The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of global civil society advocacy networks as major players in global governance. This research aimed at using a case study of GCAP in critically analysing the politics and dynamics of crafting a global civil society advocacy alliance. Specifically, the study aimed to: a) identify, analyse, and document GCAP’s experiences, strategies and challenges in trans-national networking and advocacy; b) generate knowledge on recent developments in global civil society networking and advocacy. The study analyses the study phenomenon using two central features of GCAP: networking and advocacy. Chapter one attempts to give a background of the study and also discusses the methods used. Chapter two lays the theoretical framework and operationalises the concepts explored in the study. The report argues that alliances are very different from ‘normal’ forms of organisations because they are made up of diverse forms of organisations, coming together voluntarily to achieve a specific purpose. They are therefore, by their very nature, complex, unstable, and difficult to co-ordinate. Chapters Three and Four look at such intricacies and complexities of crafting and operations of global advocacy networks. I conclude this research arguing that despite challenges in alliances building and operations, global civil society organisations will still need to network if they are to remain relevant and effective in current global governance context. It is only in their unity that they will be able to confront their common challenges.

This project argues for rethinking the western as a global genre, rather than one rooted in a particular construction of the American West. First, by considering the western's global origins through an examination of early cinema, I challenge the singular connection to an American origin. Through tracing an alternative history of the genre in early cinema, we can see that the assumed connections between America and the western can be challenged by way of examples from France, Argentina, and Australia. Moving to the post-war and contemporary periods, this project highlights the popular and political uses of the genre by way of examples from Germany, Latin America, Spain and Italy, and Australia. These case studies identify how considering the western as a global popular genre allows it to address local political concerns across a range of national and transnational contexts. To situate the different contexts, this thesis relies on the broad theoretical framework of transculturation, following Mary Louise Pratt, to consider how the western 'selects' and 'invents' from particular historical, cultural, and political moments, often as part of asymmetrical power relations. Each case study also seeks to provide a theoretical framework specific to the local context, such as the theories and practices of Third Cinema in Latin America, in order to suggest ways of addressing the western outside of Hollywood. By shifting the western away from a central origin point, this thesis shows how the genre becomes meaningful on a global scale in terms of key issues of identity, political critique, and representations of space.

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The main goal of the thesis is to develop an understanding of the history of international society, reinterpreting it as the uneven and combined development of capitalism. It is argued that uneven and combined development is the historical form that capitalism has taken in expanding international society. The way in which each individual society was integrated into the expanding international society depended on the local conditions and how this fed into the international context set by an already-existing world market and states-system. When subjected to the pressures of capitalist expansion, states attempted to quickly consolidate their power and increase revenue by developing their productive capacity through copying the methods of production and political organisation which had made Europe so strong. This produced a particular model of development in that advanced forms were often grafted onto pre-existing structures. The experience of this creates the particular context in which political action takes place. The case studies of Egypt and Vietnam provide two local comparative applications of the theory. Each case study shows, through historical reconstruction, how the history of international society and the history of individual societies are intertwined. It will also show that in both cases the experience of uneven and combined development created a particular distorted and twisted class structure which meant that social and political instability was built in. By charting their different experiences an explanation is provided for the two very different routes they took: in Egypt's case - a nationalist military coup d'etat, and in Vietnam's case - Communist revolution and war. But the theory goes further than just providing an analysis of domestic instabilities, it also shows how it is the management of these very instabilities which has dominated the policies and actions of the major powers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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We study the Lozi mapping f(x,y) = (1+by-a|x|,x) acting on a compact trapping region in R² and prove that its Sinai-Bowen-Ruelle measure is stable under small random perturbations. This extends the results of Kifer and Young [Y2] for Axiom A attractors to a piecewise hyperbolic setting.

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