gender and sexuality (one idea here is that it is the ‘man inside’ who is to blame). Finally, in chapter four, I explore how the violent woman is abjected through association with filth and defilement. Arguably it is because the strategies which attempt to assimilate, to know and to name her fail or are only partially successful, that the violent woman must be abjected from the body politic through association with dirt.