It is a generally accepted view in the literature on civil-military relations and military sociology that the military is a ‘Janus-faced’ organisation. One of its faces has to watch the strategic requirements and the other face looks at its parent society. The Janus-face analogy indicates that the strategic and societal views are intrinsically antithetical. The notion of the antithetical relationship between liberal ideology and military security was established as early as the 1950s in Samuel Huntington’s seminal book The Soldier and the State. This thesis is conceived as a critical debate with Huntington, challenging, in particular, the notion that societal and functional imperatives are inevitably distinct and antithetical. The aim of this thesis is to analyse in what ways liberalism – as a meta-ideology or a guiding ethos – determines the military capacities of West European societies. The empirical analysis has been carried out on the cases of the German Bundeswehr (from the 1950s onwards) and the British armed forces (from the beginning of the 20th Century onwards). Despite the enormous divergence these two cases represent, a similar pattern of behaviour is recognisable in them. This examination reveals that specific policies, institutions and practices are preferred because of their relation to liberal principles. Sometimes liberal norms are used merely to advocate an otherwise necessary policy, such as universal conscription at the time of emergency. Regarding other issues, such as the right to conscientious objection, liberal principles are the most relevant causal factor. Among the issues affected by liberal ideology are also the varieties of military mission, military ethics and professional identity of soldiers. The case studies examined in this thesis demonstrate that a meaningful adaptation of the military to the principles possessed by its parent society can be, more often than not, desirable also from the perspective of security strategy.

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This thesis is an attempt to examine and analyse two distinct, but related, territorial disputes involving Sudan and two of its neighbours. They concern the area between the administrative boundary and the so-called political boundary between Sudan and Egypt, and the area between the international boundary and the administrative boundary between Sudan and Kenya. The Egyptian claims to the administrative area in 1958 and again in 1992, apparently rests on two main arguments. Firstly, that Egypt possesses immemorial sovereign rights over the disputed areas. Secondly, that the 1899 Agreement between Great Britain and Egypt is the only international boundary agreement resulting from an international instrument, and therefore, could not have been revised by the unilateral Egyptian ministerial decrees of 1899 and 1902. Additionally, Egypt argues that the cession of the disputed areas of Sudan was for administrative reasons only, with Egypt retaining full sovereign rights. Hence, upon independence, Sudan was obliged to return the areas to sovereign, Egypt. It will be argued, that the essence of an international boundary agreement is that it separates two distinct sovereignties. As for the Sudan-Kenya dispute, the boundary was defined by Great Britain in 1914 with the consent of Egypt. It constitutes a straight line to Lake Rudolf to compensate the Sudan for the Mahagi strip ceded to Uganda at the same time. The final analysis is that Kenya has an administrative, not sovereign right, over the Ilemi Triangle. Furthermore, the re-definition of the line in 1947 and 1951, upon Kenya’s request, to include more areas, north and east of the 1938 line, under Kenyan administration supports the argument that the agreement between the two countries was an administrative agreement not a cession of sovereignty. The view of Great Britain as a former colonial power, as well as the corresponding agreement between Sudan and Kenya before 1938 up till Sudan’s independence in 1956, supports this argument.

As the Cold War drew to an end, a number of long-running internal conflicts began to mature, which enabled international mediators to help the belligerent parties to find a solution to these conflicts. Historically, a key obstacle to implementation has been a lack of trust between the parties: in order to stop the fighting, both sides must disarm, but to do so leaves each of the parties vulnerable to cheating by the other side. In order to help the parties to implement the peace agreement, an intervention strategy developed that called for the removal of partisan outside parties to simplify the political process, demobilisation of military forces under the oversight of international military observers and reform of the political and judicial system to help create a functional post-war polity. The key for this strategy to succeed, however, was that the conflict had to be 'ripe,' which meant that the parties felt a military victory could not be won at an acceptable cost, that each party had identifiable spokespeople who could secure the approval of their constituents for a peace agreement, and that an alternative political solution could be identified. In post-Cold War environment, however, interventions have been less successful in helping to secure a peaceful solution to internal conflicts. This has been because international actors have been intervening at a much earlier phase in a conflict's development, which has meant that the conditions of ripeness' have not existed. In addition, changes in the international system, and the ready availability of high-worth commodities (such as diamonds) have made the mobilisation of armed forces easier. As a result, the structures of the conflicts have frequently encouraged further fighting, which has conflicted with international efforts to 'create the conditions for peace.' The intervenors' inability to achieve their aims with traditional peacekeeping strategies has meant that they have increasingly sought to gain control over situations through the use of coercion. Assertion of control by international actors - up to and including the use of force - has in fact been counter-productive, because it gives them an interest in a particular outcome to the conflict. This reverses the earlier strategy of removing outside parties from the conflict. Paradoxically, the more intervenors seek to gain control over the situation, the less likely they are to succeed in 'creating the conditions for peace.'

Basing its analysis on extensive research in the diplomatic archives in all the three Baltic foreign offices, the dissertation maps out the parallel paths of development of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian alliance policies in the ten years between 1988 and 1998 and seeks to achieve a theoretically grounded understanding of this process. The study pinpoints and analyses transitions between three more or less distinct modes of the Baltic state s’ alliance behaviour in the post-Cold War period and analyses them in light of competing theoretical perspectives thereby checking the various theoretical arguments’ validity against the actual diplomatic record from Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian foreign policy archives. Overall, the findings of this dissertation are consistent with the general argument made by the realist school of International Relations theory, namely that changes in foreign policy behaviour can be understood primarily as response and adaptation to systemic pressures and incentives and that external factors rather than domestic ones take precedence in determining foreign policy outcomes. The empirical part of the dissertation is based on hundreds of both public and internal diplomatic developments as well as on a wide selection of secondary source material. The study corroborates data from all three countries, by assessing original documents in all three local languages, in addition to materials in English and Russian. Most of this dissertation’s foreign-policy data has been retrieved from the six major collections of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian diplomatic documentation from both the presidential and Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives in all three countries, most of which have so far been inaccessible to academic researchers.

The thesis seeks to examine contemporary separatism in Scotland and Northern Italy, set within the European Union (EU). It asks to what extent these examples can be said to adhere to traditional theories of nationalism. It poses the question of how much labels such as 'nationalist' and 'federalist' can tell us of contemporary parties, given the context which an integrating Europe provides. The thesis aims to flesh out the paradox of concurrent pressure on Europe's established states from above and below, by examining sub-national movements in the supranational EU context. The explicit focus of the thesis is a comparison of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Italian Northern League. These parties were chosen because they have not before been compared in such detail. They provide a good yardstick of the separatist spectrum, the former being perceived to be committed to an independent Scottish state, the latter to an autonomous, federal Italian North. The thesis situates both parties within a general analysis of old and new theories of nationalism and discusses the relevance of these within the contemporary EU. The thesis then examines the histories of both the Italian and British 'nation-states' and the emergence of both parties as electoral forces within these. The argument is made that, within the EU's supranational auspices, any differences in headline constitutional aim between the SNP and the League start to blur. Further analysis of the parties' policy pronouncements, voter profiles and activists' attitudes point to a more complex dynamic than terms such as 'nationalist' or 'federalist' can capture. Neither party has a fixed constitutional end but rather reacts to the prevailing circumstances with ideological fluidity, so that neither can be said to seek a definitively nationalist or federalist solution. Both parties, however, seek to be part of the emerging, integrated European Union.

This thesis addresses a significant yet relatively neglected problem: the inadequacy of risk assessment methods of analysis currently available to security analysts and practitioners serving customers operating in challenging and volatile environments. It also challenges the idea shared by many analysts that theories of International Relations (IR) are irrelevant to the production of security analyses. Towards this end, this thesis begins by exploring the relationship between existing forecasting techniques and theories of IR. It then evaluates the extent to which their use has the potential to expand the analytical capabilities of private security analysts serving corporate customers in such contexts. In considering the possibilities and limitations of IR approaches the thesis finds that Realism alone cannot provide a valid framework to improve private security analysts’ skills, but argues that there are definite advantages to combining this with Constructivism complemented by cultural analysis. These three theoretical components constitute the backbone of an innovative approach to security analysis herein termed Reflexive Cultural Realism; a theory of security designed to explain politically-driven security events in particular social and cultural contexts whilst allowing for forecasting based on an original way of building scenarios. This theory is applied through a specific reading grid (via a 7- step method) at all levels of political activity, from the global to the domestic. Two detailed case studies are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Reflexive Cultural Realism approach. These case studies, located in two of the GCC countries, consider security situations analysts are traditionally confronted with in their daily activities, and demonstrate the utility of the approach in facilitating practical answers to corporate questions. The thesis concludes that the Reflexive Cultural Realism approach, by combining an innovative theoretical framework with a robust application method, is able to satisfy the demands of corporate customers by improving significantly the analytical and forecasting skills of the analysts serving them.

This research is situated within the introduction of a strong ethical dimension into foreign policy-making in the study of international relations in the post-Cold War era. While the 1990s gave rise to a wealth of literature on the notion of ethical foreign policy, it has tended to simply focus on a version of realism, which overlooks the role of ethics in international affairs, lacking an empirical analysis of foreign policy decision-making, with relation to ethical values in the post-Cold War period. The purpose of this thesis is to address this gap in the literature by exploring ethical realism as a theoretical framework and, in particular, by looking at US humanitarian interventions in the 1990s at an empirical level to analyse an ethical foreign policy in practice. This study analyses the concepts of ethical realism and responsible power. The application of ethical realism to the conduct of international affairs involves the assertion that powerful states should have responsibilities and exercise leadership with ethical obligations. This research looks at the foreign policy of the United States and its experiences of dealing with humanitarian interventions during the Clinton administration, focusing on Bosnia and Kosovo, to see whether the United States could thus effectively promote liberal values and make a commitment to moral goals, rather than simply follow considerations of national security against the background of the end of the Cold War. This thesis argues that the United States, as the only world’s superpower, should not only pursue national interests but also shoulder the responsibility of power. However, as the world still divides itself into separate sovereign states, statespeople are primarily responsible and accountable for their own citizens and national survival. Therefore, a foreign policy with an ethical dimension needs to be conducted in a pragmatic way.

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