Southern Asia is witnessing the rapid proliferation of ballistic missiles in and around the region. This proliferation phenomenon, together with ongoing and enduring conflicts amongst the “competing parties” (China, India and Pakistan) creates a potential surfacing of “nuclear flashpoint” in the region. This research is an endeavour to explore the causes of this nuclear and missile race amongst the Southern Asian powers (China, India, and Pakistan) with the help of the theory of strategic culture. This study proceeds in the following way: it assesses the geo-political forces at work in the region; examines the strategic culture of China, India and Pakistan; traces the motivation of these countries for the strategic weapon programmes and delivery systems; describes their nuclear doctrines and command and control structures; and the current status of their ballistic missile programmes. It then addresses the prospects for Pakistan, India and China to move towards a system of mutual restraint regime, in which international regime theory is discussed as a conceptual framework; cold war models of strategic arms limitation and reduction models are studied and the important role of Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) is identified. The same procedure is then applied in the context of Southern Asian region; problem areas identified with the help of CSBMs tools; and conclusions reached as to the potential to move beyond CSBMs into full restraint regime. The study finds the very nature of the overlapping threat perceptions and the continuance of the unresolved issues and disputes as the main hurdles in the successful restraint models. Recommendations are therefore made for more comprehensive CSBMs leading to a Southern Asian regional version of cold war prototypes of strategic arms limitation and reduction for a more comprehensive and fruitful restraint model, which might then be applied and adhered to at the global level. The study therefore opens new avenues of research and progress in the discipline.

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This dissertation takes a post-positivist approach to strategic surprise, and examines the identity and internal culture of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the lens of social constructivism. It identifies numerous social mechanisms that created and maintained four key, persistent attributes of the CIA’s identity and culture between 1947 and 2001. These features are: 1) homogeneity of personnel; 2) scientism and the reification of a narrow form of ‘reason’; 3) an overwhelming preference for ‘secrets’ over openly-available information; and, 4) a relentless drive for consensus. It then documents the influence of these elements of the CIA’s identity and culture in each phase of the intelligence cycle (Tasking, Collection, Analysis, Production and Dissemination), prior to four strategic surprises: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, the collapse of the USSR, and al-Qa’ida’s terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. It concludes that these key aspects of the CIA’s identity and culture created the antecedent conditions that allowed these four strategic surprises to occur, and thus prevented the CIA from fulfilling its mandate to ‘prevent another Pearl Harbor’. This conclusion is supported by contrasting the majority views at the CIA prior to these events with the views of ‘Cassandras’ (i.e. individuals inside or outside the Agency who anticipated the approximate course of events based on reasoned threat assessments that differed sharply from the Agency’s, but who were ignored or sidelined). In so doing, this work shifts the burden of proof for explaining strategic surprises back to the characteristics and actions of intelligence producers like the CIA, and away from errors by intelligence consumers like politicians and policymakers. This conclusion also allows this work to posit that understanding strategic surprise as a social construction is logically prior to previously proposed, entirely positivist, attempts to explain or to prevent it.

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This thesis examines the policy and politics of the fight against organised crime in the process of the European Union’s enlargement to Eastern Europe and the Balkans. It covers the period between the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the second Eastern enlargement in 2007 which saw the emergence of a new normative base for international relations and the expansion of the international security agenda focusing on ‘soft security’ issues and threats from weak rather than powerful states. The thesis explores this new ‘soft security’ thinking and investigates its practical application in EU’s policy of building member-states in the New Europe with a focus on the case study of the fight against organised crime in Bulgaria and its EU-guided criminal justice reform. The thesis looks at these developments from both internal and external perspective and focuses on the practicalities of the policy itself such as the development of legislative changes, institutional reform and direct transfer of Western European expertise to Bulgarian institutions. The main findings of the thesis have led to a conclusion which questions the quality and premises of these policies. The thesis argues that the Bulgarian state and the European Union institutions have subscribed to a highly problematic organised crime discourse and agenda which has negatively influenced the quality of their relationship with the Bulgarian electorate.

My thesis provides a deconstructive reading of eight key narratives of temporality that emerged within the first fifteen months of the George W. Bush administration's ongoing `War on Terror'. Through a sustained empirical investigation into over five hundred documents produced by key representatives of the White House, Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and Office/Department of Homeland Security, my research offers three contributions to existing knowledge. First, by charting and exploring the administration's framings of temporality, my thesis adds an additional layer of empirical depth and conceptual sophistication to existing critical discussions of this political discourse. Second, by tracing the politicodiscursive implications performed by the eight narratives I explore, my research demonstrates the productivity and power of temporality as a key structural and legitimatory resource within this `war'. And, third, by juxtaposing the three heterogeneous temporal shapes employed by the Bush administration against one another, my thesis provides an interventionary critique of this `war's' ostensibly objective, referential framing.

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The purpose of this thesis is to examine British foreign policy-making towards the armed conflict that broke out in former Yugoslavia in June 1991, focusing on the role of the media as a domestic variable in the foreign policy-making process. After the end of the Cold War, British foreign policy-making was faced with a set of changing variables on the international level and attempted to adjust policy to them. This thesis, using the theoretical basis provided by Foreign Policy Analysis on the role of the media - in our case, representative samples of the British press and electronic media - as a domestic input in the foreign policy-making process, examines the various aspects of British policy towards the dissolution of former Yugoslavia as it attempted to reconcile the demands made by the international and domestic environment. Focusing on the issues of recognition of the breakaway republics of Slovenia and Croatia and armed intervention by the international community, which determined to a large extent the policy that would be followed by Britain and the EC/EU in the later stages of the Yugoslav conflict, this thesis argues that the influence of the media was not as great as has been often assumed, especially by policy-makers themselves. Looking at the conditions under which media influence can be maximised, it will be argued that these conditions were not present during the period under examination. Instead, British policy was formulated taking mainly into account stronger domestic and international concerns. However, the main traits that characterise media coverage of the first six months of the conflict, leading to the recognition of Slovenia and Croatia, are important on their own account, as they set the stage for the intensive coverage of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where conditions for media influence were maximised.