This research rises out of the perceived gap between rhetoric and reality in the congregational life of the church in the United States. Using the research tools of autoethnography and case study, it investigates the life settings of the researcher and the interior organizational dynamics of three cases, a for-profit, a nonprofit and a church organization. The research considers how organizational pre-conditions and traits and processes, leadership behavior and perspectives and the perceived benefits of an empowering environment, impacts the ability of the organization to implement and sustain an empowering environment. Three pre-conditions, namely, a flexibility in organizational behaviours, the total commitment of the primary leader, and a particular view of people were found to be essential. Four relational traits of voice, trust, authentication, and connectivity were discovered to generate a relational environment that was conducive to an empowering culture. No particular leadership style was found to be essential, only that the style could embrace the elements enumerated above. Personal and organizational benefits were outside the normative expectations of profit or other numerical measurements and closer to aspects of relationally and energy. There appeasers to be no significant difference between church and other organizational types in how empowerment functions. I conclude by reflecting on practical aspects and how the research journey impacted the researcher.

This thesis studies a group of Poles embroiled in the American Civil War. They span three generations and share culture, nationality and devotion to their ideals. The common thread running through their lives is that they came from a country that had basically disintegrated at the end of the previous century, yet they carried the concepts of freedom that they inherited from their forefathers with them to America. Their ancestral Poland had been openly democratic and deemed dangerous to the autocratic imperial neighbours that partitioned it. These men came to a new country, then exercised their “Polishness” as they became embroiled in the great American upheaval, the Civil War. Of the nine of them examined, four sided with the North and four with the South. Another began in the Confederate cavalry and finished with the Union. In a war commonly categorized as a struggle between two American regions, there has not been significant attention devoted to Poles and foreigners in general. These men carried their belief in democratic liberalism with them from Europe in to the American War. Whether fighting to keep a Union together or to establish the new Confederacy, they held to their ideals and made a significant contribution.

This thesis examines the context, conception and execution of US engagement strategies towards the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1979 to 1980. Utilising a wealth of primary sources and interviews with former officials, it charts the assessments that guided US policy and considers the internal and geo-political dynamics that shaped it. It focuses in particular on attempts to establish a strategic alliance based on an assumed mutual interest in containing communist encroachment. To support this, it examines US perceptions and assessments of the Soviet threat in Iran and the Iranian left. It highlights severe deficiencies in the approach and findings of both. This thesis then examines how the hostage crisis and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan re-fashioned US objectives in Iran. It demonstrates that the Soviet intervention reinforced many of the original premises that had underpinned US engagement. This thesis concludes that, whilst Washington went to significant efforts to restore working relations with Iran, America’s presentation of the communist threat as a starting point for rapprochement sat incongruously with its claim to have accepted the Revolution. More importantly, a Soviet-centric mindset obstructed a deeper understanding of Iran’s complex internal affairs. This approach does not dispute the major, possibly even insurmountable, obstacles facing the normalisation of bi-lateral relations. However, this does not obviate its analysis of some underlying flaws in how Washington approached engagement.

During their transatlantic journeys to Britain throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans engaged in what I term “adaptive resistance,” a multi-faceted interventionist strategy by which they challenged white supremacy and won support for abolition. Alongside my recovery of this mode of self-presentation in sources I have excavated from Victorian newspapers, I use an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on literary studies, cultural history, memory studies, African American studies and the visual culture of antislavery iconography to (re)discover black performative strategies on the Victorian stage from the late 1830s to the mid 1890s. Performance was only one strand in the black activist arsenal, however. The successful employment of adaptive resistance relied on a triad of performance, abolitionist networks and exploitation of print culture. For the first time, I have identified and unified these themes as central to black abolitionist transatlantic visits, and conclude that if an individual ensured an even balance between all three, it was likely their sojourn was successful. This changes our previous knowledge of black abolitionist missions, as we can use this analysis to explain why some activist visits were more successful than others. To share their testimony of slavery, black men and women such as Moses Roper, Frederick Douglass, William and Ellen Craft, Henry ‘Box’ Brown, J. Sella Martin, Josiah Henson and Ida B. Wells “adapted” to the location and the climate in which they spoke in. Intervening in white public spaces, they subverted white power and refused to exploit themselves as spectacles or objects for white consumption. To maximize their message, they exploited the connections made available through Victorian print culture to foster favourable coverage of their lectures, befriended newspaper editors and organized the printing of narratives or pamphlets recording their speeches. Synonymous with this was their utilization of as many white abolitionist networks as possible. Through the exploitation of performance, print culture and abolitionist networks, black men and women forged a black American protest tradition in Britain. Their acts of resistance infused this tradition with a spirit of independence that could be deployed against paternalistic white antislavery reformers as well as white racists, both on an abolitionist and non-abolitionist stage. An essential part of this African American protest tradition was the creation and celebration of black testimony. Black men and women sought to make their voices heard in a climate dominated by white supremacy; they refused to capitulate and educated thousands of people on slavery and its legacies through physically and mentally demanding tours organized across Britain. This protest tradition continues to this day, with #BlackLivesMatter activists travelling to Britain to campaign against transatlantic state violence.

This thesis offers a new interpretation of the international history of the early period of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. Such a revision is necessary given the recently released material in the national archives of the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and the United States, and in the personal archives of those involved. Furthermore, by adopting a different methodology, made possible by the recent archive material, further new perspectives emerge of the international dimension. Rather than taking a single element of the international history of the Troubles – for example, the ‘Irish dimension’, ‘American dimension’, the Cold War, or European integration – this thesis takes a multidimensional approach analysing the impact of the interactions of each of the international actors. The starting point for this multidimensional analysis is the introduction of internment without trial on 9 August 1971. This was not just a significant event in Northern Ireland, but also had the effect of internationalising the Troubles. Over the months that followed the international dimension developed two distinct spheres of activity – a political sphere and a security sphere. Different combinations of actors interacted in each of these spheres. In addition to the moderate Northern Irish parties, the British and Irish governments participated in the political sphere. The US government eventually ruled itself out of this sphere following the US presidential election in November 1972, but only after it had flirted with intervention. However, interventions by the US Congress’s ‘Irish Caucus’ continued. Meanwhile, in the security sphere, comprehensive Anglo-Irish security cooperation proved impossible to achieve. Instead, Anglo-American and Hiberno-American security cooperation developed – with Dublin eventually exerting as much of an influence on US policy as the UK. However, the US government’s attempts to supress IRA support were seriously restricted by the administration’s unwillingness to pick a fight with the Irish Caucus. The international dimension was an integral component of the peace process that resulted in the establishing of a cross-community power-sharing executive and the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973. Even when this process was brought to an end by a Protestant backlash in May 1974 the principles developed during this period were confirmed and were to be central to future peace initiatives in Northern Ireland, including the Good Friday Agreement.

This thesis is a study of American local government in the 1920s and 1930s and the role played by political party machines. It reviews the growth of overtly corrupt machines after the end of the Civil War, the struggle by the Progressives to reform city halls throughout America at the turn of the twentieth century and the rise of second phase machines at the end of the First World War. It analyses the core elements of machines, especially centralization of power, manipulation of incentives, leadership and “bossism”, and use of patronage. Throughout it emphasises that first and foremost, machines were small monopoly businesses whose vast profits, derived from improper and corrupt use of government levers, were allocated among a small group of senior players. Using the Kansas City Democratic machine of the infamous Tom Pendergast as a case study, it examines challenges to machines and the failure of the local press to expose Pendergast’s wrongdoing. It analyses elements of machine corruption, first in the conduct of elections where numerous fraudulent tactics kept machines in power and, second, in the way machines corruptly manipulated local government, often involving organized crime. Finally, the thesis examines the breach of ethics of machine politics, measuring the breaches against the pragmatism of bosses. Numerous larger-than-life characters appear in the thesis from bosses such as Tweed of Tammany Hall infamy, Alonzo “Nuckie” Johnson, Frank Hague and Tom Pendergast, the gangster John Lazia, as well as men who did business with or fought Pendergast, such as future president Harry S. Truman, Missouri U.S. Attorney Maurice Milligan and even Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The American Revolution has generated a rich historiography covering innumerable aspects; ranging from causation to consequences, political ideologies to social change; specific locales to global context; and exploring the significant themes of race, class and gender. However, despite this extensive coverage, there remains a disjuncture at the heart of interpretations of the Revolution between the principles that inspired it and the violence that sustained it. By reconstructing the boundaries of coercion this bifurcation can be repaired and the moral, intellectual, political and social constraints of force revealed.

My thesis, titled ‘Alter-Democratization: A Critique of US Interventionism in the Middle East’, is grounded in political sociology and its principal concern for the phenomenon of power and relations thereof. As such, it explores the dialectics of Bush administration democratic interventionism in the Middle East, with particular focus on Iran. The first part of the thesis deals with the hybrid nature of such interventionism, which is mainly empirical in nature. Here, it is argued that, because of its strategic disposition, the neoconservative drive to ‘democratize’ the Middle East is in fact an attempt at domination rather than democratization. The second part of the thesis deals with the main ontological aspect of the project, namely, the Bush administration’s assumption – as reflected in its Greater Middle East Initiative of 2004 – that Western – especially liberal, market-oriented – conceptions of freedom and democracy are somehow prior, and thus superior, to local conceptions of such phenomena. Accordingly, particular attention is paid, in mainly a cross-hermeneutical comparative manner, to issues relating to social psychology, traditional Islamic political philosophy and jurisprudence, economic conditions, and civil/uncivil society as potential determinants of the future of democracy in the Middle East. Through the use of books, journal articles, and electronic documents, the thesis draws, in quite an interdisciplinary manner, upon both primary and secondary sources of relevant historical and theoretical data, in order to put forward the idea that viable transitions to democracy in the Middle East, including Iran, will have to eventually be an outcome of endogenous processes of reflexivity, education, negotiation, consensus, and socioeconomic development, and that anything other than the above (i.e. so exogenous as to undermine endogenous processes of transition to democracy) will necessarily be dominational and, thus, undemocratic in nature. Consequently, the thesis will be addressing some of the deficiencies inherent in the existing literature on US liberal internationalism, for many of the hitherto accounts of such internationalism have either viewed the topic from an Orientalist perspective, thereby ignoring local preferences and capacities altogether, or have simply overlooked many of the negative consequences of so-called democratic interventionism for the populations and endogenous processes involved.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the activities of American women's associations in the international realm. In the years immediately following the Second World War, American women saw both an opportunity and an obligation to become active in the international sphere. With obstacles and prejudices preventing their inclusion in mainstream political and diplomatic circles, many American women channelled their interest and activities in the international realm through the medium of voluntary women's organizations. These organizations participated in a number of programmes which sought to export the American way of life, and women's place within it, to overseas markets. Whilst many of these programmes were a product of American women's authentic desire to assist women in other nations, many originated with and were directed by the US government. The work of American women's organizations in international relations were an important component of two government strategies. Firstly, they were a response to the enthusiasm and encouragement of the US government for the involvement of the private sector in Cold War propaganda. Secondly, the efforts of the US government to reach and influence group identities (such as women) in the international realm was aided by the co-operation of American representatives of that group. In co-operating with their government, American women's organizations were engaged in a constant process of negotiation between their 'natural' and international role as women and their role as Americans. The task of defining and exporting the interests and identities of American women to a world audience was both the result of direct government involvement and the willingness of leaders of American women's organizations to serve national interests. Government involvement ranged from help arranging the details of overseas tours to full-scale funding for a women's organization to combat Communist propaganda. The co-operation of voluntary organizations with the government challenges traditional divisions between the private and public realm, which have in the past contributed to a historiography which has placed undue emphasis on American women's commitment to the domestic ideology of the post-war years, at the expense of an accurate assessment of their role in American foreign relations.

This thesis charts British and American policy-making towards Burma between the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 and the military coup that ended civilian government in 1962. In particular, it examines the role aid played in Burma's relations with the West and China and the Soviet Union: what it was offered, by whom, when and why, and how its leaders responded. Aid from the West began immediately after independence, when the British furnished the Burmese government with military aid against the communist insurgency that broke out in March 1948. Financial assistance was offered, but refused, in 1950. American help began under Harry Truman's administration, also in 1950, and continued under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Further proposals were developed by John F. Kennedy's administration, although these plans were thwarted by the military coup in 1962. In giving aid to Burma, British and American planners shared the same basic underlying aim - keeping the government in power and maintaining its independence from the communist bloc. Both believed that the provision of aid gave them some measure of influence over the government in Rangoon - that, in other words, their aid had some degree of coercive potential, somehow independent of the intentions or interests of the recipient state. However, rather than passive and appropriately grateful recipients of external aid, and the policy prescriptions that tended to come with it, the Burmese are revealed as surprisingly active and autonomous agents, prepared to manipulate their aid relationships to suit their own ends, rather than the objectives of their superpower partners in Washington and Moscow.