Parties compete around political conflicts and identities that structure the way electoral alliances are formed. Changes in the issues of party competition are, then, relevant for understanding electoral dynamics. Nonetheless, the study of changes in issues over which parties compete has largely been limited to large and drastic realignments, with little systematic research aimed at understanding the process in a more comprehensive way. This thesis studies changes in the issues of electoral competition in a comparative and dynamic way. It does so by using a research design that is comparative in three ways. First, comparisons are made over time to see how the situation evolves with changes and to separate it from structural elements. Second, comparisons are made between countries, to isolate the effect of the different contextual elements, and third between issues, to see if different issues have different characteristics and dynamics. Using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project to measure the issues of the party offer, it shows that the issues discussed by parties change constantly in modern established democracies. It also shows that parties that were far away from the median voter in the previous election change the issues of their offer more radically, proving that strategic considerations play a role in these changes. However, the empirical evidence gathered using data from several opinion polls and electoral studies shows that these changes do not always translate into changes in the issues that predict the vote. Although parties explain part of the variation in the drivers of the vote, that effect is far from perfect and not common to all the issues and circumstances. This lack of automatic link between the two agendas is found both when studying it in a comparative way, and when focusing on several case studies. Consequently, further research should focus on investigating these dynamics to provide better understanding of how the two agendas interact.

The thesis explains how terrorism campaigns end, using social movement theory to analyse the Provisional IRA’s disengagement from armed violence and how this led others in the Irish Republican movement to move away from violence and remain so. The thesis argues that successful disengagement is dependent on how it is framed and the extent to which it resonates within the movement. Frame resonance is shaped by the extent it is consistent with the group’s goals, the presence of linkages in order to diffuse the frame, and the perceived credibility of those advocating it. This process ensured that most of the Provisional IRA supported disengagement, which then began to organisationally disengage as part of the peace process. Subsequently, linkages were built up with the Irish Republican movement, leading to the disengagement frame to become de-radicalised, thus providing stronger barriers against violence. The disengagement frame’s resonance in the Irish Republican movement, underpinned by political/structural change, has led to a durable decline in terrorism and political violence. The thesis’ original contribution has five dimensions: 1) the thesis draws on interviews with a broader range of actors typically found in terrorism studies; 2) the re-conceptualisation of de-radicalisation provides nuanced explanations of why attitudinal change is important for ending terrorism; 3) the thesis provides the first multi-level analysis of how terrorism ends by using a social movement approach, thus providing a more comprehensive explanation; 4) while many have recognised the ‘next generation’ as a crucial factor, the thesis is the first to analyse the interaction between generations and how the break in inter-generational support for violence emerges; and 5) the thesis challenges many assumptions on organisational disengagement by outlining how informal networks of combatants continue to exist, but shows how this can actually prevent terrorism rather than just pose a risk to recidivism.

This thesis critically analyses the process of building peace in the post-ceasefire space of Northern Ireland, from the perspective of loyalist ex-combatants attempting to reintegrate as part of a Disarmament Demobilisation Reintegration (DDR) programme. It does this to understand the challenges loyalist ex-combatants face as they move from ’uncertain defenders’ to becoming peacebuilders, or uncertain menders. In drawing on French post-structuralists, the thesis develops a conceptual framework, to critique the Liberal Peace, which expects ex-combatants to play a positive role in the reintegration process and promote reconciliation once a peace settlement has been agreed. This compilation of loyalist ex-combatant experiences then deepens knowledge on how post-Cold War peace theory shapes the way of doing peacebuilding in an increasingly neoliberal global environment. Learning from loyalist ex-combatant experiences then helps explain the everyday challenges marginalised and disadvantaged groups face in a post-ceasefire space, not just in Northern Ireland but in other conflict zones attempting to regenerate societies emerging from violent conflict. Based on these everyday challenges the thesis establishes that in the absence of a formal DDR programme, or a positive peace, many ex-combatants, and other marginalised groups, become susceptible to the coercive manipulation of local political and civil society elites, post-ceasefire paramilitary agency and international funders, who use neoliberal governmentalities to shape the conduct of conduct in peacebuilding to affect a wider societal transformation, from violent conflict towards peace and neoliberalism. With this paradigmatic shift away from tackling the underlying causes of violent conflict and promoting social justice, the thesis establishes that neoliberalism increasingly produces a ‘violent peace’ that increases, rather than reduces, the potential for polities to relapse into violence. To help resolve this negative peace, the thesis concludes with the promotion of ‘radical hope’ where subaltern critical agency may non-violently guide polities from violent conflict towards a post-neoliberal peace.

This thesis will begin and end outside the publication of The Nation newspaper. The narrative begins by establishing the uncertain ground upon which Young Ireland’s contemporaries were operating in their attempts to talk about Ireland in a way that could be understood. Precisely who was supposed to be doing the understanding will be explored at some length, as the sometimes ambiguous character (or, indeed, nationality) of the audience is deconstructed in order to reveal an inherent unease at the heart of attempts to take Ireland (and Irishness) seriously. The concern with who or what might'constitute a national reading public and how it might be created was, following John Cornelius O’Callaghan, a major concern of Young Ireland. The solution posited by Young Ireland was founded upon an historical understanding of Irish nationality. This history was necessarily implicated in discourses around race and the various subject positions this involved. These issues will be explored by reading Young Ireland alongside their contemporaries and exploring their solutions to complex questions of what Irish identity and politics might and should look like. Moving on from this we will see how the protagonists of Young Ireland themselves worked through the difficulties of articulating a hybrid subject position with regard to Ireland and the British Empire. This will lead to a more sustained engagement with the interconnected questions of the role that race and history play in the construction of an Irish national identity. Finally I will deal with how the internal tensions within the thought of Young Ireland are expressed in the work of John Mitchel, suggesting that these tensions are symptomatic of a conflictual attitude towards modernity and the temporal schemata associated with it.

The objective of this research is to develop and empirically test a comparative organization analysis approach to the interpretation of structural outcomes in social movement organizations (HJs). Various patterns of MO characteristics are empirically described and subsequently interpreted within a conceptual scheme and typology of different organizations. Empirical data is employed to clarify and test the proposed conceptual framework using a systematic approach that is largely exploratory and descriptive. This research can be labelled as a comparative, organizational-level, survey analysis of MOs. Three pivotal variables are identified: relationship to environment, size, and centralization of decision making. A three-way cross-classification forms a typology of 12 "goal and task structures". The typology is analytically integrated within a conceptual framework that presumes system properties between external environmental variables and internal structural variables. Theoretical significance is.attributed to the role of ideology as an independent variable that influences systems of relationships in complex ways. The proposed typology is used to demonstrate theoretical and empirical linkages between external environmental variables and internal structural variables, and between ideological and organizational characteristics. In effect, an empirically based methodology is confirmed as an approach to substantive theoretical and practical issues.

The thesis explores the production of violence in the intervention in Libya in 2011. In March that year an uprising against then leader Muammar Gaddafi resulted in an international intervention authorised by the United Nations (UN), which involved a no-fly zone, and aerial bombing campaign to protect civilians in Libya. The intervention is seen as the first military intervention authorised by the UN to refer to the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) norm. This thesis analyses the processes involved in the production of the international intervention in Libya through the categories of time, space and subjectivity. In doing so it draws upon neo-Foucauldian accounts of contemporary security practices, and postcolonial imaginative geographies of security and insecurity. My argument is threefold. The first argument concerns the political topography of intervention and R2P. It challenges claims of spatial separation in which political territories are clearly demarcated and separated, arguing that the security practices of liberal states are now predicated on a deterritorialised network of surveillance, monitoring and border control in which borders are not obsolete but are highly differential in impact. The second claim of the thesis concerns a displacement in the ethical measurement of humanitarian war to a temporal plane. The success of intervention is measured not in terms of lives saved, or the extent of rebuilding and reconstruction after conflict, or the humanitarian impact, but in the speed at which intervention is mobilised. The third central claim of the thesis is that humanitarian intervention depends upon, reproduces and perpetuates divisions and distinctions between people who are worthy of protection and those who may be killed. The moral universe of intervention is one where people are divided according to legitimacy based upon a series of assumptions about race, gender, class, religion and nationality. Those deemed legitimate potential subjects are worthy of saving, and many others are seen as illegitimate, and can be sacrificed without regret. The thesis concludes by arguing that the assumptions of humanitarian intervention serve to normalise violent responses to insecurity and crisis, reducing the space for non-violent alternatives. I argue that as a response, we should emphasise the possibilities for non-violent resistance.

This thesis is a study of Iranian-Islamic social movements. Iran has witnessed four major social movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Except for the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 which attracted a great deal of sociological attention, and the Constitutional Revolution which has received some specialist study, the other two, regardless of their importance and influence in the Iranian history, have been grossly neglected. In order to have a better sociological understanding and a more general model of this type of social movements there is need to review all of them according to the same theory and with an identical method. These cases which are explored in this study are: the Tobacco Movement (1892) - an 'anti colonialism' movement, the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1906) - a 'justice' movement, the 15th of Khordad movement (1963) - an 'anti modernisation' movement, and the last in chain, the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79 - an 'anti imperialism' movement. This thesis also attempts to provide a contribution to the theory of social movements with a review and synthesis of the existing major theories of the area. Ten key social movement theories are reviewed and a new synthetic one is developed. The models under review belong to Smelser (1962), Davies (1962), Toch (1966), Blumer (1969), Wilson (1973), Tilly (1978), Touraine (1981), McCarthy and Zald (1987), Melucci (1989) and Scott (1990). These theories identify quite different 'engines' of the social movement and thus can be classified according to whether they regard the individual, society, or their relations as the main cause or initiator of the social movements. Following the discussions of the relationship between the individual and society, this thesis recognises the need for an approach to social explanation which looks at the fine texture of the interrelationship of the structure, agency, and their relations, and so proposes a 'synthetic' theory of social movements which recognises the importance of the conjunction of the three elements of the individualist, the structural and the relationalist models. In this theory of social movements, social context provides the ground for the underlying mechanism of the movement to be released. Ideology plays the part of the relational factor between the individual and the society. It is the main mobilisational factor of social movements. Actors then 'perform' the movements at three levels of social actions: leadership, distribution, and enactment of the outburst. The synthetic theory provides a framework for a more comprehensive study of the four cases. Each of the movements is explained using it as a 'conceptual grid' and it is shown on each occasion to be useful tool in identifying the main agents, antagonisms, ideologies, social opportunities and constraints, and the accomplishment of the movements. So whilst the movements vary by 'focus' and by 'success' it is shown that it is Islamic ideology which shapes the goals of 'justice', 'freedom', 'independence' and 'democracy'. In all of the reviewed movements the authority of the shah came into dispute with the command of the ulama, and it was religious rituals and organisations which mobilised the people. Whilst the synthetic theory proposed here can provide an analytic framework with which to compare the movements, the history of the analysed movements reveals the significance of the 'political sociology' of Iran's last hundred years. This dimention provides an understanding of some of the 'initial conditins' which underpin the Iranian social movements. The thesis attempts to outline some crucial elements in this sociopolitical history, and attest their importance by examination of one further Iranian social movement, the National Movement of Iran (195 1-1953). This was a predominantly non-Islamic movement which failed because it declined to take the advantage of the authority of the ulama as one of the major sways at the socio-political setting of Iranian society. The adequacy of the resultant knowledge from the proposed model of Iranian-Islamic social movements is further tested against the some writings of nine scholars on Iranian social movements: Fischer (1980), Milani (1988), Parsa (1989), Amuzegar (1991), Ray (1993), Zubaida (1993), Moaddel (1993), Foran (1994) and Keddie (1995).

The past decade has seen an upsurge ofacademic and popular interest in the political activity undertaken by citizens. This thesis presents a predominantly qualitative analysis ofthe nature of voluntary political participation, and subsequently addresses a number of key concerns about the current state of democracy in Britain. It is argued that existing analysis of political participation tends to focus on quantitative questions such as the levels and socio-demographic composition of political activity, with little attention being given to the experiences of those citizens who engage with political organisations. The analysis utilises the theoretical work of JUrgen Habermas in order to consider the potential role of both state mechanisms of participation and structures of civil society within the development of rational and deliberative democracy. The primary research draws upon sixty interviews conducted within the British Labour Party, the British section of Amnesty International, two Tenants' Associations, one Residents' Association and an alternative lifestyle collective known as Exodus. Three main themes are addressed in the form of a comparative study. Firstly, the thesis considers the nature of the various organisations and their membership policies. Secondly, a typology ofpolitical participation and activism is presented. Finally, analysis is provided of the experiences ofthe respondents of the actual process ofparticipation. Addressing these themes enables the thesis to explore the nature of the discourse that occurs within spheres ofvoluntary political participation, and to provide some insight into the dialectical relationship that exists between structures of participation and the activity that develops within such contexts. It is concluded that a range of conflicting tensions currently inform voluntary political participation. These factors raise a number of serious questions about the role of civil society within processes of democratisation.

While large-scale studies of European anti-austerity movements exist, there is a need for in-depth, ‘thick description’ of anti-austerity activist cultures which explores the sustaining as well as motivating factors for political engagement. Furthermore, it is important to pay attention to differences, including gendered differences, within counterhegemonic movements to highlight the power imbalances that exist. This thesis utilises a cultural and affective approach combined with a gender lens to explore the lived and felt experiences of political participation and the gendered dimension of these. It contributes to developing a cultural and feminist approach to studying movements that takes account of emotion and gender by developing an in-depth understanding of a local anti-austerity activist culture. The research used a combination of qualitative research methods, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 30 anti-austerity activists in Nottingham. It reveals the central role of emotions in motivating and sustaining activism, uncovering the sustaining processes of solidarity and collective identity, and the importance of reasserting these in the face of an individualistic neoliberal capitalism. It identifies existing gendered barriers and exclusions to activism and ways of overcoming these, revealing that activism’s negative effects are gendered, with women feeling anxiety and guilt for not “doing enough” of the ‘right’ type of activism (direct action). This prioritising of direct action denigrates online activism, which is constructed as its opposition, underlined by the talking versus doing binary construction. Despite its supposedly abstract, universal character, it emerges that the ‘ideal perfect’ activist is the able-bodied male. The implications of this are explored, revealing the ‘dark side’ of activism which is hidden from public view. The thesis also identifies the construction of the ‘authentic’ activist who has the required lived experiences to be a ‘true’ activist, raising issues of representation. It therefore unravels the tensions between participants’ claim that “anyone and everyone can and should do” activism, and the constraints that prevent individuals from becoming politically active, including, problematically, how the ‘activist’ identity is constructed. The thesis highlights the importance of ‘care’ within the context of austerity, demonstrating the ‘retraditionalisation’ of gender roles and norms, with the redrawing of the public/private divide. In response, it explores how activism can be redefined as a form of degendered care, drawing on participants’ emphasis on empathy and universalist discourses. Overall, it contributes to social movement and feminist theory, as well as their overlap, by developing a cultural, affective, and feminist approach to studying social movements which takes account of gendered differences in activist experiences.

The main purpose of this research is to re-examine Chartism by analysing how the Home Office’s suppression of the movement affected the development of the British State and the machinery of public order during the 1830s and 1840s. In recent years, the study of Chartism has become a domain for historians engaged in cultural history. As a result, studies of both a political and localised nature have been neglected. The poverty of recent research in these areas has occurred since the major dispute between Dorothy Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones, over the ‘linguistic’ turn and the meaning of the language of Chartism took place during the 1980s. Since the early-1990s, the debate has now moved on towards what Patrick Joyce and James Vernon have identified as ‘the language of politics’. The aim of this research is to move the debate away from a cultural perspective and, instead, to examine how government policy changed to deal with Chartism. The purpose of this study is, therefore, not to examine the legislative effects of social, political and economic reforms as suggested by Gareth Stedman Jones, but to offer a more thorough investigation of the lines of argument pursued by Dorothy Thompson and James Vernon. Thompson argued that state suppression played a huge role in the demise of Chartism, whilst Vernon has asserted that during the first half of the nineteenth century the political system gradually became closed and disciplined. Mass movements such as Chartism, it is argued, failed in their quest to bring about major changes to the political system in the early nineteenth century, largely because they succumbed to huge pressure from the state and its institutions. In order to establish the influence of the Home Office, this study has analysed how its policy impacted upon the Chartists in the West Riding. This involved a struggle for hegemony between central government and local agencies which ultimately brought about significant changes to the way in which the state functioned, along with many improvements to its machinery of control. These reforms included the advent of better policing and a gradual redefining of the roles of traditional forms of control such as the magistracy, army, militia and yeomanry. From a thorough investigation of both primary and secondary source materials, the evidence suggests that Dorothy Thompson was generally correct in her observation that the Home Office suppression of Chartism allowed the state to learn from its mistakes and become more effective in managing public order. However, this study will argue that the process was not as clear cut as Thompson implied. The implementation of reforms was a gradual process in which the Home Office played a significant role in the management of tensions that existed amongst various central and local government agencies. In doing so, the state became more efficient in controlling disorder. It remains for others to investigate the view of Gareth Stedman Jones that Chartism was by-passed by a reforming state.