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In our time, it is not unusual for Islam to be portrayed as a political ideology. Constant references towards “political Islam”, “Islamism” and “Islamists” have become part of the intellectual language and are rarely challenged in terms of their foundational claims. This thesis investigates the fundamental premise that the Qur’ān may contain a political theory. In doing so, a detailed investigation has been conducted in defining concepts of the “political” from within the Muslim tradition by particularly locating these concepts within the Muslim intellectual tradition. The leading research question also seriously considers the hermeneutical issue about how scripture is read to yield a holistic understanding of the entirety of the message. The work of Toshihiko Izutsu (1914-1994) has been employed as one of the major methodological tools in analysing the Qur’ān. Alongside Izutsu’s semantic analysis, the thematic approach has also been utilised to provide a more holistic understanding of the Qur’ān. Within this framework, this research has proposed that the Qur’ān indeed contains a hierarchy of concepts that is indicative of the Qur’ān itself prioritising concepts. With this in mind, a cluster of concepts emerges which forms the main analyses. Accordingly, the idea of a caliphate theory that is equated with an “Islamic state” has been postulated to be non-Qur’ānically based. In fact, it is found that the very proposition is contradictory in terms, as the modern state itself is a European invention, both in structure and form. This study also explored the concept of sharīʿa, arguing that there are two fundamental natures of sharīʿa, the first is that it has mainly been a force of challenge and opposition to power; the second is the emphasis upon individual free choice. One comes to the conclusion that the Qur’ān is intentionally silent towards any political structure or system, yet at another level the Qur’ān reinforces, justice, rights, accountability and apposes injustices of all kind. In an attempt to provide a potential readings of the Qur’ān to render answers to the research questions, the inferences generated from the research are put together with other Qur’ānic concepts such as taqwā and iḥsān with the goal of understanding the role of the individual and the community in the wider Qur’ānic Weltanschauung. The nature of the individual is dynamic; his or her core nature is in constant turmoil but desires perfection. With the desire of perfection comes the drive towards bettering oneself and one’s surroundings. There is a tension or paradox between being an individual and belonging to the collective and between living in the mundane but believing in the sacred. This tension (or paradox) could be solved by means of a constant relationship between refining oneself (looking inward) and projecting outward with the taqwā that is developed.

This thesis examines the impact of state weakness on Iraqi foreign policy since the US invasion. Drawing on the concept of the social contract in political theory, this project seeks to untangle the relationship between state legitimacy, violence and foreign policy. In the aftermath of the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi state has undergone many forms of weakness. Each chapter of this dissertation deals with a qualitatively different moment in the trajectory of Iraqi state weakness and analyses the impact on the key foreign policies or relationships of that period. The limited research that has been conducted on post-invasion Iraq’s foreign relations has tended to portray Iraq as a passive victim of external interference. There have not been any comprehensive examinations of the way in which Iraq’s internal politics influence the activity of foreign powers in Iraq; nor of Iraq’s own foreign policy activity. The result is that little is understood about how post-invasion Iraq is positioning itself in a volatile regional environment. The literature on foreign policy analysis has a propensity to focus overwhelmingly on the role of great powers in the international system. Where small or weak states have been addressed, they are seen as merely responding to their vulnerable position in the hierarchy of powers. Drawing on recent work on the international relations of African states, this study introduces a new research agenda that seeks to understand the relationship between state weakness and foreign policy production.

This thesis challenges the assumption that recent political action in Arab societies is evidence of a ‘Habermasian’ public sphere. It argues instead that the specific historical trajectory of the public sphere associated with Jürgen Habermas’ Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, renders it an unsuitable operational conceptual framework in which to ground recent debates on the question of emancipatory political action in the various states and societies of the Middle East and North Africa. In order to demonstrate the extent of dissonance between the Habermasian designation and the empirical evidence, the thesis constructs a conceptual framework based on the public sphere’s developmental trajectory articulated by Habermas in Structural Transformation. The evidence when cast in the Habermasian light foresees a pessimistic outcome for this activity. It depicts instead a stylised identity community built around commercialism and advertising enabled by commercialisation processes and the expansion of communicative technologies. It concludes, through a discussion of recent empirical evidence, that a Habermasian approach to this material may not in fact be the most useful option. Instead, it draws on the work of Hannah Arendt, specifically sections from The Human Condition and On Revolution, which also considers the public realm. Arendt downplays the economic foundations of the public realm to a greater extent than Habermas, uncoupling political consequences from economic production. The emergent public realm of political significance in the MENA might then be better understood as an Arendtian space of appearance which envisages a possible rebuilding of a political community after the tearing down of consensus. In doing so, the thesis provides a preliminary and partial assessment of the justificatory basis for using an expressly Habermasian characterisation of the public sphere to analyse these events.

This thesis investigates the natural gas geopolitics of Turkey and explores its interaction with the Turkish foreign policy making of the Justice and Development Party (JDP). Whilst Turkey does not have enough indigenous natural gas reserves to meet the existing and growing demand, the country does have great advantages, as it is located between the major supplier countries in the Middle East and Eurasia and is placed at the crossroads of an energy hungry European natural gas market. Therefore, the major aim of this research is to explore capacity building in the creation of relationships of interdependence between Turkey and supplier and demanding countries. Rather than introducing a dependency energy mechanism, this thesis offers the interaction capacity of the country with natural gas suppliers and consuming countries. In order to explain the relationship between politics and energy variables, the thesis establishes the theoretical framework of the study through the use of a pluralistic and integrated model, by combining International Relations Theories, the foreign policy making process of Turkey and a conceptualisation of the relations of energy interdependence. The descriptive analysis of Eurasia and the energy profile of Turkey provide detailed information about the existing energy trade and dependency relations in the Eurasian space. Hence, it explains the importance of Turkey in Europe’s diversification of energy corridors and Turkey’s natural gas market, which is considered to be the second biggest market in Europe. The significance and role of Turkey in the construction of pipeline projects (ITGI, TANAP, Nabucco, Nabucco-West and TAP) that go through Turkey to Europe, a route which is called the Southern Corridor, are analysed in the thesis. On the other hand, this thesis offers certain perspectives for the Caspian-Turkey-Europe natural gas corridor, focusing on Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan’s role in the natural gas trade for the energy security of Europe. Moreover, the natural gas potential of Iran, Iraq (including KRG), Qatar, Egypt and Israel, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan are viewed as major natural gas sources for Turkey and Europe in this thesis. Turkey has historical and economic ties with the Caspian Sea and Middle East regions, which hold immense natural gas reserves that can be marketed to Turkey and to the European Union (EU). Mapping Turkey’s energy relations with consuming and producing countries, and defining Turkey’s geopolitical space, will not only help to develop its energy policy to secure its own energy consumption but also to manage interdependence relations between Eurasia and Europe. This is a new conceptualisation of energy supply and transit management of Turkey in the context of a new model called the Anatolian Gas Centre (AGS).

This study entails a theoretical reading of the Iranian modern history and follows an interdisciplinary agenda at the intersection of philosophy, economics, and politics and intends to offer a novel framework for the analysis of socio-economic underdevelopment in Iran in the modern era. A brief review of Iranian modern history from the constitutional revolution, to the oil nationalization movement, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the recent Reformist and Green movements demonstrates that Iranian people travelled full circle. This historical experience of socio-economic underdevelopment revolving around the bitter question of “why are we backward?” and its manifestation in perpetual socio-political instability and violence is the subject matter of this study. Foucault’s conceived relation between the production of truth and production of wealth captures the essence of hypothesis offered in this study. Michel Foucault (1980: 93-4) maintains that “In the last analysis, we must produce truth as we must produce wealth, indeed we must produce truth in order to produce wealth in the first place”. Based on a hybrid methodology combining hermeneutics of understanding and hermeneutics of suspicion, this study proposes that the failure to produce wealth has had particular roots in the failure in the production of truth. At the heart of the proposed theoretical model is the following formula: The Iranian dasein’s confused preference structure culminates in the formation of unstable coalitions which in turn leads to institutional failure, creating a chaotic social order and a turbulent history as experienced by the Iranian nation in the modern era. The following set of interrelated propositions elaborate further on the core formula of the model: Each and every Iranian person and her subjectivity and preference structure is the site of three distinct warring regimes of truth and identity choice sets (identity markers) related to the ancient Persian empire (Persianism), Islam, and modernity. These three historical a priori and regimes of truth act as conditions of possibility for social interactions, and are unities in multiplicities. They, in their perpetual state of tension and conflict, constitute the mutually exclusive, contradictory, and confused dimensions of the prism of the Iranian dasein. The confused preference structure prevents Iranian people from organizing themselves in stable coalitions required for collective action to achieve the desired socio-economic change. The complex interplay between the state of inbetweenness and the state of belatedness makes it impossible to form stable coalitions in any areas of life, work, and language to achieve the desired social transformations, turning Iran into a country of unstable coalitions and alliances in macro, meso and micro levels. This in turn leads to failure in the construction of stable institutions (a social order based on rule of law or any other stable institutional structure becomes impossible) due to perpetual tension between alternative regimes of truth manifested in warring discursive formations, relations of power, and techniques of subjectification and their associated economies of affectivity. This in turn culminates in relations of power in all micro, meso, and macro levels to become discretionary, atomic, and unpredictable, producing perpetual tensions and social violence in almost all sites of social interactions, and generating small and large social earthquakes (crises, movements, and revolutions) as experienced by the Iranian people in their modern history. As such, the society oscillates between the chaotic states of socio-political anarchy emanating from irreconcilable differences between and within social assemblages and their affiliated hybrid forms of regimes of truth in the springs of freedom and repressive states of order in the winters of discontent. Each time, after the experience of chaos, the order is restored based on the emergence of a final arbiter (Iranian leviathan) as the evolved coping strategy for achieving conflict resolution. This highly volatile truth cycle produces the experience of socio-economic backwardness. The explanatory power of the theoretical framework offered in the study exploring the relation between the production of truth, trust and wealth is tested on three strong events of Iranian modern history: the Constitutional Revolution, the Oil-Nationalization Movement and the Islamic Revolution. The significant policy implications of the model are explored.

This thesis intends to promote two key original contributions to the field of International Relations. One element of this thesis is to engage the body of work on Anglo-American relations with a set of International Relations theories in order to develop the understandings of the concept of the Special Relationship. By using the work of Alliance Theory and the English School’s notion of International Society, this thesis presents a lucid model for analysing Britain and America’s security partnerships. With this model in place, this thesis explores one of the most recent periods of the relationship by investigating the government of Gordon Brown. This thesis uses this International Relations theoretical approach to explore Anglo-American relations in the Brown period by investigating the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These conflicts were representative of the UK-US partnership and went through significant developments in the period between 2007 and 2010. In the case of Iraq, the Brown period saw the end of British combat operations and responsibility for parts of the country being handed back to the Iraqis. While these developments took place, attention returned to the war in Afghanistan and this period saw the emergence of serious problems in the conduct of the war. In this thesis, both of these conflicts are inspected by examining corresponding themes to demonstrate the working relationship between Britain and America. Equipment matters, troop power, military strategy and alliance relations are the four main grounds in which the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are investigated to determine the success of the Anglo-American partnership under Gordon Brown. The findings of this thesis suggest that the Brown period saw the beginning of the deconstruction of the UK-US alliance as the goals of the alliance had failed to be achieved. Largely due to the British military’s inability to conduct both wars simultaneously to the standard needed for success, her credibility as a reliable partner to the US was diminished. Brown himself was criticised for limiting the capabilities of the armed forces to operate effectively. However, Brown remained a strong supporter of the US in the War on Terror and did aim to provide important contributions to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the failings of the alliance the theoretical approach to understanding the Special Relationship has proven to be an effective way to examine the nature of British and American interaction.

Natural resources have long been associated with strategic benefits and the potential to generate impressive economic wealth. Consequently, scarce and exhaustible natural resources have been moreover coveted given the prospects for even greater gains. However, competition over ownership rights to reserves can lead to tensions as well as conflict. Resource nationalism has been described as the case in which governments and/or ethnic groups lay claim to natural resources located within territorial boundaries for the purposes of ownership and control. This thesis examines the impact of resource nationalism on international relations and the shaping of geopolitics using the Persian Gulf countries of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as case studies. It employs a multi-faceted approach in which components of resource nationalism are identified and expounded. The materials of focus are oil and gas, both of which are present across Persian Gulf region and are the primary generators of revenue for each case study. The thesis explores the dynamics of resource nationalism through various interpretations and manifestations, demonstrating its utilization in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Additionally, derivations of respective implementations are reviewed such as economic entities and militarization. In this vein, existing and developing ethnic tensions are also assessed. Afterwards, further unexplored and unidentified usages of resource nationalism are additionally covered. The research concludes by providing conceptual solutions for the shortcomings of resource nationalism framework, recommendations for tactical management of deficiencies, and prospects for proliferation.

This thesis examines United States foreign policy towards Afghanistan as a contemporary piece of analysis informed by Foreign Policy Analysis. As part of its Global War on Terror, the Bush Administration intervened in Afghanistan in early October 2001, and only in June 2011 did the Obama Administration decide to begin to end US involvement in Afghanistan. During these eleven years, a timeline which is the subject of this thesis, the US Global War on Terror policy in Afghanistan experienced a number of changes, evolving from a policy of ‘abandonment’ prior to the 9/11 terrorist acts to a military ‘intervention’, from a ‘counterterrorism’ to a ‘counter-insurgency’ strategy, from ‘destroying’ terrorism to ‘containing’ it, from treating the Taliban as ‘terrorists’ to declaring them as ‘non-terrorists’, from the goal of ‘defeating’ the Taliban to ‘degrading’ them, from seeing Afghanistan as having compelling relevance to US national security interests to seeing it as having minimal importance, and from intending to spend as long as it took to secure a ‘democratic’ and ‘strong’ Afghanistan to the objective of establishing a ‘good enough’ state so that the US could have a quick exit. Four decisions are identified to signify these developmental turning points: the decision to intervene in late-2001; the decision to employ a counterterrorism strategy in early 2002; the decision to approve a counter-insurgency strategy in late-2009; and the decision to begin to withdraw US troops in June 2011. Informed by the Foreign Policy Decision-Making Approach from Foreign Policy Analysis, this research analyses what the United States foreign policy towards Afghanistan was at each of the four turning points, and how and why it was constructed. Policymakers’ idiosyncratic characteristics, especially their belief systems and images, their bureaucratic positions and personal ties, domestic influences, and, most importantly, ‘false assumptions’, are those causal factors shown to be responsible for the resulting strategy for the Global War on Terror, which began in Afghanistan, and later for the abovementioned strategy changes. One of the main arguments of this thesis is that the assumptions made by both the Bush and the Obama Administrations were ill-informed and misjudged, and derived from rigid ideologies rather than realities on the ground in Afghanistan, and that therefore the policy choices failed at the implementation phases, greatly triggering the aforementioned changes in the Global War on Terror strategy in Afghanistan over the course of the eleven years.