This thesis seeks to research patterns of economic growth and development from a number of perspectives often resonated in the growth literature. By addressing themes about history, geography, institutions and culture the thesis is able to bring to bear a wide range of inter-related literatures and methodologies within a single content. Additionally, by targeting different administrative levels in its research design and approach, this thesis is also able to provide a comprehensive treatment of the economic growth dilemma from both cross-national and sub-national perspectives. The three chapters herein discuss economic development from two broad dimensions. The first of these chapters takes on the economic growth inquiry by attempting to incorporate cultural geography within a cross-country formal spatial econometric growth framework. By introducing the global cultural dynamics of languages and ethnic groups as spatial network mechanisms, this chapter is able to distinguish economic growth effects accruing from own-country productive efforts from those accruing from interconnections within a global productive network chain. From this, discussions and deductions about the implications for both developed and developing countries are made as regards potentials for gains and losses from such types and levels of productive integration. The second and third chapters take a different spin to the economic development inquiry. They both focus on economic activity in Africa, tackling the relevant issues from a geo-intersected dimension involving historic regional tribal homelands and modern national and subnational administrative territories. The second chapter specifically focuses on attempting to adopt historical channels to investigate the connection between national institutional quality and economic development in demarcated tribal homelands at the fringes of national African borders. The third chapter on the other hand focuses on looking closer at the effects of demarcations on economic activity. It particularly probes how different kinds of demarcation warranted by two different but very relevant classes of politico-economic players have affected economic activity quite distinguishably within the resulting subnational regions in Africa.

The argument of this thesis is that measures taken by international bodies to establish the rule of law in postconflict situations are undertaken in the mistaken belief that they will automatically enhance conditions for the rule of law to flourish. In fact, examination of the situation in Southern Sudan demonstrates that there is a wide disconnection between the measures pursued and the outcome of the process. This study will therefore inquire into the different meanings attributed to the concept of the rule of law in order to establish what the concept signifies in the context of statebuilding, with a focus on Southern Sudan. How does the theoretical understanding of the rule of law correlate with the legal and institutional measures taken by international organizations such as the United Nations and the African Union to build the effectiveness of the state in Southern Sudan? The study will further address issues such as what kind of state institutions are envisaged by rule of law reforms, together with the historical and theoretical imperatives which orient and drive the rule of law building process in post-conflict situations. The research is envisaged as a contribution to the debate on how to make ‘rule of law work on the ground’. It is hoped that if practitioners and policy makers take into account the findings of this study, their contribution to rule of law reforms in countries like Southern Sudan that have experienced protracted conflicts will not only achieve their objectives of reforms but also significantly improve the social and economic wellbeing and human rights protection of the people in whose name these reforms are pursued.

This thesis explores the complexities of parenting in post-apartheid South Africa. It investigates the normative expectations surrounding motherhood and fatherhood and how employed mothers, as those who bear the main responsibility for childcare, reconcile family and paid work. It is a qualitative study which draws on 43 interviews with women and men managers in a Government Department and a Parastatal. Thirty seven interviews were with managers (21 mothers and 16 fathers), 3 with gender experts in these organisations, and 3 with Human Resources personnel. It also draws on an analysis of domestic divisions of labour in 3 households and an exploration of national legislation and workplace policies to examine how the workplace accommodates those with family/childcare responsibilities. The study demonstrates that South African parenting is complex: parental norms encapsulate the coexistence of modern and traditional values (Inglehart and Baker, 2003; Hotchfeld, 2008), rather than following a linear pattern of change from traditional to modern. Moreover, there are inconsistencies in values and normative expectations relating to gender-role attitudes and parenting expectations, as well as between gender-role attitudes and parenting practices. Incongruencies and contradictions in relation to parenting are also found between and within domains: the fast-changing workplace brought about by the new democratic government‟s commitment to equality and the subsequent transformation of the public sector contrasts with the „stalled revolution‟ in parenting practices, especially in relation domestic divisions of labour, within the domestic sphere. Using Squires‟s (2005) typology of inclusion, reversal and displacement to analyze South African approaches to workplace gender transformation, the study establishes that South Africa has adopted policies based on inclusion and reversal and has left out displacement, thus increasing women‟s representation at the workplace without challenging the status quo. To this effect the workplace has remained masculineoriented; it is characterized by a long-working hours regime and minimal work-life balance policies. As a result mothers are facing difficulties in reconciling family and paid work. However, women mobilize support outside the workplace to cope with the demands of family and paid work. The study shows that the support networks mobilized by women are influenced by socio-economic and geographical mobility associated with the rise of the new black middle-class families brought about by the political change from apartheid to democracy. The migration of families from working to middle-class areas demonstrates the fluidity of mothering and coping strategies; while fathers remain free from childcare and family responsibilities.

This thesis is an analysis of liberal ideology and its role in South African industrialisation during the period 1886-1948. It looks at the growth of a specifically South African "liberal tradition" out of nineteenth century Cape colonial origins and focuses on the development of liberal welfare and reform orientated organisations and agencies. Using the private papers and correspondence of the individuals involved in establishing this reform tradition, the thesis argues that South African liberals were only partially successful in the years before 1948 in emulating their western counterparts in institutionalising themselves as political mediators between the state apparatus and the burgeoning black working class. Lacking a sound political base in the narrow electoral franchise, liberals were forced increasingly onto the defensive as the old paternalist basis of Cape liberalism became eroded. Though for the period between Uni-on and the second world war able use was made of local level politics, the increase in democratic radicalism by the mid 1940s forced liberals towards reformulating their ideology into one of administrative reform from above on the basis of a model of ethnic pluralism. This theory has remained the basis of South African liberal ideology substantially up to the present.

This thesis investigates the reception and treatment of the refugees from Hungary and Egypt who arrived in France and in Britain after the Hungarian revolution and the Suez crisis. The thesis argues that the reception of the refugees from Hungary and from Egypt was primarily linked to the French and British immigration policies and influenced by the Cold War context. The first part deals with the creation of the Hungarian refugees and their reception in France and Britain. Chapter two gives a brief account on the Hungarian revolution and what led 200,000 Hungarians to leave their country. Chapter three deals with the reception and treatment of the Hungarian refugees in France, and sets out to demonstrate how the revolution and the refugee situation were first exploited for propagandistic purposes and national political interests. It also examines immigration policy in France and how the Hungarians were to serve France's economic and demographic interests as candidates for immigration. French-Jewish responses to the refugee situation are also explored. Finally, it discusses the effects of the Cold War in the resettlement process. Chapter four explores similar questions about the Hungarians with respect to Britain. The second part of the thesis studies the expulsion of the French, British and stateless Jews from Egypt and their resettlement in France and Britain. Chapter five deals with who the refugees from Egypt were, and the unusual nature of their nationality and cultural background. Chapter six deals with the reception and treatment of refugees from Egypt in France, and focuses on how the French government and administration oscillated between obligation and desire to provide relief to the French Jews of Egypt, as they were not considered to be suitable candidates for resettlement in France according to immigration policies and practices. As most of the refugees from Egypt were Jewish, the chapter also looks at the Jewish specificity of the resettlement policy and how their resettlement made the refugees question their French identity. Chapter seven discusses the reception of the refugees from Egypt in Britain. It analyses the different domestic context regarding the Suez crisis and its impact on the refugees. The question of identity and cultural background is also explored.

This thesis makes a contribution to the study of Sino-African relations by analysing the bilateral relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the United Republic of Tanzania during its formative period in the 1960s. Tanzania was the largest recipient of Chinese aid during this period, which also marked the height of European decolonisation in Africa. As a work of international history, the thesis combines the analysis of the relevant secondary literature with extensive research using archival sources in Tanzania, China, the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US), as well as oral history interviews. It links Tanzanian political developments with China’s African policy in the 1960s. The Sino-Tanzanian relationship was complex and multi-faceted; it was affected by external as well as local African factors. Indeed, as the thesis shows, its development owed much to African political actors and especially to President Julius Nyerere’s gradual consolidation of power and Tanzania’s relative political stability. The study begins by tracing the contact between Chinese officials and the Zanzibari and Tanganyikan nationalists in the late 1950s, which set the stage for the strong bilateral relations that emerged after independence. Chinese military assistance to Tanzania and Chairman Mao Zedong’s offer to construct the Tanzania-Zambia rail link buttressed these ties at the highest levels of government. This was further complemented by the nature of the Chinese aid programme, which contrasted starkly with Western aid. The resilience of the bilateral relationship was demonstrated most clearly by its continued resilience in the face of the destabilising effects of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that were manifested in Tanzania from 1966 to 1968. Publicly, the Tanzanian government remained a stalwart supporter of the Chinese government, as shown by the Tanzanian delegation’s support for the “restoration” the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the China seat at the United Nations.

While news media coverage of political protest is by no means a new topic of research for media scholars, few studies have attempted to unpack how and why protesters and protests have been legitimised within news media coverage, rather than covered with the expectation of violence occurring (Halloran et al. 1970), marginalised (Gitlin 1980), cast as threats to the social order (McLeod 1995), or denied the status of legitimate political players (Shoemaker 1984). This research project is an attempt to do just that. Therefore, this dissertation examines whether newspapers from the United Kingdom and United States accorded the opposition movement against then president Hosni Mubarak with favourable news coverage during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. A content analysis of 611 newspaper articles from both British and American publications was conducted to determine whether the anti-Mubarak opposition was covered favourably, in addition to revealing what other dominant themes were present within the reporting. This study revealed that the anti-Mubarak opposition protesters were covered favourably by an overwhelming margin within both British (65 percent) and American (66 percent) newspaper articles, and put a particular emphasis on the political motivations galvanising the protests. Conversely, then-president Hosni Mubarak and the Egyptian government, and the Egyptian police and security services were portrayed as repressive actors within the reporting on the revolution. Furthermore, the anti-Mubarak opposition was featured most frequently as the first source within the reporting from either nation's newspapers. Another dominant theme emerging from the content analysis, and that was subsequently examined within the empirical chapters of this project, was that geopolitical considerations were frequently included within coverage from both British (60 percent) and American (76 percent) newspapers. Few studies have attempted to assess the prominence and role of geopolitics within the reporting of international politics (Myers et al. 1996). In summation, this research project questions the normative assumptions made about the relationship between the news media and protesters being antagonistic, and to understand how and why protest is granted legitimacy within media coverage of political crises.

The study was carried out against a background of a general perception that participatory budgeting (PB) in developing countries is an annual ritual exercise to comply with pressure from supranational agencies to adopt New Public Management (NPM) reforms, rather than a practical process that involves citizens in formulating and developing local government plans and budgets that incorporate their needs and priorities. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach and a case study design, using Uganda and Wamala District Local Government as country and study sites respectively, to explore how PB is implemented in practice and whether the desired outcomes are achieved. It further explores the underlying factors that restrict or enhance PB in a decentralised LG framework. The study argues that adapting NPM reforms to the local environment, and citizens exercising their rights and responsibilities, are critical to the achievement of desires, goals and outcomes. The findings of the study demonstrate that owing to power relations, inadequate locally raised revenues, citizens’ lack of knowledge, skills and competencies in public sector financial management, and inherent cultural norms and values, PB may not achieve the desired goals and outcomes in developing countries under a decentralized local governance system. The contribution to accounting theory from this study is that institutional pressures (coercive, mimetic and normative) can be mitigated by empowering citizens to exercise their civil, social, political and economic/financial citizenship rights and responsibilities effectively. This could lead to strengthening management accounting systems, and result in policy reforms (that are donor driven) achieving desired outcomes.

This thesis employs Gramsci’s language of hegemony in order, firstly, to explore the role of civil society in legitimating and resisting state hegemony, and secondly, to examine the sociological basis of counter-hegemonic politics in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The thesis arose out of a critique of reductionist approaches in the theorising and study of changing state-society relations in post-2000 Zimbabwe that identifies civil society exclusively with opposition politics and excludes organisations aligned to the ruling party, and therefore resulting in functionalist discussions that view civil society as necessarily anti-state. This thesis demonstrates however that a dense hegemonic civil society also exists and it is organically aligned to ZANU-PF in its advocacy for a social change based on a radical transformed terrain of the relations of social forces of production, vis-à-vis land redistribution, albeit implementing this vision through coercive violence, persuasive but exclusionary discourses of radical nationalism, Afro-radicalism and nativism. Confronting it, is an equally militant counter-hegemonic civil society aligned to the MDC, and it deploys the discourses of constitutionalism and human rights to resist state hegemony and to unravel the violent nature of ZANU-PF’s nationalist project, but in ways devoid of a serious critique of the structural inequalities of a post-independent Zimbabwe.

This work seeks to examine traditional Christian doctrines regarding life after death, from a pastoral perspective. The study explores new ways of interpreting the meaning in human identity, dis-innocence and forgiven-ness specifically as relating to the continuing evolution of Humankind, and offers a description of humankind as Homo sanctus. The thesis is built around three individual selected case examples of death and dying together with a constructed narrative of ‘problem dying’, and a group of five persons in a Fellowship of the Dying; it describes the development and praxis of new approaches to ministry in these areas. A number of new terms are introduced to better convey the substance of meanings. The study itself may be considered as offering significant new insight in two respects: 1. It engages with the idea that bio-death has teleological meaning within the evolution of Personhood in resurrection. 2. It offers the experiences of Christian pastoral ministry pro-actively engaging with dying as a pilgrimage into and through bio-death, in which every member of the immediate community of faith is pro-active in pilgrimage with the dying Person. The study draws on extensive cross-cultural and multi-faith experience in Britain and Africa.