Over half a century after Islamic economics, as constructed in the post-colonial search for a modern Muslim identity, claimed that a morality-based economic system, built on the axiomatic foundations of Islamic ontological thought, would achieve the social and political aims of Islam, Muslim lands are in a dire state of underdevelopment and chaos in which basic human rights are absent even though resources are not scarce. Therefore, it may be said, that this Islamic economic vision has failed to produce any desired effect. The question is, why? This research explores the ontological sources of Quran and Sunnah, aims to identify the reasons for the failure and, through the reformulation of a new authentic model, aims to present an Islamic development methodology which is holistic in nature and which transcends the limitations of the economic or political spheres. The resulting model encompasses the concept of trust and leadership in Islam and identifies the role and functioning of each one separately. This research, which is qualitative in nature and utilises the methods of discourse analysis and textual and contextual deconstruction, is structured around three major essays the first of which details the overall development model as the path of Islam-Iman-Ihsan (submission-faith-perfection), the second with the role of iman (faith) as the binding force in Islamic social order and the last details a new concept of Islamic leadership, drawn from the prophetic example, and outlines its specific functions to construct the environment in which Islamic development can be sustained

This dissertation is concerned with the distribution of power within the Conservative Party, but specifically how power manifests itself. Following the devastating 1997 defeat, the party embarked on a programme of organisational change, which brought together the individual components of the party, underpinned by a written constitution. A more formal approach to organisation ensued. It was deemed the route to party renewal, in line with the Labour Party's central command model. As such, it was a direct challenge to the traditional autonomy enjoyed by the constituency parties. The research thus examines how the party responded organisationally to defeat and the attendant impact on local autonomy. The methodology employed is qualitative in nature and takes the bottom-up perspective. Interviews were conducted with local constituency officers, area officers, agents and regional officials. These were supported by statistical and documentary data. Three centrally-orientated themes emerged: the right of political determination, the development of political capability and the approach to party management. These were synthesised into a new framework to explain the evolution of the Conservative Party organisation: the managerial-network model. This recognises the move to greater central administration and control, but equally to local rights of self-organisation, as local autonomy is now conceived. Moreover, it incorporates the increasing engagement of outside supporter networks and expertise at the local level; this is an extension of the national practice. The model is appraised against the `oligarchy' and `party evolution' literature. Oligarchy has been strengthened by managerialism, thereby re-enforcing McKenzie's (1963) argument, but in a wider organisational context. The party evolution literature was found to be too narrowly focused, as it did not satisfactorily address organisation. Hence, the managerial-network model builds upon the electoralprofessionalm odel of Panebianco( 1988), but is more comprehensive and flexible. It also suggests that the notion of `membership party' is no longer applicable as there is a noticeable political deficit locally. It has been replaced by a local network in which the local association is the foundation. This has resulted in the blurring of its boundaries. The new organisational settlement is a logical and sustainable response to the changing political environment that the Conservative Party leadership was confronted with, but one that offers room for further development.

Based on the Europeanization and the misfit concepts, the study is looking on the transformation of the Bulgarian governance and policy in the field of regional development, resulting from the EU accession conditionality and the EU regional development policy (after the country became a member of the EU). The study is looking to answer three main questions. What is changing as a result of the adaptation pressures coming from the EU? What are the mechanisms of change? Is it possible to describe the change as multi-level governance? In order to give a detailed answer to the questions the study is looking at the changing role of three sets of actors - the central government, the local authorities and the non-state actors in order to find out how the adaptation pressures coming from the EU are leading to changes in each of these levels, as well as in their role in the implementation of the EU regional policy in Bulgaria. The study is also comparing Bulgaria with two similar EU-15 countries (Greece and Ireland) and the central and East- European countries that joined the EU in 2004. The study argues that even though Bulgaria had to undergo significant changes in order to respond to the requirements of the Copenhagen criteria in the field of the EU regional policy, these changes have in fact strengthened the control of the Bulgarian central government over the policy formulation and implementation process, despite the initial attempts of the European Commission to promote decentralization and multi-level governance in the candidate countries of the fifth enlargement.

The biography of the Lebanese businessman-politician Rafiq Hariri explores the different economic, political, cultural, and 'imperial' projects contained in neoliberalism. Rafiq Hariri (1944-2005) accumulated great wealth as a contractor in Saudi Arabia during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), served as Lebanese prime minister (1992-1998, 2000-2004), and pushed through a neoliberal reconstruction programme. In February 2005 he was assassinated, prompting a UN investigation. Hariri belonged to the 'transnational capitalist class' but his rise is not just due to the impersonal dynamics of global capitalism, it must also be placed within the specific historical sociology of Lebanon: the production and reproduction of classes, elites, networks, and the culture of sectarianism. Rafiq Hariri's rise is due to changes in Lebanon's role in the world economy and in its class structure. Thanks to Saudi support, Hariri was the most successful member of a 'new contractor bourgeoisie' of Lebanese who had grown wealthy in the Gulf and pursued a neoliberal project in post-war Lebanon. Hariri and allied technocrats put in place two neoliberal rent-creation mechanisms: reconstruction of Beirut's city centre and financialisation through government over-borrowing. Former militia leaders prevented further neoliberal reforms: privatisation and cutting welfare spending, which was a patronage resource. Class interest was mediated by elites, which is a more open category than class, not least because it incorporates sectarian identity. Hariri transformed himself from a 'national' leader to a specifically 'Sunni' leader from the mid-1990s onwards. His sectarian provision of health and education services was a response to pressure from rival elites on his neoliberal project. His philanthropy reproduced the culture of sectarianism. Changes in US imperial strategy from the 1980s to 2005 affected Hariri's relationship with Damascus. US-Syrian conflict led to Saudi-Syrian tension and curtailed Hariri's room for manoeuvre in Lebanon. Hariri's network of technocrats, experts in sectarian mobilisation, Syrian regime members, etc. is an artefact that allows his biographer to locate agency in neoliberal globalisation.

This thesis reappraises Gramsci’s thought. It notes a discrepancy between his analysis and proposed reforms of the Italian ruling class and his Marxist proposals for the social transformation. Gramsci aimed to remedy the Italian ‘crisis’ by incorporating the masses into the ruling class and responding to their demands that others had neglected. By contrast, Gramsci’s Marxism aimed to achieve a communist society by overriding the very political distinction between the ruling class and the ruled, upon which this programme was based. If the former signifies that ‘everybody can govern,’ the latter suggests that ‘everybody actually governs.’ Chapters 1-3 demonstrate how Gramsci consistently focused on the demands of the Southern peasants as the largest group among the Italian masses. He argued that their call for agrarian reform had not been represented since the Risorgimento, stifled by stigmatisation and common sense of a Catholic origin to uphold the status quo. Chapters 4-5 show how Gramsci’s reformist programme aimed at representing these demands and shaped his concepts of hegemony and the ethical state. However, he also elaborated these concepts in Marxist terms as a way of establishing a communist society. Gramsci’s reform sought to recruit the masses into the ruling class and recreate a stable and ‘hegemonic’ relation between the two. Doing so necessitated the ‘ethical state,’ which would narrow the educational gap between the two groups and enable the masses to acquire the intellectual resources needed for politics. However, this programme was incompatible with his Marxist notion of hegemony, which conceived the ‘Modern Prince’ as a totalitarian party capable of replacing parliamentarism, and of the ethical state as a ‘regulated society’ identical to the communist utopia. As Chapter 6 illustrates, by seeking a comprehensive transformation of capitalist and class-divided societies, his Marxism overrode the very distinction involved in his proposed political reform.

In most academic writing on state sovereignty, it is considered as a special, abstract form of independent power. This thesis considers sovereignty from a historical and anthropological perspective, arguing that it is a certain form of social and political organisation through which the state's power is performed and maintained as natural. This organisation and maintenance rests on particular, powerful ideas, for example on the assumed unity of territory, government and population, and on certain values about what constitutes politics and a fulfilled human life. By analysing the management of Iraqi migrants in Damascus through state and humanitarian institutions, this thesis shows the daily-life bureaucratic and violent practices through which state sovereignty became a reality in this context. The analysis emphasises that state sovereignty exists as an imagined 'ideal', as reflected in international law or world maps, and as a much more complex, context-dependant, lived reality. The differences between the way that humanitarian agencies considered Iraqi migrants from the perspective of the 'ideal', and the way Syrian state institutions governed Iraqi migrants according to very different standards, highlighted this distinction. Methodologically, this thesis calls for, and attempts to provide, a hermeneutic approach to social inquiry, in which empirical evidence underpins arguments about theory. Ethnography and interviews in Syria were used to collect in-depth information about the lives of Iraqi migrants, and the interventions and programmes through which Iraqi migration was being managed, in 2009 and 2010.

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The dissertation formulates a theory of outlaw emotions and makes a case for placing the category of emotion at the heart of our pursuits in understanding social process. The theory is articulated in the space between interaction ritual theories (taking insights from and offering a critique to the sociology of Randall Collins) and psychoanalytic theories (drawing on the elaborations on the "radical imagination" authored by Cornelius Castoriadis). Actors are relational, or multi-relational, rather than phallo-centric; they become entangled with one another and they sustain their synchronic entanglements with meaningful objects, on the basis of their mutual resonance of inner conflicts, and, as a result, they create more meaning. At the level of social institutions, there is an accumulation of the emotional energies flared up in local synchronic entanglements. Social structures are made up through a complex aggregation of emotional energies. To anchor these theoretical notions, I analyse a case of intellectual change in the academic discipline of International Relations, known as "the constructivist turn". Drawing on biographic interviews with International Relations scholars, I unpack this "turn", and I show how emotions such as rage, anger, embarrassment, and humiliation have been at the root of different forms of creativity, and have allowed new theoretical developments in the field. The dissertation thus makes a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, by articulating a socioanalytic way of understanding the creation of novelty in intellectual fields, and by telling a story of change in a discipline in terms of an accumulation of emotions. The dissertation also makes a series of epistemological and methodological contributions, starting from a socioanalytic reading of biographic interviews and ending with a critical approach to citation analysis, which is here used to trace the emotional organisation of an intellectual field.

Transnational philanthropic organisations (TPOs) have become important agents in the relief of global poverty. However, the current literature on transnational justice has treated them as uncontroversial vehicles for realising duties to the global poor. This thesis asks whether the current conditions under which TPOs operate raise questions of socioeconomic justice. It will be structured into two parts. The first argues that the current practices of TPOs are characterised by benevolent domination. It begins by addressing the common assumption that transnational philanthropy is a matter of personal ethics rather than justice. It will be shown, using Peter Singer's "solution" to global poverty, that the ethical approach either lacks the tools to be able to assess the character of institutions that are necessary to relieve global poverty or relies on a crypto-utilitarian theory of justice. In either case, this provides reasons for relational theorists to reject Singer's approach and provides prima facie justification for examining transnational philanthropy from the perspective of justice. It continues by generating a conception of domination that is drawn from the republican tradition of political thought. However, it distinguishes itself from the conventional understanding by emphasising the structural, normative, and systemic elements of domination. This conception will be used to test the current practices of TPOs. It will be shown that they are characterised by social relationships in which TPOs possess institutionally constituted capacity for interactional and systemic arbitrary interference in the choices available to the global poor, who are in a situation of dependency. In other words, TPOs dominate the global poor. The second part of the thesis will argue that benevolent domination is an ecumenical problem for relational theories of justice. It will then examine social liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and republicanism. It will be argued that in varying degrees these three theories have idealised TPOs and, consequently, have provided non-ideal guidance that is incoherent with the principles found in ideal theory and is an impediment for the development of just transnational social institutions. As a result, it will be argued that this exposes the need for a theory of transitional socioeconomic justice that can provide coherent guidance that is adequately transitional. The last chapter of the thesis will provide explore what this means for theories of transnational justice and the practice of transnational philanthropy.

Exploring and Analysing the Demand and Supply Conditions for the Institutionalisation of Islamic Banking and Finance in Libya Abdulwahab Alhajam Abstract Islamic banking and finance has made important inroads into the financial systems of many countries including the major industrialised countries. However, in some other countries, such as in Libya, where there has been political unwillingness towards Islamic banking and finance (due its connotation with Islam as a religion) either there had not been any developments or very sluggish developments took place. The change in the political regimes in some of the Arab countries, including in Libya, in recent years following the so-called Arab Spring, shifted the balance of powers resulting in a certain degree of Islamisation of their respective financial systems; the Libyan transitional government adopted full Islamisation of the banks in the country indicating a radical change in the strategy compared to the previous regime. This study, hence, aims to explore and empirically examine the demand and supply conditions for Islamic banking and finance in Libya and also for the institutionalisation of Islamic finance through participants’ perceptions, opinions and understanding. In doing so, a questionnaire survey aimed at collecting data from ordinary people, business circles as well as professional bankers and financiers was administered in the early months of 2012 shortly after the i new political phase was initiated in the country. With the primary data collected, the aim has been to (1) gauge participants’ perceptions and opinions on the past performance of the Libyan economy and financial system, (2) measure individual’s awareness, understanding and expectations of Islamic finance and banking and (3) measure individuals’ understanding and support for an alternative type of institutionalisation. In addition, since this study aims to explore the supply side conditions as well, a number of individuals with various supply-related stakeholder groups were interviewed in early 2012 in relation to their understanding and expectations of Islamic banking and finance as well as its potential role in Libya alongside the potential obstacles perceived. The results of the interviews and questionnaires have shown that the people of Libya support the implementation of the Islamic banking and finance system in the country, since most of the Libyan people prefer to avoid interest-based banking transactions. However, the majority of respondents believe that the former regime has been responsible for the underdevelopment of the Islamic banking and finance sector in Libya. Although a number of studies have highlighted the social failure of Islamic banks, the results of this study on that matter can be described as inconclusive. Accordingly, some of the participants in the survey believe that Islamic banks in Libya will make a significant contribution towards social development as expressed through corporate social responsibility activities. Thus, some of the participants believe that the government should also regulate the Islamic banks in terms of their delivery on social programmes with the objective of ensuring that Islamic banking can contribute to the future socio-economic development in Libya. As part of an alternative institutionalisation, therefore, this study explored the idea of institutionalisation of Islamic social banking in Libya to serve the socially and financially excluded groups in achieving developmental and social objectives. However, the results show that only a small fraction of the participants are familiar with the concept of social banking; the majority of respondents, nonetheless, would prefer Islamic social banking and commercial banking to remain separate entities, and believe that the former should receive funding from government, NGOs and commercial banks.