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The need for Muslim women’s emancipation is very often tied to what some scholars argue is the Islamic oppression and victimization of women; by a religion they argue is strictly patriarchal. As one of the greatest documented eras in medieval Islamic history, the Abbasid Caliphate, has been one of the most widely covered by researchers of Islamic history studies and will be the case study of this thesis. Through a historical analysis, this study finds that despite the extensive coverage by researchers of the period, research on women and their roles during the time has not yet claimed its rightful status. Indeed, in comparison to the studies of Islamic history, the study of Muslim women remains, at best, undeveloped. The lack of resources dealing with the roles of Muslim women in history and the subsequent sparse coverage of their achievements can be directly linked to the way people, both within academia and contemporary media, perceive women in Islam. This thesis merged the theories of Gaye Tuchman, Fatima Mernissi and S. Jay Kleinberg to form a troika through which the roles of Abbasid women may be re-assessed. As such, this research proposes a solution to remedy the invisibility of Muslim women and their roles in history: by creating a theoretical framework centred on the causes of said invisibility. In applying this framework, the thesis examines the textual materials by critically analysing the various aspects of women’s role in Abbasid society including political, social and religious facets of life in the Būyid and the Saljūq periods. This study of women, in said periods of Abbasid Iraq will highlight the major roles they played in shaping and developing Islamic society. It hence advances knowledge of this era in an original manner by the analysing of women’s history in Islam, via a new approach.

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Although the refugee protection regime is grounded in principles of international human rights and refugee law aimed at protecting individuals from abuses of state power, in practice it still privileges and produces state sovereignty. Principles of protection can become subverted to serve state interests, normalising the increasingly exceptional treatment of refugees. The tensions that result from this paradox, however, may also present opportunities for contesting and denaturalising such exceptionalism. This thesis explores this phenomenon as it emerged in the post-2003 Iraqi refugee crisis. Grounded in Agamben’s work on sovereignty and the “state of exception”, it considers how sovereignty and exceptionalism were expressed through biopolitics and governmentality in the governance of refugees. Using methods of critical legal geography, it maps and analyses how state, institutional, and individual practices reproduced, intersected with, or contested sovereignty and exceptionalism in four spaces of the Iraqi refugee crisis: the Iraqi state, host states in the region, camps in the borderlands, and resettlement. This thesis argues that Iraqi refugees, their legal status, and the spaces they occupied came to embody the contests for identity, power, and authority lodged between states, local actors, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In the process, the technologies of power deployed in the governance of these spaces revealed the persistence and proliferation of the logic of sovereignty. Yet at the same time, they also created opportunities to expose and un-work sovereign violence and to envision forms of protection beyond the state

This thesis explores how Kurdish nationalists generate sympathy and support for their ethnically-defined claims to territory and self-determination in international society and among would-be nationals. It combines conceptual and theoretical insights from the field of IR and studies on nationalism, and focuses on national identity, sub-state groups and international norms. In so doing, this thesis presents a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the self-determination claims of sub-state nationalist groups and their interaction with international society. Such assertions for the control of a specific territory typically embrace, either implicitly or explicitly, ethnic conceptions of national identity. A three-fold argument is proposed and developed to explain why these ethnic claims to self-determination gain sympathy and support. Firstly, political assertions regarding the identity of a specific piece of land and its cartographical depictions are powerful in influencing outsiders’ perceptions because of the normative context in which they are framed. The norms related to sub-state nationalist groups involve both a specific interpretation of self-determination and the norms of human rights and democracy. Secondly, such claims are further reinforced by the perception that the history of a territory is identical to the history of the people living on it. Although a political association between a people and a territory is a relatively novel link, such associations are often assumed and accepted to exist throughout all of history. Kurdish nationalists use the maps of Kurdistan effectively to convey the message. Finally, the diasporal activities of nationalists who, thanks to their location outside the homeland and their ability to communicate their ideas directly to international society, play an important role in asserting the rightfulness of their demand for self-determination and in promoting the idea of an ethnic territory.

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In 1991, following its defeat in the first Gulf War and out of fear of a humanitarian catastrophe, the Iraqi army and state-apparatus were forced to withdraw from the three Kurdish-population governorates in Northern Iraq. This left an administrative vacuum that was filled by the leadership of the Kurdish fragmented guerrilla movement – now a de facto Kurdish state in Northern Iraq, known as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). Instead of achieving their goal of an autonomous (and in the long-term even independent) Kurdistan through insurgency or guerrilla warfare, the Kurdish leadership came to see state- and institution-building as the most efficient path. De facto statehood has had a significant impact on the development of the KRG, its state-building, its interaction with the international community, and its policies. As demonstrated in the growing literature on de facto states, the pursuit of international legitimacy often plays a key role in shaping their conduct and identity, paving the way toward substantial, though fragile, achievements in state-building. The purpose of this research is to contribute to the study of de facto states by exploring the case of the KRG. It argues that the pursuit of legitimacy is essential for the understanding of de facto states, mainly due to its potential to generate interaction between the de facto state and different segments of the international community. Transnational advocacy is found to be particularly significant, including diaspora activism for conveying ideas and encouraging interaction. By examining the evolution of the Kurdish national liberation movement from 1958 to 2010, this research aims to better explain the dynamics that shape de facto states in general, and to contribute to the study of the KRG as a de facto state in particular, including its development, and its domestic and foreign policies.

This thesis focuses on the role of agency during political transition processes in divided societies. To be more specific, it examines how the Iraqi political elites view democracy and what type of political institutions they support. The years between 2012 and 2015 are of great significance and the final US withdrawal at the beginning of the period marked the conclusion of military occupation. That event made the Iraqi political elite central to the political process. Previous studies have focused on structural issues in post invasion Iraq, highlighting factors that could facilitate democracy or systems that could undermine prospects for a democratic system in the country. A gap in the literature on Iraq is identifiable as there is a lack of any real attention to the issue of agency. The theoretical contribution of this study is that it illustrates and underlines the importance of elite perspectives for the democratisation process in a country divided along ethno-religious lines. The study argues that democratic institutional arrangements are needed as the means to reconcile different, and at times conflicting, political interests. Having established this point, the research analyses the role of agency in terms of key political players in forming, arranging, and setting up institutions. Extensive field research collating original empirical data was carried out in Iraq, Baghdad and Erbil, from 2011 to 2015. This study surveys the Iraqi House of Representatives, the Iraqi Presidency, and the Iraqi Council of Ministers, and involves interviews with highly placed decision makers in the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, as well as members of the Constitution Drafting Committee. Key participants include; the President and the Prime Minister, Speakers of the Parliament, and the Chair of Iraqi Constitution Drafting Committee. The participants include members from all the main ethno-religious groups in this divided country. Based on this new data, the specific views of Iraq's political elites are analysed, and their preferred types of political system are articulated, providing a concise contribution to current knowledge of democracy building in Iraq. The first empirical finding is that elites of the minority groups conceive democracy as power sharing, while members of the majority understand it as majority rule. The second finding is that larger groups support majoritarian institutions, while smaller groups support consensual ones. Those findings confirm previous academic thinking, for example Lijphart's theory on consensus democracy. The third finding is more surprising. All groups support a consensual arrangement of federalism and a majoritarian constitution. This unexpected support for these types of institutional arrangements required investigation in more depth to determine how political elites view federalism in Iraq, and how the constitution, if the opportunity arose, might be amended. It is argued that the future possibilities of Iraq’s polity depend largely on political agreements between the political elites representing the main groups in Iraq. The stability of the country rests mainly on the ability of its elites to arrange political institutions in such a way as to accommodate the different interests of the groups they represent.

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