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The aim of this study is to provide a conceptual and analytical foundation for a discussion about the future shape of security arrangements in the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf is a regiion whose strategic and economic characteristics have strengthened its vital significance to all littoral states as well as the entire world's economy and political life. Its significant geopolitical situation, in addition to its dominant position as an energy source and gateway for global energy has caused this region to be a worthy rival to outside powers, particularly the West, while also being the most unstable and chaotic of any world region. Therefore the objective of this thesis has been to provide a security model for the Persian Gulf that address the need for a stable and peaceful structure of relationships which will provide security for all individual littoral states, as well as assuring the interests of the external powers. The thesis' hypothesis of cooperation as the only possible basis for a comprehensive strategy for peace and stability in this region has been substantiated by employing a variety of conceptual and analytical tools to understand the reasons for the failure of security models 'in the Persian Gulf and to confront the huge obstacles to a security system for this region. The relevance of this model is supported by the modem global political landscape, most especially the events that have occurred since the end of the 11 Cold War, in addition to various successful cooperation models that are to be found in other regions of the globe, e. g. the EU. This is assisted by the unprecedented opportunity for regional cooperation and the conditions for the creation of new security arrangements in the Persian Gulf and beyond that have been created since the downfall of Saddam's regime in 2003, which was one of the major elements of insecurity in this region. To this end, this study has analysed various security models in this significant geopolitical region in the world since 1962, with special reference to Iran's foreign policy. Particular reference has been made to Iran because of its geostrategic and geopolitical situation and as the hegemonic power in the Persian Gulf, which regardless its political regimes, it has great national and security concerns and plays a determinant role in peace and security of the region. With emphasis on dialogue as the best solution to the regional security problems in the Persian Gulf, this study has come up with a pyramid security model on the basis of the region's geopolitical realities which emphasisesth e need for domestic reforms as well as interaction and cooperation and a balance of interests between all regional and non-regional players.

The debate over the origins of the First World War in the early 1960s is widely regarded as one of the fiercest historiographical battles. It was provoked by Fritz Fischer’s book Griff nach der Weltmacht. The impact of the debate on the historiography of the war’s origins, the interpretation of German history more generally and its contribution to the transformation of West German political culture is widely recognised. By grounding the production of historical knowledge in the social and cultural practices of West German historians, this thesis seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the debate. It explores how it was possible that Fischer’s book could first be produced and second how it could provoke such a fierce debate. It analyses the intellectual, biographical and political context in which the book must be situated. The thesis argues that the book drew on several dissident intellectual and political currents of the early Federal Republic while challenging several unspoken political and scholarly assumptions that dominated the West German historical profession throughout the 1950s. Furthermore, by embracing Nazi ideology Fischer had distanced himself from national-conservative historiography and its basic assumptions during the 1930s and early 1940s. He continued to cultivate this sceptical outlook and substantiated it throughout the 1950s. This discussion of conditions and context presents a starting point for a micro-historical analysis of the controversy between 1959 and 1966. It analyses how Fischer developed a particular strategy that sought to ensure recognition within and outside the profession. The strategies of Fischer’s critics proved to be ill-adapted to an increasingly liberal democratic society. Partly due to the reaction by Fischer’s critics, a debate broke out in 1964 that placed the discussion of a historiographical issue within the public sphere. Concerned about the status of scholarly authority, several historians sought to return the discussion to the historical profession and its power mechanisms. Although this move left Fischer a relatively marginal figure in the historical profession, the criteria of scholarly plausibility with regards to the interpretation of German history had significantly shifted in the course of the controversy.

This thesis examines the evolution of the relationship between nuclear weapons and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in UK policy, with a focus on the first ten years of the New Labour Government, 1997-2007. By approaching the NPT from the perspective of an international security regime, the thesis argues that the relationship between the two strands of policy – nuclear weapons and the NPT – should be understood in relation to the changing normative framework of the NPT’s disarmament pillar. The influence of the NPT in shaping policy was both enabling and constraining. It was enabling to the extent that the developments in the disarmament pillar of the NPT allowed the Government to frame its nuclear weapons policy in terms of multilateral disarmament without directly impinging on its nuclear future. It was constraining to the extent that it placed pressure on policy-makers to continue to make further cuts in capability, to recognize that incremental reductions were part of its obligations under the NPT, and to accept that the goal of nuclear disarmament was a clear and distinct obligation under the terms of the Treaty. The thesis argues that ultimately the tensions between what was considered the strategic imperative of nuclear weapons and the disarmament imperative in the NPT were not resolved by the New Labour Government, but in examining how the Government’s endeavours to reconcile the irreconcilable shaped policy, the thesis highlights one of the most pressing issues in British foreign and defence policy, and develops an understanding of the operation of one of the most important international regimes for global security.

This thesis examines the development of thinking about security in Brazil between 1930 and 2010 in the light of Jessé Souza’s theory of emotional action (TEA). Souza’s TEA is a critique of Brazilian social theorizing in which the author argues that political and academic common sense in that country has been informed by a restrictive set of ideas on Brazilian identity and development. Thus, this thesis provides grounds for exploring the validity of his claims about Brazilian social theorizing by applying his critique to thinking about security in Brazil. It attempts this in three different political contexts. First, the thesis looks at the ideas informing security during Getúlio Vargas’ first government (1930-1945), when thinking about security was put forward by authoritarian actors under an authoritarian regime. Second, it explores thinking about security produced at the Escola Superior de Guerra (ESG) – the so-called Brazilian Doctrine of National Security (DNS). The ESG was where conservative and authoritarian actors regrouped after the Estado Novo regime to think about security during the democratic interregnum (1945-1964); these were the two decades between the end of the Estado Novo and the establishment of the 1964 regime, and the DNS became the only way of thinking about security until the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. Third, it investigates thinking about security in post-redemocratisation Brazil (1985-2010). In order to analyze thinking about security developed by democratic actors under a democratic regime, this thesis looks at knowledge production in Brazilian International Relations (IR). The analysis of these three different contexts sustains the argument that independently from the type of actor (authoritarian/democratic) or of political regime (authoritarian/democratic), thinking about security in Brazil has been mainly concerned with reifying and reproducing particular claims about identity and state development. By examining the relationship between the state and intellectuals, and intellectuals and knowledge production, the thesis also expands Souza’s TEA. Furthermore, it analyzes how different intellectual sectors have strategized their claims about identity and development to fit specific political purposes. After examining how Brazil has traditionally been ‘worlded’ in relation to the concept of security, the thesis concludes by contending that a ‘re-worlding’ of the assumptions that underlie thinking about security in Brazil is an important, necessary and urgent part of the engagement of Brazilian IR with contemporary forms of theorizing.

Since the economic crisis of the 1990s in Cuba, pursuing relationships with foreigners has emerged as a viable means of accessing hard currency, consumer goods, travel, and emigration – of gaining admittance to a perceived better life. This practice is part of a broader set of black- and grey-market activities known locally as ‘jineterismo’. It would be inaccurate to frame such relationships as purely transactional or bereft of emotional content; rather, they are part of a complex sexual-affective economy, now a normalised part of life in Cuba, and a means of resisting the scarcity faced every day by young Cubans. The state has responded controversially, categorising these people as ‘prostitutes’ and enacting a programme of mass arrests and ‘rehabilitation’ centres. Its approach renders all interactions with foreigners, and especially sexual/romantic liaisons between Cuban women and foreign men, thus functioning to locate virtue in austerity – and simultaneously to pathologise and criminalise young women who associate with tourists, dress provocatively, or frequent heavilytouristed areas. This characterisation of young women of colour as troublesome bodies renders them vulnerable to multiple forms of violence in their everyday lives. A struggle to define ‘jineterismo’ has materialised between urban youth and state institutions. Far from simple semantics, the state-led discourse of ‘jineterismo’ inscribes certain bodies with promiscuity and moral laxity, producing them as available for state intervention. The young people implicated in Cuba’s sexual-affective economy, on the other hand, articulate a more nuanced world where love, sex, and money are not mutually exclusive, and where socialist ideals can co-exist with material comfort and individual fulfilment. In the midst of escalating state repression, this ethnographic study investigates the governance of bodies in Cuba today, along the way examining the history which underwrites the ‘jinetera’, relations of power in the sexual-affective economy, and possibilities for aesthetic self-creation.

The United Kingdom's Department for International Development (DFID) has undertaken a highly innovative development strategy in Sierra Leone, reforming the security sector of the post-conflict state in order to ensure a stable environment in which investment and development can occur. Yet in doing so, DFID has not engaged with the actual locus of security provision in Sierra Leone and the effectiveness of reforms thus remains limited. This thesis seeks to understand why DFID has been unable to engage with informal security actors in its security sector reform (SSR) programme in Sierra Leone. Informal security actors are the dominant providers of policing and justice in Sierra Leone, with approximately 80 per cent of the population relying upon their services. Despite this, however, this thesis illustrates that DFID's bureaucratic and political nature produce particular understandings of security and the causes of war that focus overwhelmingly on state capacity and security provision. As a result, DFID engages with only state security providers and state failure aspects of the causes of war. Ultimately, this approach limits the ability of DFID's SSR programme to comprehensively address the causes of conflict and sustainably transform security provision in Sierra Leone. These limitations must be overcome if DFID is to remain at the forefront of SSR policy and practice.

There has recently been a plea to better problematize the concept of practice in International Relations (IR) theory. This study attempts to explore (and contribute to) the merits of advocating a practice turn in IR. The thesis begins by exploring the practice theory literature to facilitate the elaboration of a specific practice inspired theoretical framework. It then deploys the framework on the slavery case to argue that a focus on practice(s) can help us better apprehend and explain both the discontinuities and continuities connecting the global abolition of slavery to a set of present-day practices commonly referred to as contemporary forms of slavery. By harnessing the slavery case, the objective is to illustrate the fertility of a practice approach in bridging and adding specificity to some of the more rigid dichotomizations and treatments of global continuities and ruptures. Ultimately, the hope is to eventually transpose the theoretical framework to investigate other issue areas. The overarching and longer term aim is to facilitate comparative studies to investigate and better apprehend issues of global stability and change – with a view to transforming our social world.

Since 2001, and the US response to international terrorism by launching an ill-defined and open-ended ‘Global War on Terror’, a striking debate (re)emerged within the discipline of International Relations (IR) about the global nature of American power, more specifically about the imperial character of the exercise of that power. In a discipline such as IR, forged on the heels of colonialism (cf. Schmidt 1998: 123-150, Long & Schmidt 2005), it is somewhat surprising that for several decades, little work had been produced within its mainstream on the topic of empires and imperialism1. Whatever the causes of this, two events were to change that sad state of affairs. One was the publication and unexpected success of the book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Hardt & Negri 2000), which received an unusually broad array of acclaim and critique, and became something of a global phenomenon in sales, slowly achieving that rare status of a ‘theory’ best-seller. The other trigger, barely a year apart, was September 11th and its aftermath. The response of the US government under George W. Bush helped re-launch the debate, and made empire a political buzzword once again (Eakin 2002, Ricks 2001). This was compounded by the influence of the so-called neo-conservatives within his administration – some of them vocal proponents of an imperial set of policies towards the rest of the world (Boot 2001, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Kagan 1998). To borrow Michael Cox's ironic and apt phrase, the empire was back in town (Cox 2003).

This thesis examines the effect American human rights conduct during the war on terror had on three international human rights norms: torture, habeas corpus, and rendition for the purposes of torture. It does so by analysing a large-n sample of public legitimation strategies of both the United States and other members of international society during the administration of President George W. Bush. The thesis asks three questions: First, has the defection of the United States from these human rights norms led to a ―norm cascade‖ that delegitimized the norms? Second, did the United States run an exemptionalist argument for each, and was this successful? Third, did the material preponderance of the United States help it to legitimate its preferences in international society? The thesis argues that the United States was unsuccessful at overtly legitimating its preferences in the habeas corpus case study. In the torture case study the United States had some early success using a strategy of norm justification, but most international legitimation strategies were subsequently abandoned. It was relatively successful in the rendition case study where it pursued very few legitimation strategies, relying instead on secrecy and denial. Furthermore, there is no overt evidence that the United States either attempted or was successful in an exemptionalist strategy, though some of the conduct by the United States and other members of international society might imply that a covert strategy was in effect. Lastly, though the material preponderance of the United States allowed it to absorb the costs associated with its illegitimate behaviour, there was no evidence that it was useful in transforming international human rights norms.