My research is about the resistance and peacebuilding initiatives of the Peace Community of San Joséde Apartadó(CdPSJA), the Cimitarra River Valley Peasant Association (ACVC), and the Carare Worker and Peasant Association (ATCC) in Colombia. These communities were created by internally displaced peasants to protect civilians, to challenge the power structures that sustain the conflict, and to eventually build peace. My central research question asks how an analysis of civil local peace initiatives that resist power networks and structures responsible for the prolongation of conflict in Colombia contributes to under standing social and political change in war-torn societies. My research is informed by the ideas and concepts of the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, in an attempt to offer new perspectives on peacebuilding studies. Conceiving of peacebuilding processes as struggles for hegemony, my research identifies three key elements based on which peasant communities’ role in building peace can be assessed. The transformation of common sense into a critical consciousness, the control over space through strategies of war of position, and the building of alternative historical blocs all help explain the dynamics of the three communities under study. The argument of this thesis is that peasant communities have managed to develop counter-hegemonic alternatives. But whilst they succeeded in considerably reducing levels of violence amid armed conflict, it remains to be seen whether they will be able to contribute to bringing about structural change in a post-conflict setting. My research finds that their initiatives are likely to be integrated within the government’s model for the post-conflict setting. My findings then offer new insights on social change from below and the role of the state within peacebuilding processes.

This thesis is an exploration of Andean autochthonous music as a practice of decolonisation in the urban context of Bolivia. It follows the cultural, social, religious and political activities of different music groups who play autochthonous music in the city and the surrounding area of Cochabamba and La Paz. Following their stories it contrasts and contextualises these groups’ journeys within the wider socio–political processes of Bolivian society. In this sense, my research follows Anders Burman’s call for a move away from the ‘critical intellectual theorizing’ of decolonisation and towards a more practice-oriented approach to decolonisation. Music in this context is understood as a complex, interdependent and inherently situated practice that is in constant process of creating worlds. The thesis dwells on the implications for academic knowledge production when we take seriously the claims, practices and experiences of those people we engage with in our research. The thesis thus explores the ramifications and importance of the claim made by autochthonous musicians that music is more than just an artistic performance, an aesthetic endeavour for applause or for political vindications. Doing so, the thesis problematizes the questions of authenticity, folklorisation and politics of recognition more broadly that are generally associated with Andean autochthonous music. The thesis seeks to take the experience and ideas of urban autochthonous musicians seriously by engaging with those worlds, and spiritual hinterlands that are invoked through Andean autochthonous music. The question then is not whether music can be an instrument of decolonisation. Rather the thesis asks: under what circumstances does music contribute to decolonisation and what kind of decolonisation processes does music bring about? In this sense, the project explores the possibilities and limitations of discourses and activities of the urban autochthonous music groups wherein Quechua and Aymara political vindications and the empowerment of Andean ways of knowing and being become possible. Through the example of urban autochthonous music groups the thesis engages with the idea and the conditions of possibility necessary for social and political change. I suggest to look at music and autochthonous music in particular as sites of many worldings, where the pluriverse gets enacted and performed. The thesis’ aim is to contribute to further our understanding of how the decolonial, post-colonial or critical theoretical frameworks continue to perpetuate colonial structures and contribute to the further folklorisation and cooptation of the indigenous and other marginalised cultures and lived experiences rather than their liberation.

This dissertation describes how it came about that the British government, civil service and military were prepared badly for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its new analysis of this often-discussed period centres on the plans prepared in 2002 by the various government departments involved; those plans were not suitable for the policy that the British government eventually pursued in the beginning of 2003. This mismatch occurred because although Britain’s post-9/11 Iraq policy was understood across Whitehall and Downing Street, its limits were not. Specifically, there was no clarity on the circumstances under which a policy should be abandoned, and if so, for what alternative. The assumptions made about those elements varied across actors. This resulted in internally contradictory British plans, unsuitable for the invasion as it happened. A relatively simple mechanism that can limit, though not eliminate, these problems in future policy-making is the so-called ‘preferred alternative to the pursued policy’, derived from the ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement’ (BATNA). BATNAs are a well-known concept in negotiation practice and doctrine; I argue that similarly, ‘preferred alternatives’ can and should be used in a policy-making context for keeping policy and policy plans aligned and coherent across members of government and their civil service departments. The original contribution to knowledge is both a new interpretation of the reasons for Britain’s difficulties in Iraq, and a new argument about how to improve policy-making through a new application of an already successful tool, the ‘preferred alternative to the pursued policy’.

This thesis examines processes of governing in European co-operation networks, critiquing the argument that co-operation networks provide a depoliticized space for exchange and learning by demonstrating that hierarchies, struggles and contestation are inherent features of European network processes.

This thesis analyses the rise to power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or Sepah-e Pasdaran-e Enqelab-e Eslami, also known as ‘the Sepah’, in post-Khomeini Iran, particularly after the election of Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005. It explains the manner in which the Sepah has become a powerful political force with a substantial stake in Iran’s economy and foreign policy. To understand the growing role of the Sepah as a political and economic actor, the thesis develops a theoretical framework by combining the literature on civil-military relations and institutionalist studies with an analysis of power relations in post-revolutionary Iran. Drawing on Laswell’s concept of the ‘garrison state’, the thesis explains the growth in power of the Sepah from the vantage point of its evolution from a pillar of the regime, referred to here as an ‘auxiliary guardian’, to a leading political and economic player in the IRI. The thesis demonstrates that this evolution has taken place gradually, within the context of Iran’s factionalised political process, and under conditions of perpetual domestic and international tension; moreover, it will show that while the Sepah was imbued with political and non-military functions owing to its role as the guardian of the revolution, the scope of its political involvement and its influence over Iran’s economy and foreign policy was the outgrowth of its responses to internal crisis and perceived external threats in the context of Iran’s ongoing elite struggle for power.

The fast-moving global banking sector has become highly competitive in order to survive. This includes Islamic banks in the GCC region, which strive to not only thrive, but to insulate themselves from possible regional and global meltdowns. In order to stay ahead of their competition, it is imperative that the services provided to customers are of the highest quality to ensure the optimum level of customer satisfaction, which ultimately results in improved customer loyalty and reduced attrition rate. This research aims to explore, measure and compare the perceived service quality levels of Kuwait and Qatar’s Islamic and conventional banks, based on customers’ perceptions and expectations of perceived service quality. The research presented in this thesis also aims to determine which service quality dimensions make the greatest contribution to overall customer satisfaction. In addition, this study attempts to determine the consumers’ level of awareness and familiarity of banking products and services. Utilising a modified version of the SERVQUAL model, this study measures and tests nine service quality dimensions through a questionnaire survey: tangibles, assurance, empathy, reliability, responsiveness, cooperative social responsibility, technology, competitiveness and religious compliance. A questionnaire survey was distributed in order to gather data from which 1,082 responses were returned (581 from Qatar and 501 from Kuwait). The empirical findings reveal that customers in conventional banks have higher levels of awareness and familiarity of banking products and services compared to Islamic banks in Kuwait and Qatar. Furthermore, the findings indicate that all of the banks in the study produced a negative service quality gap (perception minus expectation) for all service quality dimensions, which indicated the expectations of customers were not met. The findings revealed that respondents from Kuwait Islamic and conventional banks are satisfied with the overall service quality based on customers’ perception. However, the opposite is the case for both types of Qatari banks, although it was ‘close’ to satisfaction. Overall, Kuwaiti conventional banks have better service quality scores compared to Islamic banks based on the modified SERVQUAL model dimension gap differences, while in regard to Qatar, Islamic banks have higher service quality than conventional banks. The findings also demonstrate that ‘assurance’, ‘empathy’ and ‘responsiveness’ dimensions scored the highest expectation mean for Qatari and Kuwaiti Islamic and conventional banks, while ‘religious compliance’ and ‘assurance’ dimensions scored a high perception mean for Qatari and Kuwaiti Islamic banks. In regard to Kuwaiti and Qatari conventional banks, ‘assurance’ and ‘technology’ scored the highest mean perception score. Regression analysis shows that ‘assurance’ was found to be the most important predictors of customer satisfaction based on respondents’ perception and expectations for all types of banks in Kuwait. Customers in Qatar rated ‘empathy’ and ‘assurance’ as the most important predictors of customer satisfaction. Furthermore, the study also found that customer demographics have a significant effect on their perception and expectations of service quality in Kuwaiti and Qatari Islamic and conventional banks. The factor analysis revealed that the customers of Islamic and conventional banks reorganize the service quality dimensions into various components differently than the modified SERVQUAL dimensions. For Kuwaiti and Qatari Islamic banks, the customers revealed ‘management, establishment and confidentiality’ to be the highest-ranked service quality component, while for Kuwait conventional banks, ‘customer service’ was found to be the highest-ranked.

With the rapid growth of economy and carbon emissions, China has been seen as having a key role in addressing climate change and receives substantial attention from the media. In the Chinese coverage, climate change issues can be interpreted as various concerns and ideas involving the dimensions of the economy, energy and emissions, public involvement, science and ecology, and responsibility. In this sense, a discourse approach can be used to understand how the newspapers construct the climate change discourse and discourse networks in the coverage. This study selects three different newspapers in China, namely People’s Daily, China Daily and Southern Weekend. Also, it identifies three critical policy moments for observing changes in climate change discourses of China, namely the release of China’s National Climate Change Programme on 4th June, 2007, the announcement of China’s positions on the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference on 26th November, 2009 and the submission of China’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on 30th June, 2015. This PhD thesis makes a primary contribution to academic studies through the application of an interpretivist discourse network approach to understanding the constructed climate change discourses in the newspapers in China. This approach employs storylines, actors and discourse network to analyse the constructed discourses. Actors are seen as news sources cited in the newspapers, and storylines refer to various statements concerning the issues identified in the coverage. Also, it contributes to existing knowledge of climate change politics and coverage of China, dynamic environmental discourses and social constructionist approach. This thesis identifies three dominant discourses constructed in the climate coverage, namely development, ecological modernisation and low carbon, which have been rising and falling in their prominence in different ways across the newspapers in China.

Extant studies of lobbying in the European Union (EU) by private actors have focused on the legislative arena: how such actors target the Commission, or the Parliament. These works have generally considered lobbyists as uniform transnational capitalist actors, seeking to extend the reach, or depth, of the single market. Recent advances in supranational institutional capacity have begun to create a ‘single European regulatory space’ (Levi-Faur, 2011), through which the EU now seeks to achieve market delivery. However, to date there has been little study of how private actors lobby this new institutional venue. Using the example of the European Banking Authority (EBA) – one of the regulatory institutions in this new arena – this thesis examines the patterns in lobbying behaviour. It takes the cases of British and German banks, and uses the notion of durable variations in domestic contexts to account for differences in their lobbying activities. This approach draws on the work of Hall and Soskice (2001), and posits that domestic financial systems and their associated regulatory regimes shape lobbying in the European regulatory arena. These features of the national landscapes condition banks’ holding, and deployment, of lobbying resources; and shape their beliefs about European bank regulation - meaning that banks engage essentially as national capitalist actors. The thesis uses a variety of qualitative data to investigate these activities and their roots. The findings show that banks’ lobbying behaviours can be seen to remain grounded in their national contexts; and in turn that the strength of these domestic institutional and ideational structures mean that a great deal of lobbying remains distinctly national, even where directed at a supranational venue. Targeting of the EBA is fragmented and contingent.

This thesis aims to examine the notion that the Internet is affecting the way in which we behave socially and politically. In particular, it focuses on the analysis of social capital and its potential outcomes on voting behaviour. There are three main empirical outcomes of this thesis. First, it provides an structural analysis of online networks from three different cases, and compares the network structures of these cases with different theoretical expectations about social network behaviour. The results show that online structures follow a similar pattern that we could expect offline, emphasising the role of formal organisations in fostering bridging social capital. Second, the thesis introduces a new instrument for measuring social capital, the Online Resource Generator. This module was fielded in the third wave of the British Election Study 2015 and contains a thorough measure of access to social capital in a general way and both online and offline. The instrument responses are used to calculate individual level positions on latent dimension representing different forms of social capital. These latent variables are estimated using Bayesian Item Response Theory, and aim to provide a valid measure of individual levels of social capital. Third, the thesis examines the relationship between different forms of social capital and voting turnout. In particular, it focuses on the analysis of the European Parliament Election in 2014 and the UK General Election in 2015, using a multilevel approach for the latter. The main results show that online social capital is negatively associated with a higher likelihood of voting, while the combination of online and offline social capital has a positive association. In summary, this thesis provides compelling evidence against the dystopian claims about the internet, and shows how a balanced use of technology can improve people's individual levels of social capital.

Complex social systems strive by exchanging information and resources. By means of the exchange, some actors in the system are able to at least partially determine the behaviour of another actor, thereby influencing it. Both the information exchange process and the degree of actors’ influence are latent, unobserved phenomena in many instances of real-world systems. This thesis presents a framework that intends to unearth the two hidden properties. It does so by introducing a Network Inference and Influence Framework (NIIF), which makes use of graph-based methods to derive a latent network in a social system, and measure the influence of its elements. The framework is applied on three case studies where the latency problem translates into research questions with importance for public policy making. The first case study uses NIIF to estimate the latent network of interdependency across financial institutions, and measures the extent to which a bank may negatively influence the system after an economic distress. In the second case study, a network of information diffusion is extracted from House of Commons parliamentary debates, testing the relation between the resulted metric of influence and speakers’ positions in government. The last case study builds a network of semantic and ideological affinity across UN General Assembly members, showing how graph-based methods can detect global political change. The thesis concludes with a discussion of potential future usages of the framework, as well as ameliorations.