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This dissertation is an attempt to solve a puzzle: how and why did the poor, remote and isolated country of Afghanistan become a site of international Muslim aspiration and imagination in the early 20^th century? To answer this question, the dissertation focuses on the creation of ‘place’ - of Afghanistan in conceptual and material terms - out of the movement through ‘space’ of Afghan and Muslim travellers, and the inscriptions of such movement in texts. Through such a study, the dissertation argues that Afghanistan’s emergence as imperial counter-space and practical base for Muslims was the product of new physical and intellectual interactions amongst Afghan and Muslim travellers, powered by new technologies of steam and print. Such an argument resituates Afghanistan in connection to larger transformations taking place elsewhere. It thus marks an attempt to write late 19^th and early 20^th century Afghanistan back into global history. At the same time as drawing Afghanistan into that larger global story, however, the dissertation stresses the distinctiveness of the ‘Muslim turn’ to Afghanistan: how many of these new physical and intellectual movements relied on older physical or imagined connections with ‘the land of the Afghans’; how other movements offered strikingly original visions of what Afghanistan was and could be; how the Afghan court fostered and encouraged such movements through its particularist policies; how Afghanistan’s seemingly remote location, on the peripheries of the religious heartlands of the Middle East and the political and economic centres of western imperialism, made it such a prominent and attractive focus of Muslim interest and action. By plotting the inter-connections of Afghan and Muslim travellers over a forty-year period, the dissertation charts how Afghanistan grew to become one of the great hopes of the Muslim world. At the same time, the dissertation charts the growing gap between the idealized representation of Afghanistan and its reality. Finally, it illustrates how the ‘Muslim turn’ to Afghanistan ended in disillusionment and disaster, on Afghanistan’s plains.

This thesis examines the development of the Leftist movement in British Punjab and the insights it provides into the political spaces it inhabited and the actors it engaged with. Broadly speaking, this is an attempt at uncovering lesser fragments that offer the possibility of complicating our understanding of Punjabi and South Asian History. In doing so, I seek to uncover a socio-political arena which played host to a multiplicity of contested identities, notions of sovereignty, and political objectives. I thus seek to explore this complex and fluid arena through the study of a variety of movements and intellectual strands, all of which can collectively be labelled as the ‘Left.’ I begin by situating the Punjabi Left within the wider global arena and then shift to examining it within the province itself. I then explore the Left’s acrimonious relationship with the Colonial State as well as its tortured engagements with ‘nationalist’ and ‘communitarian’ movements. Taken together, this thesis, aside from enhancing our understanding of the ‘Left’ itself, also contributes to regional studies in general and questions historiographical demarcations and the categories that are normatively employed in standard political histories.

In 1926 the Kruger National Park in South Africa became the first national park in Africa to accept visitors. Since that date there has been a propaganda campaign to convince people outside of the administration of the importance of the national park project and the value of the wildlife inside the parks. As a large tract of land in a land-hungry region of the country, the Kruger Park required both political and public support to ensure its survival. This attempt to communicate with the public is the subject of my thesis. The idea of the national park, and the natural world that it contained, altered dramatically since 1926. At times the message was tightly managed, and at others that control was loosened. As various interests intervened and encroached, new discourses developed and struggled for influence. Contained within the messages around the park and its wildlife were ulterior strands and ideologies that impacted in various ways on the idea of the national park. Nationalism, race, gender, class and status all became constituent parts of a heterogeneous construction. My thesis interrogates those strands within the discourse on the Kruger National Park. In 1967 the Manyeleti game reserve, on the western borders of the Kruger Park, became the first segregated game reserve for the exclusive use of black South Africans. Through this parallel project African visitors, who had been generally ignored in the Kruger Park setting, became the focus of propaganda efforts intended for a black audience. Race, gender, and class merged with the environmental messages in this unique setting to create new directions in conservationist rhetoric. My thesis sets these diverse messages communicated at Manyeleti alongside those transmitted through and about the Kruger Park.

Between 1945 and 1969 the Sudanese achieved independence and overthrew a military junta with a popular uprising. Nevertheless both democratic periods were quickly ended by military coups. At the same time a civil war divided the country. The thesis asks why the democratic structures were so unstable, and unable to end the conflict between north and south. It argues that the ideas about the Sudanese nation by different groups were so contradictory, that no nation could be built. As a result, the political system failed to find a stable form and to deliver policy results to the constituents. The thesis is using political parties as units of analysis and primarily the constitutional process and, secondarily, questions of independence and sovereignty, as prisms. It discusses the history of the political parties within the context of the political history of Sudan. The discussions about the constitution are understood as one form of expressing ideas about the nation. The thesis presents the different suggestions for the constitution by different parties, especially in regards to governance, federalism, and religion. These contradictory ideas led to the failure of the constitution writing process. The thesis argues that the contradictory positions of the parties created a dual deadlock, which led to a breakdown of democracy. Firstly, due to reciprocal distrust, widely diverging platforms, and generally the difficulty of forming coalition governments, especially in the absence of a democratic tradition, coalitions became extremely unstable and politicians were forced to invest a lot of time and effort to keep coalitions alive and in consequence concrete political actions did not receive enough attention. Secondly, the divergent perceptions of the nation led to a situation where they stopped to see each other as part of the same nation and therefore stopped to recognise others as legitimately participating in the political process.

(i): The first part of this thesis questions the concept of ‘minority’, and the way it has been used to analyze French imperial policy in Syria (‘divide and rule’). Chapter 1 traces the concept’s emergence, showing that it is not self-evidently valid but rather depends on a set of wider social and political circumstances related to the existence of modern nation-states: the minorities of modern Syria cannot be mapped directly back onto the Ottoman millets or religious communities. Chapter 2 examines the term’s application in Syria between the wars: French imperial policy emphasised divisions in Syrian society, but the term ‘minority’ was only systematically attached to these divisions from the 1930s. The concept’s spread in Syria reflects its growing importance in international public discourse worldwide, as the nation-state became the standard state form after World War One. The second part of the thesis uses case studies of particular themes to show how the emergence of minorities illuminates processes of state-formation that have shaped the modern world. Chapters 3 and 4, on the question of ‘separatism’ and the definition of modern Syria’s northern border, examine the spread of effective state authority across a ‘national’ territory. This process bound culturally-divergent populations more tightly into the fabric of a centrally-controlled state, thereby constituting them as ‘minorities’. Chapter 5 examines the debate about a Franco-Syrian treaty leading to Syrian independence, showing that this made the recently-established body of international law on ‘minorities’ in newly-independent states applicable to Syria: the term only became widespread in Syria at this time. Chapter 6 looks at French efforts to reform personal status law in the later 1930s, when the restructuring, on religious lines, of the institutional relationship between the Syrian state and its population created a new uniformity within communities at the national level (one condition for their developing the sense of being ‘minorities’). It also sparked opposition from groups now claiming to represent the ‘majority’. Other Syrians, though, understood their society in different terms.

This is the history of a turbulent borderland in a time of transition. Colonialism redefined the meaning of borders in Burundi, and in the traumatic shift from colonial rule to Independence it became dangerous to live on the frontier. Responding to Newbury’s plea to ‘bring the peasant back in’ to the written history of the Great Lakes region, the thesis takes a micro-history approach, viewing the tumultuous events of the 1960s and 1970s from the perspective of the hills and the homestead. The border with Rwanda, as experienced in the two communes of Kabarore and Busiga, is tested as the point of encounter between society and state in this crucial time. It reveals the function and dysfunction of political linkage, and the tensions of being a citizen and a subject in the margins of a political community ruled by suspicion and paranoia. The themes - dissent, collaboration, elimination, repression - link this local history to the flow of national politics and the making of a new African state. Taking as its scope the pivotal period from decolonisation to the military state’s ‘selective genocide’, enacted against its Hutu population, the thesis identifies ‘vigilance’ as the most productive concept by which to study concepts of governance, political community and political linkage in the Great Lakes at the vital point of transformation. A communicative act that blends the stance of the citizen and the subject to shape a means of cautious cooperation and mutual recognition between people and state, vigilance also proved the destructive weapon that violently distilled the population into a subjugated peasantry beneath a bloodied state. The interaction on the border reveals these vital issues in acute contrast, opening the door to their examination elsewhere. This thesis studies the border; its conclusions may be chased far beyond it.

Traditional historiographies of the Cold War Middle East read into Britain's postwar economic decline a corresponding demise of British regional influence. According to these accounts, the Suez Crisis served to teach Britain new limits to its military capabilities, occasioning a break from independent endeavours to project power in the region. However, the case studies presented in this thesis demonstrate that the Suez Crisis did not mark a precipitous turning point in Britain's political influence in the Middle East in the short- to medium-term. Britain's power in the region rested upon not only its material assets, but other less tangible bases as well. Most importantly, Britain's power in the Middle East during the period examined increasingly included its ability to influence the policies of United States – a country with great resources and an emerging presence in the region.

Concentrating on the time frame between the establishment of India's Constituent Assembly in 1946, and the passing of the Dowry Prevention Act in 1961, this thesis attempts to write an alternative history of India's transition to Independence, by applying the tools of feminist historiography to this crucial period of citizenship making, as a way of offering new perspectives on the nature, meaning and boundaries of citizenship in post-colonial India. It focuses on a cohort of nationalists and feminists who were leading members of two prominent women's organisations, the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) and the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW), documenting and analysing the voices and positions of this cohort in some of the key debates around nation building in Nehruvian India. It also traces and analyses the range of activities and struggles engaged in by these two women's organisations - as articulations and expressions of citizenship in practice. The intention in so doing is to address three key questions or areas of exploration. Firstly to analyse and document how gender relations and contemporary understandings of gender difference, both acted upon and were shaped by the emerging identity of the Indian as postcolonial citizen, and how this dynamic interaction was situated within a broader matrix of struggles and competing identities including those of minority rights. Secondly to analyse how the framework of postcolonial Indian citizenship has both created new possibilities for empowerment, but simultaneously set new limitations on how the Indian women's movement was able to imagine itself as a political constituency and the feminist agenda it was able to articulate and pursue. Thirdly to explore how applying a feminist historiography to the story of the construction of postcolonial Indian citizenship calls for the ability to think about the meaning and possibilities of citizenship in new and different ways, to challenge the very conceptual frameworks that define the term.

Between 1957 and 1964 the Soviet Union sought to export to West Africa a model of economic and social development. Moscow’s policy was driven by the conviction that socialism was a superior economic system, and could be replicated in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali. However, Soviet confidence in the project was undermined by the unreliability of local leaders, and then by the Congo crisis. The setback in West Africa taught the Soviet leadership crucial lessons, including the importance of supporting ideologically reliable leaders, and the necessity of building military strength to bolster intervention. Combining Soviet and Ghanaian sources with those more readily available in the UK and the US, this thesis shows the importance of modernisation of the Third World for Moscow’s foreign policy during the Khrushchev era, and contributes to the new sets of literature on the cold war in the third world, and on the Soviet Union’s foreign policy.