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This thesis examines the emergence and governance of dual-use concerns associated with biotechnological innovation. Previous work has engaged with various facets of the dual-use issue from a wide range of theoretical perspectives. This includes, for example, the study of the dual-use issue as an ethical dilemma facing the scientific community (Miller and Selgelid 2007) and as a challenge to international arms control and non-proliferation regimes directed at biological and chemical weapons (Kelle, Nixdorff, and Dando 2006). Work in this area has also included educational (Rappert 2009) and other types of ‘active research’ (Rabinow and Bennett 2012) approaches, which have focused primarily on the scientific community. A key gap in this literature is the absence of comprehensive explanatory frameworks which address how and why governance initiatives are developing in national contexts, which could lead to clearer understandings of the scope and prospect of dual-use governance. To this end, this thesis takes a comparative case study approach to characterise the emergence of dual-use governance regimes directed at the nascent techno-scientific field of synthetic biology. The work focuses on developments in the emergence of the field in two national cases studies; the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Empirically, the work draws upon several types of source material, including elite interviews as well as primary and secondary document analysis. In theoretical terms, academic debates about constructivist approaches to the study of securitization processes are utilized in order to help refine the analytical framework developed within this study. This thesis represents the first substantive comparison of UK and US approaches to the governance of dual-use aspects of cutting-edge life science research and biotechnology. It identifies and characterises four key domains of dual-use governance at national level. Further to this, the work traces the various impacts of these domains on the emergence and scope of dual-use governance in the case of synthetic biology in a US and UK context. In particular, this work reveals the role that existing laboratory safety and security regimes play in defining the scope of dual-use problems. It also identifies a number of attempts within the New and Emerging Science and Technology domain to move beyond these restrictive framings. Analysis reveals a series of challenges facing such initiatives which can be explained with reference to the institutions and norms within the key domains of governance, the relationship between these domains. This work also reveals the extent to which dichotomous presentations of bottom-up verse top-down governance options represent a crude understanding of the politics of dual-use issues. In particular, analysis reveals how key aspects of the synthetic biology community, scientific institutions and industry have played a fundamental role in shaping the scope and nature of government responses to dual-use concerns in relation to certain dual-use issues associated with the field. Finally, this thesis also demonstrates, through the utilisation of two policy process heuristics, that securitization theory could benefit greatly from further engagement with policy theory, particularly in the context of analytically eclectic research in the context of the study of non-traditional security issues.

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The aim of this thesis is to use the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to examine the way in which the Anglo-American special relationship functioned away from a crisis and on an issue over which the British were, uniquely the controlling power. Africa became a Cold War battleground in the sense that both the Americans and the Soviets wanted saw this vast area as a potential gain. For Britain the issue was how to appease both the white settler and African native populations, under the scrutiny of both new African nations and the UN while pushing forward with their decolonisation policy. This pressure, coupled with the desire to establish a new world role through helped to create a unique situation for Anglo-American relations as it gave the two nations an issue they could work together to solve, without a crisis to guide or influence them.

How do leaders of an alliance manage crises in which the interests of the members of an alliance conflict with each other while, at the same time, maintaining the functioning of an alliance? This thesis seeks to make a contribution towards better a understanding of allies' crisis behaviour and offers a new model to explain this. In order to undertake the study, four crises in the US-UK 'Special Relationship' during the Reagan-Thatcher years (198 1-1988) have been selected: the Faildands War 1982, the US invasion of Grenada in 1983, the US air raids on Libya in 1986, and finally the Persian Gulf reflagging operation of 1987. The particular focus is upon the way in which crises were managed by the two governments and how these events impacted upon their wider relationship. It also argues that the nature of a certain type of crisis undermines the Anglo-American special relationship. By examining and analysing the allies' crisis behaviour in these four case studies, this thesis tries to determine whether the relationship between the two allies enabled them to co-operate more effectively in times of crisis.

The relationship between religion and foreign policy has emerged as a priority for Western governments in recent years, yet scholarly analysis of the religion-foreign policy relationship, particularly in the UK, remains scarce. Seeking to contribute to this - still nascent - conversation, in this thesis, I ask the question ‘what are policy makers doing in the context of so-called religious resurgence or ‘post-secularism’? In doing so, I challenge conventional wisdom about the secularism of public policy, about the emergence of the post-secular, about the impacts of globalisation and about rational choice theories of religious vitality. Broadly speaking, I argue that policy makers are finding new ways to ‘manage’ religion by drawing on both domestic policy and domestic constitutional settlements. As a result, I argue, there are constitutive differences in the way the United States and the United Kingdom pursue religion-related foreign policy. However, contrary to many sociological accounts which emphasise the outlier status of the United States in the otherwise overwhelmingly secular West (see e.g Berger et al, 2008), I demonstrate the ways in which Britain and America - when it comes to religion-related foreign policy - are religious and secular respectively. Furthermore, this thesis offers a different account than that presented by, increasingly numerous, post-secular narratives. Where they emphasise religious change at the international level, I demonstrate that religion-related foreign policy, on both sides of the Atlantic, is characterised by continuity at the national level. Finally, I make suggestions about how a more religion-attentive UK foreign policy could be developed in ways which are consistent with this story of continuity in the national management of religion.

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This thesis examines the Anglo-American Relationship around international drug control and addresses two main questions: first, was there a ‘special relationship’ in the field of drug control? Second, what impact did their relationship have on international control efforts? It highlights that the relationship was far from ‘special’ and was frequently strained. Further, it argues that the outcomes of international drug control efforts, between the collapse of the League of Nations system during World War II and the coming into force of the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1964, derived from a triangulation of three international drug control blocs: control advocate states, led by the US; producing states and their noninterventionist allies, led by Turkey and the Soviet Union; and moderate manufacturing and consuming countries, led by the UK. In this triangulation process the UK and US remained the lead international actors and represented the two core policy strands within the system: regulation and prohibition respectively. The Anglo-American drug relationship saw overlap and division in policy interests, resulting in both cooperation and competition. They overlapped around pursuing a global regulatory system managing the flows of ‘dangerous drugs’ internationally. They diverged around the peripheral or frontier aspects of this system: namely, where to draw the line between licit and illicit consumption; how tightly to restrict, regulate and prohibit global production; how much national oversight and interference to provide international organisations; and how to deal with existing drug consuming populations. Where their policy interests overlapped, and when the UK and US consciously worked together, international political progress was possible. Where the two diverged, around strict adherence to prohibitionist principles; overly restricting the manufacturing sector’s ability to procure raw materials; and assuming national obligations for a repressive ‘closed institutional’ model of dealing with ‘addiction’, political momentum generally stalled. Finally, this thesis argues that the 1961 Single Convention evolved via Anglo-American ‘competitive cooperation’ and was ultimately a joint Anglo-American creation: a regulatory system with prohibitionist aspects. However, the 1961 Single Convention ultimately represented a victory for the regulatory strand and the UK over the US-led prohibitionist strand.

This study investigates the relations between Britain and the United States with regard to East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century with a view to establishing how far these conformed in practice to the ideal of the ‘great rapprochement’. It makes the case that interaction between the two powers, while generally cordial, was not characterised by cooperation or collaboration on a practical level. Through discussion of the issues of foreign investment and encroachment in China, the Boxer Rising, the Russo-Japanese War, Japanese immigration to the Pacific Coast of North America and the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the study considers why Britain and the United States failed to cooperate despite an apparent basis for joint action in both shared interests and ideological motivations. It argues that the community of interest of the two powers was generally nullified by the broader concerns of each power, principally the dictates of domestic politics for the United States and the global policy needs of an already overstretched British Empire. With regards to ideology, the study demonstrates that in spite of a significant body of shared ideas regarding race and civilisation, specifically the ideologies of Anglo-Saxonism and the Yellow Peril, British and American policymakers did not often employ such ideas or make use of ideological language in their interactions. It suggests that policymakers deliberately avoided or downplayed ideological considerations, apparently believing that these had the potential to be counterproductive. The key findings of the study are therefore that British and American policymakers were surprisingly sensitive and careful in their handling of ideas relating to race and civilisation and that very similar, if not identical, interests in a given region were not sufficient to overcome the wider limitations on British-American cooperation, bringing into question the notion that the ‘great rapprochement’ was effective beyond the level of rhetoric and friendly relations.

This thesis investigates UK-US relations with regard to the South Asian Crisis of 1971. Through a focus on an understudied point of disagreement within the relationship between Prime Minister Edward Heath and President Richard Nixon, the thesis sheds further light on Anglo-American relations in the early 1970s. Through analysis of archival documents on both sides of the Atlantic, this thesis contributes to the growing revisionist literature that has moved away from a focus upon Heath’s pro-Europeanism as the cause of problems in the Anglo-American relationship at the time. Rather, a more nuanced approach that also investigates the impact of the secretive foreign policymaking style of the Nixon White House is taken into account. The thesis reveals the issues in communication and differences of interests that, in December 1971, led the UK and US delegations at the UN Security Council to tacitly advocate for opposite sides of a hot war in South Asia. The thesis assesses the effect that these heated disagreements had upon the Anglo-American relationship going into 1972 and 1973.