This thesis examines grassroots women's political activism in the Western Cape, South Africa (SA) during the 1980-1994 phase and their struggles to achieve citizenship. Through tracing the history of women's political agency and the social and political forces that shaped women's resistance, this dissertation asserts that women profoundly contributed to the New SA. Motherhood was the legitimate space granted to them by the liberation movement but women transformed it into an empowering public role, affirming their demands for citizenship. The shifting nature of women's resistance, the dominant discourses that mobilised them, what forms they took and how they changed over time are explored. The thesis asserts that despite the obstacles of a patriarchal culture relegating women's issues as secondary and a repressive state, women's focussed struggles succeeded in uniting diverse women to make effective intervention. This culminated in participating in negotiations for a new SA. A secondary focus examines the transition from apartheid to a 'women-friendly' SA. This study argues that private carework of women should be inscribed as citizenship responsibilities. Presently the SA State strategy promoting women's citizenship is through welfare. For women's effective citizenship it is imperative that there is a balance between women as workers and welfare beneficiaries, and that women participate as decision-makers at all levels. By comparing the demands of The Women's Charter for Effective Equality (1994) with the 1994-2004 reality of women and by analysing what women themselves state, I assess women's citizenship. This thesis concludes that the achievement thus far of the feminist citizenship project is uneven. The impressive constitution contributes to the improvement of many women's lives. However, the sporadic implementation of gender-sensitive policies, failure to address poverty, high levels of violence against women and the negative impact of culture and religion are some of the obstacles to women's comprehensive citizenship.

Debates about multiculturalism attempt to resolve the tension that has been identified in Western societies between the cultural claims of minorities and the liberal values of democracy and individual choice. Earlier writing on multiculturalism was criticised for a failure to recognise the centrality of gender and women's symbolic role in debates about culture; more recent feminist analysis has placed gender at the centre of multicultural debate. The risk is that cultural minorities are now characterised and problematised almost entirely through the unacceptable attitudes to women held by some of their members. From this perspective, gender equality and cultural rights are irreconcilable. While earlier writing on multiculturalism did indeed fail to address the experiences of minoritized women, approaches that take gender as their starting point can be criticised for - at times - resulting in a discourse that feeds cultural stereotypes and serves reactionary agendas. This alienates the very women it is intended to empower, forcing them to make an unreasonable and impossible choice between their cultural identity and their gender rights. I argue that the assumption of a necessary conflict between gender equality and cultural rights is based on a false and simplistic conception of 'culture'. A more sophisticated analysis is provided by writers, including Uma Narayan, Avtah Brah, Leti Volpp and Madhavi Sunder, who challenge the assumption that cultures (and religions) are homogenous and stable units. This thesis takes their work forward by locating it in a UK context and asking to what extent it is practical or possible for policy makers, activists and service-providers to deploy this more satisfactory approach when working for and with vulnerable minoritized women. It does this through an analysis of three 'cultural practices' identified as problematic and addressed in public policy between 1997 and 2007: forced marriage, female genital mutilation or cutting, and 'honour' crimes.

This research looks at public private partnerships in Ghana and their role in promoting legal compliance with child rights by guaranteeing efficiency and enforcement. Child rights face a number of obstacles when being enforced in Africa. The causes of poor legal compliance are three-fold: legal transplants as well as exogenous and endogenous causes of poverty. Partnerships among civil society, governments, international organisations and companies try to offer a solution to poor legal advancement, by implementing projects which affect the enforcement and efficiency of child rights. This research is intended to contribute to the literature which already exists in relation to partnerships and human rights, and make a strong contribution to the existing reflections on the role of partnerships in human rights advancement. Given cocoa partnerships have a long and established history, I decided to use them as case study. The conclusions derive from my field research which involved conducting interviews with chocolate and cocoa companies, NGOs, trade unions and public organisations in the UK, USA, Switzerland and Ghana. Existing literature on human rights and partnerships tends to provide only a surfaced limited analysis of partnerships. It rests on the claim that multinationals have enormous power and thus prevail in partnerships, ultimately favouring the privatisation of human rights. It seemed important, therefore, to explore in depth the power dynamics between businesses, public organisations and civil society organisations in order to properly understand what has become one of the most popular institutional organisations for the advancement of human rights.

Labour in the “post-industrial” society alienates bodies’ embodied capacities such that bodies’ potential to engage in praxis – the properties of bodies with which humans express their Being as political Being – has become the social form of the domination of labour by capital. The labour process of these emergent forms of labour is a political space in which bodies’ potential for praxis is formatively shaped and deployed in the making of bodies in desiring forms, constituting and re-constituting social environments in forms that unevenly and contestedly reflect transformations in modes of capital accumulation. This social-fixing of indeterminate labour-power links and decouples the inner relations between power, production, reproduction, value, and subjectivity that constitute the emerging politics of alienation. My jumping-off points to these relations are a set of investigations that purportedly describe “new” and “hegemonic” forms of labour in the post-industrial society: the sociological and political economic enquiries into ‘aesthetic labour’, ‘emotional labour’ and the triadic conception of ‘affective/immaterial/biopolitical labour’. I resolve the one-sided and contradictory elements of these explanations with an empirically-informed dialectical reconfiguration of the concept of body work that identifies new dimensions to the corporeal character of alienated labour. Alienated body work is attendant to a deepening of the reciprocal relations across productive and reproductive spheres and therein alienated body work integrates articulations of the capitalist politics of production together with the social mechanisms of the production of subjectivity more acutely than in previous phases of capitalist production. This deepening connection between spheres of production and reproduction is the centre of the contradiction of the social form of the domination in the postindustrial society: the emerging politics of alienation is constituted by the potential for a capitalistic transformation of the body which forecloses on the subversive potential of bodies’ capacity to engage in praxis but this social condition simultaneously brings those embodied political capacities into direct confrontation with the logic of value at the very centre of production.

This thesis explores how secularism affected women’s marital rights in Egypt and Iran between 1920 and 1939. Situated within the religio-legal jurisdiction of Shari’a, family law in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region has been critically scrutinised by both adherents to Islam and Western observers. There is consensus between both tradition that secularism had no meaningful impact on women’s rights in the private sphere due to the continued influence of Islam on social and cultural practices in the region. The nature of the Egyptian and Iranian states has altered with varying degrees of religiosity being evident. This is partially dependent on individuals in power; however, interactions with foreign actors have also contributed to fluctuations in the secular or religious nature of the state. Despite arguments that increased gender equality arises within more secular environments, the authoritarian implementation of policies in some secular states results in further impediments. Religious interpretations also heavily influence policy development, with debates continuing about the compatibility of women’s rights and Islam as prescribed in the Qur’an. Silences emphasised through contemporary events such as 9/11, 7/7, the Arab Spring and the emergence of ISIS highlight significant gaps in our historic understanding. Occidentalist arguments frequently emerge stating that increasing religious traditions serve to protect the identity and traditions of the state from Western influences. Whilst this perspective is heavily contested, patterns of a similar nature become evident in the early twentieth century following escalations in foreign presences in Egypt and Iran. Whilst twenty-first century family law in many Muslim countries remains firmly embedded in religious law, it is possible to see how the implementation of secularism during the early twentieth century influenced the trajectories of family law, facilitating the legal structures visible today.

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This research has been carried out on the basis of a quite short and quite simple question: Is the notion of children's citizenship a reality or romanticism? It looks at the status and extent of our knowledge of the position of children over a period of about 2500 years in the past and toward an as yet unpredictable time in the future. In so doing it looks at not only 'ourselves' (Western European societies) but other cultures, traditions and beliefs that broaden the question's base. It considers branches of knowledge such as the social sciences, theology and philosophy. Those disciplines have examined humanity with varying amounts of reference to children or childhood for at least as long as any of them has existed. The choice of methods includes analytic induction, morphological analysis and content analysis cum symptomatic reading. Those choices are governed by the fact that most parts of all data are printed texts. Some of the content is also my own work, partially field based and other parts published texts. Some of my more recent, undocumented field based work has also raised questions that require answers that a work of this nature might provide. This research moves on and away from child participation using a children's rights based argument toward examination of the relationship of the child with the state, thus as a potential full member citizen, including children's rights as part of the broader human rights agenda. In so doing, the conclusions complete research that has taken a course in which the intent before examining evidence was to reach a position that was partly advocacy for full citizenship. The conclusions bearing the weight of historically and geographically widespread data now look at a better informed reality of the possibility of that being realised.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly in 1989, is the world’s most widely and rapidly ratified international convention. Although it was hoped that the Convention would have an enormously positive impact on all children, this has not happened in many parts of the world for a variety of reasons, including its western bias, which has, hitherto, dominated the debate on children’s rights. However, this universality vs. relativity dichotomy does not help us to protect children on the ground. Hence, it is necessary to move beyond the binary debate relating to the universality and relativity of children’s rights and engage with children’s local realities, which illustrate that there is, indeed, a middle ground in which people live their lives that may facilitate dialogue on children’s rights with local communities. In order to identify this middle ground the thesis focused on eliciting the perceptions of adults and children in two local communities in Accra, Ghana, the first country to ratify the Convention in February 1990, on children’s rights, constructing childhood and the socialization of children and their implications for the implementation of the Convention. Special attention is given to Article 12, which has caused controversy in countries around the world.

What rights do children and young people have to participate in the decisions that affect their lives? And what benefit, if any, can be gained from their participation in the democratic process? Through the adoption of an interpretative perspective the research undertakes a case study exploration of these issues working directly with child and young people across a number of public and third sector organisational settings, utilising a Participatory Action Research methodology (in the form of an Interactive Group Work Programme) in order to examine their engagement in decisions that affect their lives. The research examines the factors that both inhibit and promote participation with young citizens and how this is affected by the individual organisation’s context and practice. It explores through the proposition of a new paradigm shift in the ‘adultism’ (Bell, 1995) discourse that identifies an ‘awkwardness’ in the way adults engage with children and young people arising from a lack (and/or loss) of the skills necessary to respect, relate and respond appropriately to them. A shift that the researcher has termed the ‘Three R’s of Awkwardness - Respect, Relate and Respond’. The research identifies a new distinction between forms of communication which are ‘instructive’ and those which are ‘expressive’ in nature and the benefit of participatory dialogue. In so doing, it has demonstrated the aim of the research in seeking to express the importance of the participation agenda and the value that can be gained through it.