This research found Saudis were apathetic for a variety of different reasons, but the main factors that might have contributed to the citizen's apathy were the following three factors. First, a lack of political awareness among a considerable number of citizens regarding the importance and the role of the elections in general, and municipal elections in Saudi society in particular, might be the main reason for apathy. Second, the ineffectiveness of the government's awareness media campaign before and during the elections might have failed to educate people about the importance and regulations of the electoral process, and to urge them to participate in it. Third, the ineffectiveness of the candidates' electoral campaigns may have reduced citizens' enthusiasm towards municipal elections. Moreover, findings showed the factors that caused apathy in Saudi Arabia resemble those in other democratic countries around the world, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy.

The objective of this research is to evaluate the employment of the Canadian Navy in a maritime enforcement role within the Canadian maritime zones. This investigation is comprised of two main parts: an analysis of the Canadian political and regulatory structures, as well as an analysis of naval enforcement operations. The marine geography of Atlantic Canada is described through six key ocean-use sectors, followed by an analysis of important oceans policy initiatives, and the federal government's ad hoc approach to security and defence policy formulation. The mandates, jurisdictions, and general capabilities of Canadian federal departments with either direct or indirect links to marine security and maritime enforcement are discussed, as well as the legal framework for the use of Canadian military forces for domestic operations. The second part of the thesis analyses the capabilities that the Navy brings to maritime security and enforcement operations. These include the contribution to maritime domain awareness, government "presence" derived through aerial surveillance, search and rescue operations, and naval support to fisheries enforcement. An analysis of patrol patterns is offered, as well as spatial analyses of at-sea inspection data. Two exploratory studies that address the perceived deterrent value of naval support to fisheries enforcement, and public opinion as it pertains to naval support to constabulary operations are presented, as well as the effect that fisheries support missions have on the combat readiness of warships. The thesis suggests that the Canadian Navy could take on a greater role in domestic enforcement, and a proposal is made for enhanced legal powers. The thesis ends by summarizing the Navy's important role championing and enabling improvement in the government's Marine Security Response System, as well as a whole-of- government approach to maritime surveillance planning.

The Internet has been viewed as a revolutionary means for including individuals in public deliberation on an equal basis. However, there is insufficient empirical work on applications of computer mediated communication to public deliberation under non-democratic social circumstances. This thesis explores the potential of computer-mediated communication in constructing the public sphere in post-Communist China and focuses on the current affairs discussion on Qiangguo Luntan (QGLT), one of the most popular Internet bulletin boards in China. The production-content-reception study shows that: 1) Internet bulletin boards in China are not 'online dissident avenues' without administrative surveillance. In addition, self-censorship works in a long-term and covert way in restraining the democratic potential of online discussion; 2) Internet bulletin boards enable ordinary Chinese to have their identities as politically activated citizens constructed in cyberspace. Their enthusiasm in voicing differentiated political standpoints proves that online public opinion could enrich the political discourse in China, and has the potential of leading to tensions between the public and the state; 3) QGLT SARS postings display the growth of a public critique that ventured to touch upon a taboo issue that was originally banned from public discussion. Non-localized and dialogic forms of communication among the users have created an alternative form of publicity outside the mainstream media's agenda and could potentially check the government's policy-making. The Internet may work to undermine public deliberation by increasing inequalities of access, fragmenting public discourse, and accommodating non-progressive rhetoric. Nevertheless by enlarging the scale of civic participation, advancing alternative and oppositional public discourses, and tackling problems at a global level, Internet bulletin boards could make a significant contribution to the construction of an alternative public sphere representing divergent political views. In summary, under the articulated forces of commercialisation, democratisation, and globalisation, the virtual public sphere in China today has been put in tension between democratisation and degeneration.

This thesis considers the development of welfare reform policy by the British Labour government in the period 1997-8, with a particular emphasis on the role and ideas of Frank Field, Minister of State for welfare reform from May 1997 to July 1998. It examines the significance of welfare reform to the New Labour project and the competing positions associated with Field and with (Chancellor of the Exchequer) Gordon Brown in the 1990s, with an in-depth discussion of Field's broader political philosophy and of his ministerial career, and of Brown's political philosophy with particular reference to welfare policy. We broadly adopt a model of structure and agency to explain the direction which welfare reform took under the first Blair government, and conclude that there are two reasons why Field's ideas did not prove to be the model for the government's welfare reform programme. The first, and lesser, reason relates to Field's performance as an actor in core executive politics. Field, we argue, misunderstood the contingent and negotiated nature of power in the core executive, and the structures which constrain capacity to act within it. The second, and ultimately more significant reason, is that Field's philosophy- in particular, his beliefs about the role of the state- was fundamentally incompatible with the discourse of New Labour, which emphasised an active state as an engine of national economic and social well-being. Brown's views, by contrast, were well-integrated with this discourse. The need for consistency with this discourse thus constrained New Labour's freedom of action in respect of welfare reform.

This thesis examines the construction of White anxiety through an analysis of discursive strategies used to marshal racialised fears and resentments within the context of specific political cultures. Here, White anxiety is defined as the imagined threats and displacements felt in response to the presence of those identified as ethnically or racially different, and in particular fears of loss over resources assumed to be scarce. I analyse the way political discourses in the USA and the UK deploy or negotiate such white anxiety in the post-war period with specific case studies focussed on the 1992 US and 1997 UK election campaigns. The topic of 'race' in contemporary politics has proved to be a potent and difficult issue for politicians. On the one hand appeals to 'race' and racialised resentments continue to be assumed as vote winners. On the other hand, in liberal democracies such as the US and the UK, such appeals attract accusations of 'playing the race card' to signify improper politics. These accusations prompt contrasting political responses and media participation in each country. The comparative analysis indicates the importance of specific political cultures in the construction and deployment of White anxieties grounded in assumptions of popular racisms. What is common to both contexts is that politicians with the help of the media rely upon and tacitly collude with White racialised resentments keeping notions of immutable racial differences in play. This is done through appeals that have distinct historical and contingent resonances. I have identified three narrative frames that have been persistently deployed, with contingent modifications, in order to marshal and construct White anxieties within each political culture. In Britain immigration numbers linked to racial harmony has been an enduring theme, supplemented by a second narrative frame of nation and belonging. In the US the dominant theme is tax resentments linked to Affirmative Action, with a second frame of national belonging becoming increasingly important. I show how the development of these historically and culturally specific narrative frames have retained validity and resonance even as they have been modified for new conjunctures.

Under the New Labour government, the state has begun to describe British society in explicitly multicultural terms, employing a new politics of race that has come to be implemented in policy and legislation. This thesis attempts to map state multiculturalism in Britain, to make sense of its historical and conceptual origins, and to consider how it engages with and reconfigures the existing field of race discourse. It is my contention that the British state's involvement in race politics is necessarily overdetermined by a nationalist horizon, sidelining and subordinating an anti-racist agenda to countervailing state interests. Multicultural nationalism accordingly describes as a point of crisis and contradiction the triadic relation between race, nationalism and the state in contemporary Britain. While a pluralist version of nationalism has been mobilized by New Labour in an attempt to define a cohesive national identity, definitions of multicultural citizenship and `Britishness' continue to construct hierarchies of race and culture. State policies deployed at a local level to deal with social conflict are likewise shown to entrench racialized divisions, and to produce them anew in discourses that constitute the white working class as a new racial group in multicultural Britain. This research considers the dynamics of incorporation, the process by which a hitherto marginal and oppositional set of beliefs and practices have been co-opted by the state. It reflects on the state's adoption of a putative feminism in recent conflicts over cultural difference, and the alignment of nationalism and women's rights in discourses of race. Finally, it looks at multicultural nationalism in the context of the War on Terror, and considers how the transnational commitments of some minority communities are problematized by the British state in its efforts to prescribe the terms of their belonging to the nation. It is the object of this research to explore how the politics of New Labour remains informed by a disavowed racist legacy, and to show how modified ideas of racial difference have been utilized across a range of recent state projects. It demonstrates the weaknesses and contradictions inherent in an official multiculturalism that exists alongside - and in combination with - continuing racist practice.

No description available.

This study looks at the seeming intractability and predictability within the human rights debate between policy makers and activists and puts it under the lens to see what it tells us about these sets of actors and what their deliberation in turn tells us about international and world society. It does this by identifying some underlying fissures in this debate that require a closer examination. These features are moral agency, the relationship between order and justice, and the basis of human rights, they each represent different facets of underlying tensions between the two sets of actors of interest, which are predicted to take the form of a family tree of ideas between the two groups. The goal is to better understand the structure underlying this debate and develop analytical tools which can be used for this debate and used for the analysis of broader debates on similar questions in world society.

This thesis is concerned with how the Second World War is memorialised in Perak, Malaysia. It considers memoryscapes (or memory practices and sites) within the state dedicated to the war, established not only by state agencies but also grassroots actors. In terms of findings, the thesis first highlights how the Perak state has sought to ‘postcolonialise’ (read: ‘nationalise’) public representations of what was an event that took place when Malaysia was still part of ‘colonial’ Malaya, and the issues associated with it, particularly how, despite efforts to make the war (and its attendant memoryscapes) something its people could identify with, the state has been criticised as exclusionary of ‘local’ war stories and partial to a ‘foreign’ audience, thus alienating its population and reproducing much of how war commemoration in Perak was when Malaysia was under British rule before. Generally, the thesis demonstrates the fraught nature of memoryscapes and how there can be fundamental limits to which such ‘postcolonialising’ projects may be successfully realised on the ground. The second concern of the thesis is on the ways in which war narratives of the war that are marginalised within official representations may still survive in other forms and on other sub-national scales. In interrogating these memoryscapes ‘from below’, the thesis reveals that, while some locals prefer to mark the war in a more private fashion so as to covertly resist state tendencies to be exclusionary, or out of fear of reprisals from the state (due to remembering controversial aspects of the war past), the most widely-cited reason is still the simple desire to remember according to local customs, religious beliefs and socio-cultural norms. In doing so, it showcases alternative forms of memory-making that problematises traditional understandings of war commemoration common within prevailing literature, and highlights ways in which contestations against elite memory and heritage practices may not always emerge in oppositional fashion or enacted in clearly overt and public ways but also through the absence of voice. Additionally, the thesis also challenges the tendency to celebrate grassroots practices of memory-making as necessarily ‘recuperative’ of official exclusions of the past. As the situation in Perak exemplifies, these too can be just as political and exclusionary, where, in many cases, the locals themselves may represent barriers to emergent war memories as much as they can be the champions. Lastly, the thesis touches upon the ways in which ‘the material’ may be appropriated towards forgetting the war, not only officially by the state but also by those who went through the war as ordinary civilians. It then illustrates how, despite efforts ‘to put the past behind them’, sometimes memories of war can still ‘emerge unbidden’ to involuntarily force individuals to confront the war past even when they would rather not recall it. In doing so, the thesis demonstrates how material legacies of the war can be utilised not only to presence, but also to absence, the war, although at times ‘the material’ too can undermine efforts to render the past passé. More broadly, the thesis thus contributes not only to debates about postcolonial memory-making and politics, and the complex nature of grassroots remembrances, but also the role of materiality within processes of forgetting, specifically in showing how ‘the material’ can at times exercise agency on humans as much as the reverse is possible. The thesis is based on data collected via textual analysis, participant observation and interviews.

This thesis situates itself in a context that has become a feature of the globalizing world – the emergence of private authority in global governance and the transformation of the power of the state. As the title suggested, the thesis investigates the emergence of private authority in the oil industry by concentrating on the negotiation and implementation of various oil concession agreements of the past in the period between 1900 and 1960. The analysis employs qualitative methodologies, taking experiences of private actors through archival research using case study concentrating on four countries in the Middle East region, namely, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and Iraq. The examination of each case focuses on the oil concession agreement that is pivotal to the structural transition of oil industry, hence power/authority transition. The relationship between public and private authorities involved in the case study is the key to the emergence of private authority. The public-private interaction that allows this relationship to establish and develop is also important to the process. Other factors such as inter-firm cooperation; resources in the form of finance and expertise; and political, economic and social climate also contribute to the process which allow private authority to emerge and operate. Despite the fact that identifying these factors permits us to gain better understanding of the concept of private authority, it is still difficult to pinpoint the exact moment it emerges and the clear location it operates. Private actors today play a major role in global governance, affecting the political, economic and social development both at national and international level, thus, the exact of its route and the true impact of its existence need to be clarified. The findings from the research have great relevance to the theorizing of the concept of private authority. It provides powerful insights into debates regarding the emergence and operation of private authority both in historical and contemporary perspective. The findings also give us better knowledge of the nature of private authority in term of its various forms and functions.