Internal wars and state failure are cited amongst today 's key threats to international security because of their potential to contribute to the growth and empowerment of illegal transnational networks and terrorism. As a result, the international community has launched increasingly ambitious and complex peace consolidation and state building projects. The promotion of the rule of law and human rights through far-reaching reform of the justice and security sectors (SSR) has thus become an important component of peace building. This is especially true in Africa where almost half of the current UN peacekeeping missions are operational. SSR is considered crucial for bolstering state authority and promoting efficient and democratic state institutions that safeguard internal peace and stability and thus in turn international security. The reality on the ground shows, however, that despite the huge efforts put into such state reconstruction ventures, the initially set goals are rarely met. This thesis examines, with the example of Liberia, a country that after two successive civil wars became host to one of the largest UN peacekeeping forces, why such comprehensive reforms have had so little success to date. The empirical data reinforcing the analysis was gathered during six months of extensive fieldwork, mainly in Lofa County, Liberia. Not concerned with policy relevance, this thesis focuses on an overall examination of the peace building framework and its underlying assumptions. The thesis argues that the Western approach is problematic. There is a misconception in the assumption that an internal political order can be externally prescribed and imposed. Chief concepts about internal conflict, and the management thereof, that have been shaping the response of the international community neither contribute towards peace consolidation nor the furthering of development. Rather, they lend themselves to achieving a deadlock where the possibility of continuous conflict and political emergencies may become a reality.

Despite an extensive debate on foreign aid, the voluminous aid literature mainly focuses on donors' strategies, aid modalities, and the scope for foreign aid to improve development indicators. The evaluation of foreign aid outcomes (or aid effectiveness) dominates the debate. The aid literature has rarely considered the aid policy process and the influence of aid policy networks on managing foreign aid decisions in an aid recipient country. This research responds to this gap by providing new understanding of how the aid community interacts and manages aid decisions in Pakistan. The aim of this research is to explore how donors and the Pakistan government interact to manage foreign aid in the aid policy network. This research provides an in-depth, qualitative, rich description of donor-Pakistan government interactions in managing the aid policy process. These insights are valuable in improving existing knowledge about the complexities, interdependencies and constraints involved in managing foreign aid in Pakistan. This research focuses on donor-government interactions in the complex web of multiple actors. First, it maps the network structure in place to manage the aid delivery system. Second, it explores the network management strategies actors employ in their attempt to manage the aid policy process. Finally, it examines the influence of aid proliferation and state capacity on managing foreign aid in Pakistan. This study concludes that many of the problems of international development aid are known to the actors involved in the aid policy process in Pakistan. However, there has been a lack of collective action on practical steps to make foreign aid more effective that adds to the complexity of the aid policy process. To make the aid policy process work better and eventually enhance the value and effectiveness of foreign aid, the Pakistan government and donors need to review their partnership strategies and interaction practices to make aid efforts more collaborative and improve coordination. The Pakistan government needs to focus more on overcoming capacity issues and shortages of technical expertise in the public sector, while donors should cooperate with the government in curtailing high transaction costs. Nonetheless, overcoming the passive acceptance of the problems among actors involved in the aid delivery process is likely to be hugely challenging.

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With a particular focus on UN-Habitat's land dispute resolution programme in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), this thesis analyses UN-Habitat engagement with contested legality in a peacebuilding context. UN-Habitat's on-going experiences in DRC, and the associated policy processes, are contributing to a significant evolution in their approaches to land disputes in situations of conflict, post-conflict and peacebuilding across Africa and beyond. The organisation's policy processes enable non-state actors, interests and legal systems (local, national and international) to shape the UN-Habitat programme in DRC. This thesis argues that, in order to have meaningful impact in the DRC, UN-Habitat need to seek legitimacy from numerous sources, and this in turn curtails the extent of their power to act. This is indicative of a shift in the approach of international organisations to the Rule of Law, which, in the case of the UN and World Bank for example, have typically been overly focused on the formal, state legal institutions and systems as the means to address the challenges of peacebuilding and post-conflict situations. Instead, the complex interaction, blending and mixing of multiple formal and informal legal orders gives rise to new forms of legal meaning and action described by Boaventura de Sousa Santos as 'legal hybrids'. This thesis identifies the emergence and characteristics of such a legal hybrid, 'UN-Habitat law'.

This thesis reconsiders the nature of humiliation, defining it as an exercise of power, and argues that the SED consciously and as a matter of habit used humiliation to seek to shape people’s lives in the GDR. It seeks to understand the processes that led to this happening and the consequences of it. The thesis considers different theoretical approaches to humiliation and contrasts it with shame. It argues that humiliation is a demonstrative use of power with a recurring set of elements: stripping of status; arbitrariness or unpredictability on the part of the humiliator; exclusion or rejection of the victim; and a personal sense of injustice matched by the lack of any remedy for the injustice suffered. It suggests that the emotions flowing from an act of humiliation follow a predictable course and the consequences for the victim, and often for the society, are serious and long-lasting. This understanding of humiliation is applied to a close reading of literary fiction, films, letters, diaries and memoirs from the whole period of the GDR and beyond. These sources suggest that humiliation or the fear of humiliation was a constantly recurring feature of the relationship between the people and representatives of the SED and the State. The thesis considers the founding myths, the norms and values implied by them, and how and why the Party breached these by humiliating its perceived opponents. It looks at the Party’s hostility to Freudian as opposed to Marxist-Leninist ways of understanding human behaviour, analyses different forms of humiliation shown to take place in everyday life and discusses why the Party used humiliation against its own members. It concludes by considering the impact of humiliation on the attempts to develop the GDR as a ‘normal’ society and discusses some of the present-day implications of this understanding of humiliation.

This thesis investigates how peace negotiation processes influence peace settlement referendum outcomes. It addresses a re-occurring problem in peace processes of settlements being rejected by popular vote after strenuous political negotiations. For this purpose, it investigates and compares how the Annan Plan negotiations in Cyprus and the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) negotiations in Northern Ireland culminated with the acceptance of the latter and the rejection of the former. In doing so, it effectively bridges an existing gap in academic research and literature. Research and theory on peace negotiations and mediation has traditionally focused on uncovering how the process helped the political leaders sitting at the negotiations table reduce military tensions, improve relationships, and come to different types of agreements. It had not yet considered referendum results as a crucial outcome of contemporary peace negotiation processes. Existing research on referendums, on the other hand, traditionally studies voting behaviours through public opinion polls and surveys, or the analysis of referendum campaigns, seldom considering how they are shaped by negotiation processes. The comparative case study analysis of the Annan Plan and GFA negotiations and referendums presented in this thesis provides for unique comparative features and a novel research design. It aims, not only at understanding how the Annan Plan and GFA negotiations led to opposing overall referendum outcomes, but also how they shaped differences in support between and across the four communities. While the Annan Plan was rejected due to the low 23 percent Greek Cypriot 'yes' vote, 65 percent of Turkish Cypriots actually voted for its ratification. The GFA was ratified with a similar difference in support between the local communities, the very high 96-97 per cent vote from the Nationalist community and the 51-53 per cent from the Unionist community. Bridging existing knowledge in peace negotiations and referendums literatures, this thesis compares how specific features of the negotiation process, namely, mediation strategies, political inclusion, civil society inclusion, and the agreement's design, shaped the political parties' support for the agreement in the referendum, the organization and strength of the campaigns, and voter information and uncertainty. Its findings are based on an empirically rich analysis of interviews conducted in Cyprus and Northern Ireland during the first half of 2014, which included key political stakeholders and civil society actors. The thesis demonstrates that the secretive and exclusionist nature of the Annan Plan negotiations, and the comparatively less secretive and more inclusive GFA negotiation process, shaped the referendum campaign periods leading to the opposing outcomes of the two cases. It further shows that support for the peace settlement was higher in the communities where the mediated negotiations included more political parties and where civil society was, directly or informally, included in the negotiations. The findings support existing claims that inclusive and participatory negotiation processes can foster support for the peace process, adding that they can deeply shape peace settlement referendum experiences and outcomes. It argues that referendums are unsuitable for traditional secretive and exclusive peace negotiation practices that fail to educate and engage the public. The contribution is novel in arguing that, as a tool of democratic politics, peace settlement referendums need to be preceded by inclusive negotiations that involve a broad spectrum of political stakeholders and civil society and that, therefore, when referendums are used to seal a peace settlement, the entirety of its negotiation process needs to be adapted from the start.

This thesis asks what it is that we are doing when we talk about trust in international politics. It begins by reviewing the recent and growing body of literature on trust and International Relations, locating this more nascent collection of literature within a wider, established body of social science work on trust in disciplines such as psychology, political science, business and management studies. It claims that an implicit but ubiquitous assumption about how words gain meaning underpins the literature, and that this assumption precedes and limits the range of possibilities for the form of the subsequent research. The thesis challenges this way of understanding by deploying Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It then undertakes an alternative study of trust that acts as an ostensive challenge to the literature and thus shows by example how accepting different sites and processes of meaning can add to our understanding of words such as trust in International Relations. It accomplishes this through a 'grammatical investigation' of the uses of trust by President Richard M. Nixon and President Ronald Reagan regarding nuclear weapons and nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union. Using these examples, the thesis then suggests several alternative ways of talking about trust that would provide avenues for further research while avoiding the semantic and methodological difficulties of the dominant social science approaches. The contribution of this work is to challenge prevailing assumptions about words and meaning that exist within the literature and in so doing, to open up a path for alternative ways to talk about words like trust in International Relations.

In the post-SARS era, we have witnessed the development of a multi-actor framework for disease control, global disease governance. This framework includes states, international organisations, non-governmental organisations and many others besides. Their actions have been codified in international law (International Health Regulations 2005) and through increasing normative understandings of global disease control. However, decisions about how to manage an outbreak remain a sovereign prerogative. This thesis considers the tensions that might occur between the normative and legislative goals of global disease governance and state conceptions of sovereignty. Sovereignty has, to date, been considered an analytical given in global health, and it is often used as an explanation for a state’s lack of compliance with global disease governance, without further consideration. However, as this thesis will show, sovereignty is not exogenous to the system of global disease governance, but it finds new meaning in this health context, which is produced through interaction between states and non-state actors at the international and global levels. This thesis considers the tensions between sovereignty and global disease governance in three case study states, the United Kingdom, Thailand and Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Through empirical analysis, it will show when states embody the ideals of global disease governance, and when they prioritise their sovereign demands. Through this, a more considered understanding of sovereignty will be shown, depending on context, allowing states to reinterpret what sovereignty means to them in global disease control.

This thesis examines cooperation trends in Post-Cold War security organizations through a development of Deudney's Republican Security Theory (RST) and the notion of resilience. Neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism are the default theories in explaining the interactions among states inside an organization. While neoliberal institutionalists argue that organizations exert a strong influence on cooperation, and arise from a need for it, neorealism sees the organization as ephemeral and a reflection of great power interests which ultimately undermine cooperation. The two mainstream theories, crucially, provide contradictory structural explanations for cooperation when applied to multiple regions. I argue that this because both adopt the flawed assumption of immutable international anarchy and thus fail to appreciate that a new ordering principle, negarchy, is emerging. By searching for negarchy, I consider the organizational characteristic of resilience. Resilience is an organization's ability to sustain cooperation after exogenous shocks. I argue that the operation of security organizations in Europe, Eurasia and South America is best explained by reference to environment and ordering principles. RST provides tools that are useful in providing an alternative logic for cooperation based on changes in ordering principles, governance, the material environment and the desire for security and liberty. While RST is a promising alternative for explaining cooperation, it has not yet been utilised to explain the Post-Cold War security environment. In light of this, I modify RST in order to take into account non-state actors as sources of violence, as well as extra-regional powers encroaching on a geographic security sphere. I also introduce a macrostructural and microstructural model that incorporates exogenous shocks and the emergence of negarchy through the detection of the anarchy-interdependence and hierarchy-restraint problematiques. I conclude that negarchy is present in varying intensity in three regional security spheres. This allows us to account for the dynamics of organizational cooperation patterns.