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This ethnography examines Trinidadian politics by exploring everyday forms of participation in authority and what they signal about governance of public life. It first delves into the relationships, values and actions that most matter to ordinary women and men. More specifically, it looks at the ways male and female market vendors, Carnival masqueraders, illegal squatters and religious leaders manage and engage with others, ideas, things, spaces, processes, institutions and habits. It then examines how these inform their participation in informal, formal and state-centred aspects of public life. I argue that Trinidadian politics is grounded in the taken-for-granted norms of informal social life or lore. Lore is crucially significant to deepening analysis of those state institutions, rules and practices, or law, typically studied in political scholarship. In fact, the ways formal processes of state and government actually work can hardly be understood without a grounded understanding of informal social life. This study, therefore, examines the relationship between lore and law and, at another tier, the interaction between social politics and a legal politics. It explores the values, practices and negotiations associated with sociality, and the dispositions that articulate them. These dispositions reach across and engage ideas connected to legality as well. They created habitual and homologous ways of expressing, participating in and negotiating authority. They give life to what is considered desirable and legitimate, and become the basis for women and men's participation in governance. Together, they inform an approach to authority defined by values of reasonableness and advantage. People refer to these when legitimizing how they make sense of the world. This is exemplified in the ways that vendors and police enforce legislation, party activists and squatters depend on patronage, women and men participate in associational life, and Carnival masqueraders and local governmental officials compete to lead a national event. In each instance, and comparing them, I explore what matters to individuals and groups and what kinds of authority, including emotions, family, need, God, and gender, weigh in on the moment. Such styles of legitimization point to an aesthetic that normatively orders overlapping individual, social and state-centred ways of doing things. Aesthetic authority is, therefore, the basis for my approach to everyday, lived aspects of governance in Trinidad.;KEYWORDS: Politics, Governance, Authority, Informality, Public Life, Gender, Trinidad and Tobago.

The major subject matter of this thesis is the development of International Relations (IR) studies as an academic discipline in Turkey. Despite its firm history, the high level of institutionalization and its considerable size, the IR community in Turkey (IRCT) has not been able to contribute to the theoretical studies of global IR. The thesis suggests that Turkey and Western IR communities have been functionally integrated. Whereas, the Western IR communities tend to produce theoretical knowledge, the IRCT has mainly contributed to the Western IR literature as local/area experts. The IRCT tend to specialize on Turkish foreign policy, area studies and Turkey (as a region of study) with a special focus on political-security issues. The thesis analyzes the IRCT in terms of two major groups of academics: the Western-IR-socialized scholars and other scholars. The thesis aims to analyze major factors behind the functional division of labor between the Western and Turkish IR communities, Turkish IR scholars tendency to produce empirical knowledge related with Turkish foreign policy and the low level of theoretical coordination and fragmentation between the Western-IR-socialized and other scholars in Turkish IR. In order to explore the case of Turkish IR, the thesis uses Richard Whitley’s theoretical model in the sociology of science and focuses on the internal and external structure of the Turkish IR discipline. Both qualitative and quantitative research techniques such as descriptive statistics, questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviewing, publication analysis, discourse analysis, citation analysis and process-tracing method were used in the thesis. The thesis argues that the Western IR community has a high level of control over the competence and performance standards and key resources of knowledge production in IR. This tendency results in high level of mutual dependence and low level of task uncertainty between Western and Turkish IR scholars and lead to functional integration between them and encourage the IRCT to produce empirical knowledge related with Turkish foreign policy. Moreover, as a consequence of the low level of control over competence and performance standards, the low level of standardization of research skills and methods and the low level of common technical background and norms, the mutual dependence and theoretical coordination between Turkish IR scholars is low.

The place of the public sector bureaucracy in the political, social and economic life of Saudi Arabia is central. It plays a major role in both policy making and implementation and it is charged with development, planning and administration. Therefore whether or not the bureaucracy is succeeding in meeting this responsibility is of interest to and directly affects every member of the society. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that there are two forces at work within the Saudi bureaucracy. First, there is an overt, formal, systematic and rational structure that has been planned and organised. Secondly, there is a covert, informal, network that has no official status or recognition, yet is immensely powerful. We conceive of the inter-relation of these forces, following its discussion in the literature as '<I>the dialectic of agency and structure'. </I>This work shows that trying to understand one without the other will deliver at best only a partial understanding. The formal structure follows the overt model of other bureaucracies in the modern world. The second, is based around relationships and personal power differences: between the people who work in the bureaucracy and between those officials and the public. We attempt to show how there is an ever-present interpenetration of agency and structure in Saudi bureaucratic organisational life. By demonstrating that this state of affairs exists, we are not claiming to be able to find a final resolution, much less a solution, to the problems faced by the bureaucracy.

The existing explanations of the causes of poverty that dominate the development literature have tended to ignore the influence of international inequality on poverty, instead focusing exclusively on domestic factors. Furthermore, these explanations pay little attention to the effect of domestic inequality on poverty. This study addresses these shortcomings through a quantitative analysis of the effects of inequality between and within countries on poverty, between 1980 and 2007. The study introduces a new structural measure of international inequality based on countries’ positions in the international system, created by applying social network analysis to international trade networks to place countries into four hierarchical positions. The results of the regression analysis demonstrate that international inequality has a strong effect on poverty, controlling for a range of other factors typically associated with poverty, such as geography and institutions. In addition to assessing the effects of international inequality on poverty; this study also considers the historical roots of the current unequal international system. The results of the regression analysis demonstrate that colonial factors strongly influence international inequality. The analysis also considers the impact of domestic inequality on poverty, and finds that inequality within countries has a significant effect on poverty. The analysis finds support for the argument that domestic inequality domestic inequality impacts poverty though the effect it has on politics and policy outcomes. Furthermore, by including an interaction term in the regression analysis, the study also demonstrates that domestic inequality has a greater impact on poverty in countries that face lower levels of international inequality than in those that face higher international inequality. In doing so, the study shows that poverty is impacted by a combination of international and domestic factors. In particular, the study demonstrates the manner in which world poverty is fundamentally tied to the structure of global political economy.

Secularism has recently become a topic of deep disagreement in Turkey. There are two main camps in the debate: Kemalist/secularists who defend a rigidly non-religious public sphere as the site of national self-expression; and Sunni believers who seek to redefine 'official secularism' in favour of religious liberty. This thesis attempts to construct two rival normative models of secularism from the republican and liberal traditions, and by delineating the boundaries of reasonable disagreement explore which model runs the best chance of being affirmed by both secular and religious citizens in Turkey. I argue that a third model that synthisises these two, John Rawls' political liberalism, provides the basis for an understanding of secularism that is best equipped to generate agreement between Kemalist and Islamist doctrines. I begin by analysing how political unity is achieved by civic religion in republican 'common ground' secularism, by religious neutrality in liberal 'independent ethic' secularism, and by an interplay between comprehensive and independent reasons in political liberal Rawlsian secularism. Then I provide a systematic survey of the affinities of Kemalist and Islamist conceptions with these normative models. This is accomplished by showing how the Kemalist conception of secularism combines republican and liberal approaches by a dual-commitment to the state-promotion of 'secularised national Islam' and religious neutrality in education and law. Finally, in order to emphasise the normative sources inherent to the Islamist conception of secularism, I explore the Orthodox-Sunni understanding of justice, the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, the Ottoman religious policy, and the reformist-popular Islamic discourse found in the works of Said Nursi and Fethullah Gulen.

This thesis proposes a conception of responsibility for human rights. The conception includes three components: an account of the normative foundations of human rights; an account of human-rights correlative duties; and an account of the violations of human rights. The account on the normative foundations connects human rights with certain moral principles and shows why those rights might impose obligations to various agents. The account on the corresponding duties uncovers different categories of duties related to human rights and formulates general guidelines for the distribution of these duties. The account on violations lists the conditions that must obtain for something to qualify as a violation of human rights. All these components are reunited in an internationalist conception of responsibility for human rights. According to this conception, human rights serve the dignity of persons. Since the protection of the dignity of persons requires the social world to be designed in a certain way, State agents bear primary responsibility in guaranteeing the human rights of their populations. Notwithstanding that, human rights impose on other non-State agents second order duties to contribute with the capacity of their political institutions to comply with their human rights related obligations. The international community in particular has transnational duties to create the adequate international conditions necessary for every political community to be able to fully realize the human rights of their population. Although these second order duties are derived from human rights, their non-compliance does not amount to a human rights violation.

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Microfinance has become very important for inclusive finance and micro-based economic development and the rise of Islamic finance responds to this change in many parts of the world. In Thailand, the first Islamic microfinance institution was established in the Muslim populated Pattani Province in 1987 and several others followed over the years. Yet, very few studies have been conducted to systematically document the basic aspects of this endeavour. The aim of this study is to examine the development and prospects of Islamic microfinance (IsMF) and assess the perceptions of the customers on the products, impact, performance and scope in Thailand. In doing so, this study is one the first to provide an overview of IsMF industry in Thailand and identifies factors affecting demand for IsMF services. Importantly, it will analyse the impacts of various IsMF services of the socio-economy of the Thai society. The study also evaluates outreach and sustainability of the IsMFIs. In an attempt to accomplish the aims of the study, a triangulation research method was employed. First, the questionnaire-based survey was administered to the customers of the IsMFIs in order to ascertain the factors affecting demand for products and impacts of IsMF. Secondly, a semi-structure interview was subsequently conducted with the customers in order to develop an in-depth understanding on demand for and impacts of IsMF. Thirdly, secondary data from financial reports of the IsMFIs were collected to compute relevant financial ratios, indicating outreach, sustainability, and efficiency and profitability of these IsMFIs. The findings from the survey analysis reveal that the demand for IsMF services are driven by the needs in various life cycle events, affordability, awareness and exposure of IsMF regulations and procedures. In addition, IsMF services have enhanced the well-being of the poor and financially excluded in different aspects. The levels of impacts are influenced by the emerging needs, affordability and exposure factors in varying degrees. Interestingly, IsMFIs have achieved operational sustainability, reached considerable number of the client-base, and been profitable. The findings not only provide valuable information in terms of behavioural dimensions and customer preferences, they are also useful for the microfinance providers and government in considering the future development related to Islamic microfinance programmes.

With the radicalisation of the ‘War on Terror’ and the chaos following the 2003 Iraq War, the concept of ‘risk’ emerged as central to a wide-ranging set of claims about the extent and significance of the changed post-Cold War strategic environment and its impact on policy-making. International Relations (IR) scholars argued that ‘risk’ and ‘risk management’ defined foreign policy-making, with the US as the principal exemplar of such a change. The thesis explores the two, sociologically rooted, accounts of risk that underpin this literature – indebted to Ulrich Beck and Michel Foucault respectively – to identify the deeply contrasting and contradictory conceptualisations of risk they produce. Returning to some classic, and badly neglected, writing on risk and highlighting an alternative account originally developed by John Graham and Jonathan Wiener, the thesis establishes Presidential decision-making in foreign policy as a series of ‘risk versus risk trade-offs.’ This framework focuses on the ways in which risk operates simultaneously in different environments via concepts of ‘political risks’ focusing on the domestic environment and ‘strategic risks’ focusing on the international dimension. The concept of trade-off elucidates the ways in which actions aimed at countering a ‘target risk’ frequently produce ‘countervailing risks’ of their own. Using this approach, the thesis assesses the build-up to three crises in US foreign policy; two from the Cold War (the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Iran hostage crisis) and one from the post-Cold War period (the road to Srebrenica). The case studies, based on archival research and interviews, effectively challenge the claim that the end of the Cold War represented the onset of an era of foreign policy-making as risk management, by showing how the Kennedy and Carter administrations engaged in policy-making practices and processes that are not markedly dissimilar from Clinton’s. In addition, the case studies enrich the ‘risk literature’ and demonstrate how the analysis of crises can be advanced by understanding the moment of crisis as the culmination of a series of neglected ‘countervailing risks.’ More generally, the thesis points to the initial validity of an approach that can be applied to diverse issues in foreign policy-making.