In this thesis, I critically investigate how issues of sexual justice, sexual politics and normative heterosexuality are interpreted, constructed, and discussed in several salient emancipatory or critical legal and political projects on sexuality and gender, especially in the areas of family relations. Subordination feminism, men and masculinity studies, queer theories, and liberal theories of sexual justice are the major theories I engage with. After critically reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of these theories, I argue that it is worth incorporating a combined approach of queer humanist men and masculinities studies in thinking about gender oppression, normative heterosexuality, law and sexual justice. The combined approach, I argue, is an approach that draws on queer theories, liberal theories of sexual justice, some feminist theories, and humanist men and masculinities studies. I contend that one of the core insights of queer humanist men and masculinities studies is the rejection of an oversimplified and unidimensional concept of gender oppression and gender power relations; a concept that is frequently assumed by subordination feminism. Queer humanist men and masculinities studies view the power relations of gender and the gender oppression in the family as multi-layered and complex, not just about male domination and female subordination. I argue that we will be able to see more realities and previously hidden or marginalised sexuality and gender oppression by incorporating perspectives inspired by queer humanist men and masculinities studies. I further contend that we cannot effectively subvert normative heterosexuality by only seeing and addressing gender normativity in one gender. I discuss the implications of queer humanist men’s studies in equality law, family law and gay men’s studies. In conclusion, I argue that queer humanist men and masculinity studies can broaden our base of concerns and knowledge of sexual injustices and sexual oppression in sexual justice projects. It is an approach worth considering and an area of sexual justice study worth further exploration and research.

The major objective of this study was to analyse the impact of the 2003 war on drugs policy on imprisonment and the prison social world in Thailand. While most studies on the drugs war have focused mainly on the quantitative increase in the prison population in the penal systems as the policy’s main impact, this research further examined the social shifts in Thai prisons driven by the drugs war. The data were qualitatively collected and analysed through documentary analysis, observations and in-depth interviews with forty-six participants: the former Director Generals of The Corrections Department, prison inmates, prison officers, and prison directors from Bangkwang Central Prison, Klongprem Central Prison, The Central Correctional Institution for Drug-addicts and The Women’s Correctional Institution for Drug-addicts. Although the Thai government declared a victory in the drugs war by claiming that the drug business had almost been eradicated due to the decrease in the size of the prison population and in the number of drug case arrests, in reality some changes caused by the drugs war within the prison world have been overlooked. The findings of this thesis reveal that the war on drugs produced significant effects upon various spheres of imprisonment. By dividing the framework into several levels for analysis focusing on prison inmates, prison officers and the social relationships behind bars, the lives and experiences of prisoners and prison officers are shown to have been effected in a negative and tougher way. Besides, there have been changes in social relations among prisoners and between inmates and prison officers. Crucially, the key factor leading to the policy impact was the replacement by the more powerful drug dealers in Thai prisons for drug users, due to the Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act B.E. 2545 (2002), which was a significant feature of the 2003 drugs war.

The thesis seeks to examine how The Times functioned within mid-nineteenth-century British society and to suggest how the newspaper can be used to read the history of the period from the perspective of the dominant elements within it. It begins by analysing the uses made of the newspaper by historians and questions the assumptions which lie behind them. Chapters 2 and 3 assess the dominant role of The Times within the newspaper press and explore the relationship between the newspaper and its readers and their mutual perceptions. Chapter 4 analyses the structure of contemporary society and the common values which lay within, while the following chapter indicates the extent to which The Times in its treatment of the French revolution of 1848 constructed its version of reality within those values and thereby defined and defended them. Chapter 6 completes the location of the newspaper by considering the extent to which it was independent of Government, yet dependent on individual politicians. The locating of The Times within contemporary society enables its treatment of the crisis of 1848 to be critically examined in chapters 7 and 8. This reveals the extent to which events in London and Ireland were associated together and perceived as parts of a revolutionary movement which encapsulated the basic fears of the possessing classes and threatened their vital interests. In defending those interests The Times was at its most potent and 1848 demonstrated the ability of the paper to orchestrate and direct opinion on specific issues. The role of The Times and its importance are evaluated by means of the perceptions contemporaries had of events, the way they reacted to them, and the judgements subsequently made by historians. The thesis emphasizes the importance of The Times both as an agent within society and a source for the study of it.

This thesis examines one man-made disaster, resulting from the plethora of UneXploded Ordnance (UXO) in Laos, to clarify the performance of post-conflict humanitarian aid and development until 2012. This is achieved through case study field work in Laos. The time period studied is from 1954, the beginning of the political background to the war in Laos, through to the work carried out by the national agency UXO Lao in the field to 2012. The academic disciplines driving this research are War, Conflict and Security Studies, including Post-Conflict Studies, plus aspects of International Relations and Disaster Management. It is not a Law thesis although of necessity it touches on aspects of International Law and particularly the subsequent Protocol V to the 1980 Treaty on Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CMC). In nine years from 1964-1973 the U.S.A. dropped 260 million cluster bomb submunitions on Laos. It is estimated that 30 percent of the cluster munitions failed to detonate. It is not known exactly where they were dropped and rivers and rain cause them to move. The effect of UXO in the most affected provinces has made them unsuitable for expansion in tourism and agriculture. Analysis of responses to this situation shows that efforts to educate people about the dangers of UXO have often been ineffective and victim assistance is lacking, although now covered by the CMC. The U.S.A. bombing, remained shrouded in official secrecy, and Laos's Communist status precluded overt aid. Laos was therefore a forgotten war but one which has profound implications for warfare and subsequent peace-building. Clearance remained a low priority, in part because it was a low priority for the Lao Government which was not much interested in the welfare of the rural communities affected. The National Regulatory Authority (NRA), the agency within the Laotian government responsible for UXO and EOD requires in FY 2013 $30 million, for UXO clearance with substantial additional increases over the next ten years. The U.S.A. is now committed diplomatically and financially to assist Laos in its bomb removal effort, after President Barack Obama signed a Presidential Determination in 2009 declaring that Laos was no longer a Marxist-Leninist Country and thus facilitating U.S.A. and other international aid. New technology may finally unlock the solution to this 50-year old problem. The distribution of GPS to farmers would enable them to report locations of any UXO they found, for immediate attention, greatly increasing the speed and effectiveness of response.

This study focuses on reader comments within three British mainstream news online comment forums, the BBC’s World Have your Say, The Daily Mail’s RightMinds and The Guardian’s Comment is Free, to assess whether, and to what extent, these virtual spaces can be viewed as hosting an online public sphere. The sample includes 9,424 comments drawn from 78 forums between 1st May 2011 and 31st May 2012. Two theoretical frameworks are applied during data analysis comprising an initial small-scale content analysis complemented by a larger sociological discourse analysis. First, data are analysed against three of Dahlberg’s (2001a) online public sphere criteria: ‘autonomy’, ‘discursive inclusion and equality’ and ‘exchange and critique’. Second, analytical tools drawn from Bakhtinian (1986) notions of utterance, speech genres and heteroglossia are applied to the data. Key themes arising include the different levels of autonomy commenters achieve across the three news comment forums, abuse as a catalyst for participating in debates, and the importance of commenter-to-commenter deliberations. Moreover, in contrast to the rational-critical demands of public sphere discourse, intonation and more specifically Bakhtin’s (1984) notion of emotional-volitional content, demonstrates a significant presence within debates.

Since 2001, there are more than 50 national border barriers around the globe — proposed, under construction, or finished. My dissertation considers this new infrastructure inside larger questions of sovereignty, governance, immigration, and security in the “borderless” age of globalization. To approach this work I used an epistemological framework of border thinking, a “third space” hermeneutics that locates the border as a central place to theorize the complex geopolitical and postcolonial relationships. I conducted two case studies of this fortress infrastructure, one along the U.S.-Mexico border and another along the Costa Rican border with Nicaragua, considering how new border walls are material manifestations of inchoate sovereignty, occupying claims in the borderlands — one of the latest frontier zones of global capital. Broadly, this project calls for us to consider the global proliferation of national border walls and fences in a way that invokes collective action against the persisting operative logic of race/culture thinking that underpins securitization as both a form of governance and an ideology. It situates the urgency of this intellectual work inside the expanding sovereign jurisdictions of capital and opens up new sets of questions about how national border barriers are integral structures inside the changing ideo-political frameworks of war, sovereignty, and governance in the age of the drone.

Early research investigating digital activism in relation to the 2011 Arab uprisings intended to determine whether digital media played a significant role in consolidating the revolutionary opposition. As a result, this literature essentially focuses on the exact moment of the January 2011 protests and often fails at considering the evolution of digital activism and social media consumption over time. Alternatively, this work goes beyond the context of the January 2011 events and investigates how participative media have been used over the course of the political crisis that led the 2011 Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions to the 2013 military coup d’état. By doing so, it elaborates the debate on digital activism and assesses how social media has affected public deliberation over the long run and as political leaders attempted to regain legitimacy in the aftermath of the uprisings. In doing so, this research contributes to the evaluation of what extent these emerging forms of political action, which Bennett and Segerberg conceptualise as connective action (2012) are sustainable and likely to materialise into institutional politics. In order to map the post-revolutionary debate across a range of digital media, this study draws on a large data set extracted from different social platforms, including blogs, search engines and e-consultation project. Data visualisation tools and traditional discourse analysis are jointly applied to analyse this data set and identify how various political actors, such as party leaders, bloggers or random social media users debated online over the course of the 2011-2013 political crisis. In addition, this work includes a set of face-toface interviews conducted on the field with Egyptian journalists and political activists actively engaged in the post-revolutionary debate. By analysing the long-term effects of digital activism in Tunisia and Egypt, this research proposes to challenge the assumption, according to which digital media, as a manifestation of technological development acts as a factor of democratisation.

In this thesis, I unpack the mutation of Mexican organized crime by providing insights of unprecedented depth into one of the field’s principal actors of the past decade, Los Caballeros Templarios (The Knights Templar, LCT). My elaborations are based on firsthand qualitative data. During a year of fieldwork, I conducted ethnographic research in LCT’s core operational territory of Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, including interviews with LCT’s leaders and local civilians. Drawing on these data, I situate LCT as a phenomenon deeply engrained in the liquefaction and reshuffling of social order, governance, and sovereignty in Mexico and other parts of the ‘global south’. In this setting, the problem of survival is as eminent for non-state armed actors as it is for state actors. Upon revisiting historical transformations of Michoacán organized crime, I analyze how LCT sought to secure permanence through a hybrid form of criminal agency that defies default approaches to organized crime. The group perceived a minimum degree of legitimacy as crucial to control over locally rooted resources and thus survival. I argue that this drove the construction of a project of alternative governance; in essence a ceremonially enacted narrative portraying LCT as a guardian of social order. By contrasting ‘official’ claims with the lived experiences of civilians, I examine the latter’s performance and impact on local communities and lives. Furthermore, and as opposed to the predominant reduction of state-organized crime-interactions (in Mexico) to violent antagonism, LCT did not pursue its project of alternative governance against or without the state per se. Rather, I contend, higher-level state actors and LCT converged in the production of a trans-­‐legal order. The state’s symbolic-legal façade is here carried by actors standing on either side of the binary licit-illicit-divide, which acts as a veil for shared access to resources stereotypically exclusive to ‘the’ state.

The thesis explores the post-return integration experiences of Chinese-born Kazakh returnees in Kazakhstan. Contemporary migration studies have explored a wide variety of integration processes and transnational practices among immigrants in different countries, however, there are only a limited number of studies on ethnic return migration into post-Soviet countries such as Kazakhstan, a new Central Asian country which emerged as a result of the collapse of Soviet Union at the beginning 1990s. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent Kazakhstan was a multi-ethnic society dominated by two major ethnic groups – Kazakhs and Russians. As a part of its nation-building policy, Kazakhstan launched an ethnic repatriation program which encouraged Kazakhs abroad to ―come back home‖ in order to help revive Kazakh identity, culture and language, and to contribute to building an independent Kazakh state. Beginning in 1991, around one million Kazakh returnees came to Kazakhstan but their integration into modern Kazakh society became a major challenge for the newly born Central Asian state. This thesis comprises a case study of the integration process of Chinese-born Kazakh returnees Kazakhstan. The complex processes of integration of returnees into modern Kazakhstan are examined by applying the two mainstream concepts of Segmented Assimilation theory and Transnationalism. I argue that although Chinese-born Kazakhs had similar ethnicity, culture, language, and religion to the settled Kazakhs in their ancestral homeland, the returnees tended to be incorporated into different segments of the host society, which encouraged the development of their transnational practices with China, and had led to the development their own ―shifted transnational identity as a reaction to unfavourable external environment in Kazakhstan.

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