The thesis investigates the paradoxical developments and implications of the emerging Romani (Gypsy) civil rights movement in post-socialist Europe. Focusing on contemporary Hungary as a case study for the region, the research covers discursive and political frameworks on human rights, and critically analyses their multifaceted dimensions, including the role of human rights NGOs and INGOs and the moral entrepreneurs who run them. The research uses qualitative methods to investigate the activities of non-state actors and social agents which influence both Romani communities as well as state policy in Hungary vis-a-vis Roma. In Hungarian society, the complex discursive shifts on Romani people, from the 'Gypsy problem' to 'Roma rights' are key components of an emerging narrative of liberal human rights entrepreneurs engaged in creating a visible space for recognition of the rights of Roma. The research investigates how the public face of the 'movement' builds itself around claims of violence and oppression of Roma. It also reflects upon key strategies and technologies employed by the movement's participants within Hungarian civil society. The co-existence of neoliberal human rights regimes of governance with emancipatory discourses indicates, paradoxically, the continuing (re)production of racialised and other hierarchies within the movement itself which reinforce asymmetries of power within Hungarian society. Another primary finding is that in practice the movement has privileged the pursuit of civil liberties over socio-economic justice for Roma, and has, as a result, served to dislocate local Romani communities from decision-making structures. The thesis argues that 'counterdiscourses' to neoliberal human rights approaches are effectively marginalized, as particular 'Roma rights' frameworks have become impositions from outside the Romani communities, generating arenas of strategic instrumentalisation by elite participants. Subaltern Romani communities signal their awareness of these asymmetries of power, and show their resistance through a strategic display of ironic humour and attempts at epistemic disobedience.

This thesis provides a critical examination of four approaches to democratic inclusion. These approaches are: egalitarian theories of deliberative democracy, identity politics and its post-structuralist critics, and integrative approaches. The thesis presents each approach as a successively more effective way of addressing democratic exclusion. Each theory is measured against the demands of accommodating the claims of groups that have suffered some form of historical exclusion and injustice. The thesis explains the significance of the demands of historical injustices in relation to these approaches and concludes that deliberative democracy and the politics of recognition require supplementation by a politics of reconciliation. Drawing on the idea of reconciliation from conflict resolution and international relations, the thesis explores the way in which democratic inclusion can be supplemented. The politics of reconciliation is fundamentally crucial for the task of accommodating demands of historically excluded social groups primarily because of its emphasis on confronting the past, acknowledging injustices, taking responsibility and offering an apology for causing these injustices and embracing the concrete and specific experiences of historical oppression and exclusion. Briefly, the distinctiveness of reconciliation stems from its serious engagement with the specificities and particularities of real and concrete experiences of historical oppression and exclusion. The originality of this thesis lies in providing a supplement to and therefore transforming the politics of recognition and deliberative democracy and their ability to address political problems of excluded social groups. This thesis does not aim to replace deliberation and recognition with new substitutes but seeks to offer a new interpretation of these theories and supplement them with reconciliation. Briefly, the thesis offers a new interpretation to familiar issues in different disciplines and the novel task has been to bring them together. The application of the ethic of reconciliation, from International Relations and conflict resolution, to the politics of recognition and deliberation makes a significant contribution to the field and the opening of a new research agenda for normative theories of democratic inclusion.

This is a study of how one can successfully justify the universality of human rights to people with a diversity of beliefs and values. I argue that intercultural dialogue is an essential part of working out an interpretation of human rights that is acceptable to a broad range of cultures. I develop this position through critical engagement with three recent philosophical approaches to the intercultural validity of human rights: John Rawls's Law of Peoples, Martha Nussbaum's Human Capabilities approach, and Abdullahi An-Na'im's cross-cultural dialogue approach. Inspired by Judith Shklar's political liberalism of fear and Ins Young's critical theory, I seek an account of human rights that has normative legitimacy from the perspectives of marginalized and victimized people. Cross-cultural dialogue in my scheme is a bottom-up approach from the victimized and powerless people that can avoid the problem of generality and provide multiple routes to reach agreement regarding universal human rights. In the end, I believe my approach will be descriptively more suitable to the moral reality of universal human rights, and provide a normative grounding of human rights in a way that is more compelling than other approaches.

This thesis examines the relationship between human rights treaties and sovereignty of both the state and legislature of the United Kingdom. In order to do this the thesis examines the meaning of state sovereignty at international law and legislative sovereignty within a state. The relationship between the two sovereignty doctrines and the various stages of protection under human rights treaties (negotiations, ratification, implementation and enforcement) is examined with particular attention on the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966. Following a brief introduction, chapter one identifies a model of state sovereignty for use throughout the thesis. Chapter two analyses the meaning of legislative sovereignty with particular reference to the UK Parliament's sovereign status. In chapter three the relationship between the two sovereignty doctrines is examined. Chapter four analyses the implications for sovereignty of entry into a human rights treaty. Chapter five explores the relationship between the two sovereignty doctrines and the implementation and enforcement of these treaties. In chapter six the perceptions as to the relationship between sovereignty and human rights treaties, held by both the UK government and treaty bodies, will be analysed. Finally, chapter seven will explore further the conclusions of this thesis.

In both Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, the debates on how to define victims of political violence mirror the debates on how we understand the past; whether we see the past as a political conflict or a problem of terrorism. This thesis investigates the relationship between these debates and transitions from conflict to peace within democratic states (ie the under-explored type of intra-democratic transitions). Specifically it asks "What is the relationship between transitional justice processes that take place in democratic states and the debates on how to define victims in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country"? Employing comparative, socio-legal and qualitative methods, the study analyses the debates on victims using a transitional justice framework; it is the first comparative examination of these two case studies using a transitional justice framework. The research found that, despite the existing controversies and hierarchies, Northern Ireland and the Basque Country have moved towards a more inclusive definition in contrast to Spain. The thesis argues that the transitional framework itself is related to the inclusive definition of victims, ie, the expansion of the definitions in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country is explained by a correlation between the definitions and the process of transition. Connected with this is the role of different narratives; the rejection of an official peace process and the adoption of a less inclusive definition of victims correlates with the adoption of a counterterrorist narrative in Spain; while in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, the more inclusive definitions arise in the context of more complex, admittedly still contested narratives of conflict, terrorism and human rights violations. On a theoretical level, this PhD contributes to the field of transitional justice by studying one especially complex aspect of intra-democratic transitions, the contestation over victimhood. The study shows how there are various ways by which to frame transitional justice in democratic states (states dealing with historical abuses and states dealing with the legacy of a paradigmatic transitions, for instance) and adds two situations in which transitional justice applies: intra-democratic transitions, where transitional justice mechanisms are implemented in correlation with a transition; and the implementation of transitional justice mechanisms in the context of counter-terrorist policies. The thesis explores how the discourse of transitional justice is expanding to new realms and concludes by identifying future lines of research opened by this expansion.

Although perceived changes in political participation patterns amongst young people in recent years have attracted much academic research in established democracies this remains an understudied area in the newer post-communist democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. In established democracies, researchers have shown that although many young people are increasingly shunning traditional forms of political involvement, such as voting and political party membership, instead they are turning to more direct methods such as volunteering and protest. Despite evidence that young people in newer democracies may also have low levels of electoral participation and party membership, there is little understanding of whether this is due to communist legacies of forced participation, economic and social hardship or indeed reflects trends in established democracies. As active political participation plays a vital role in the improvement of the quality of democracy, this represents an important gap in our knowledge. The aim of this thesis is to start to address this by analysing the logics behind youth political participation in two contrasting newer democracies, Poland and Romania. To do this, I employ a multi-method comparative approach which combines qualitative findings of fieldwork and quantitative data on electoral turnout. The thesis assesses electoral participation, party membership and involvement in informal forms of participation such as volunteering and protest. It finds that many young people in postcommunist democracies choose to opt out of traditional forms of political participation because, as in established democracies, they feel alienated from formal political agents. However, this exit from formal methods of participation is not generally coupled with active participation in informal forms of involvement. The thesis concludes that despite sharing some important characteristics with young people in established democracies, legacies of communism and the rapid nature of post-communist political and socioeconomic transformation continue to negatively influence youth political participation in Poland and Romania.

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The advent of web technology provides opportunities to facilitate, broaden, and deepen public participation in the democratic process. In some ways, e-participation brings democracy the same sorts of enabling technology that information systems and decision support have brought organisations. However, an e-participation system differs from an information system within a single organisation in many ways. Therefore, it is natural to ask whether e-participation can provide a valid way for communication and decision support in the risk/crisis management situations in public domains. This research seeks to understand e-participation systems by reviewing relevant theories in the literature and e-participation tools that in practice help the researchers and practitioners to clarify goals, identify stakeholders, structure participatory processes and provide mechanisms to involve stakeholders. We have also integrated a broad range of inter-correlated constructs to evaluate e-participation. The proposed framework seeks to evaluate e-participation by exploring the characteristics of system, users and the task and how the interaction among them has effects on user satisfaction via the user's internal beliefs, i.e. perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment, and then assess the outcome of the impacts. This model demonstrates a general guideline for understanding, developing and evaluating e-participation systems. Moreover, the development processes of two e-participation systems have been reported in this research. One is on the development of an interactive food chain tool, which provides a web-based visual interface for risk communication in the problem formulation stage of a decision making process. The other is about two small scale experiments using GroupSystems' ThinkTank to support deliberation between distributed participants, seeking to explore whether wGDSS has a place in risk/crisis management in public sectors. The conceptual framework presented to evaluate e-participation has been examined under the context of these two e-participation systems. The findings suggest that the proposed framework and associated measurement instruments provide an effective way to understand and evaluate these e-participation systems.

The present study seeks to contribute to the existing debates surrounding the prevention of torture in a number of different ways. At a general and broader level, the thesis engages with a number of definitional and conceptual challenges when approaching the question of torture and its prevention. In particular the thesis seeks to provide a theoretical and conceptual analysis of one of the most under-conceptualized aspects of the prevention of torture: the general duty to prevent. On a narrower and more specific level, the study examines some of the challenges the implementation of torture prevention faces in a country characterised by a persistent crisis situation and seeks to analyze how international human rights bodies have dealt with the challenges arising in the Sudanese context of quasi-permanent states of emergency and the regulatory approaches devised to foster the implementation of human rights and torture preventive obligations. From the thesis it emerges that both the conceptualization and the implementation of torture prevention defies any monolithic or unidimensional analytical framework and requires a nuanced and critical multilevel analysis in order to become a meaningful tool at a national and supranational level. The study reveals that there are many practices and implementation processes linked to torture prevention that need to be carefully scrutinized and critically dissected and that, while not providing a panacea or silver bullet in terms of eradicating the practice of torture, can yield significant findings that may contribute to the strengthening of the torture preventive legal apparatus.

Operation Breadbasket was a Southern Christian Leadership Conference project that was founded in 1962, and was dedicated to improving the economic conditions of black communities across the United States. This thesis shows how the economic agenda of the early Operation Breadbasket - to facilitate integration in the workplace - gave way to its later counterpart which embraced a friendlier attitude toward capitalism and was more solicitous of the black middle class. In particular, this thesis identifies the personalities and events responsible for this transformation while pointing to me broader trends in American capitalism that made the advocacy of workplace integration increasingly less important than access to capital and mass consumption. Since there is not a dedicated study on Operation Breadbasket, this thesis begins to fill that gap in historiography. Drawing on archival research and original oral histories collected through interviews with veterans, this thesis reconsiders Jesse Jackson's historical role in the success of Operation Breadbasket as an empowerment organization enlarging economic opportunities for black workers and entrepreneurs, In particular, it 'argues that Operation Breadbasket was a remarkable program that contributed to the convergence of me Black Church-driven Civil Rights Movement and the activist-based Black Power struggle in the economic arena. To fully appreciate the transformation of Operation Breadbasket's activities from a more traditional Civil Rights program pursuing job desegregation to a militant, innovative campaign addressing issues such as black business development, the more recent scholarly work on Black Power and its intersection with the Civil Right Movement has been taken into account.