Convention Theory sees government, market, community and general public work with each other by coordination. Over time, this coordination yields faith and trust, i.e. public good for all. This research employs Convention Theory as an aid to understanding the public disputes brought by two new urban renewal policies in Hong Kong before and after the 1997 handover. It compares two major cases representing the two new policies. Through an examination of the processes of these social disputes and each patty's justifications in the different, case studies, this thesis explores the differentiation between them in terms of people's and specific communities' expectation, faith and trust in public policies under the British administration and the new Hong Kong SAR administration. It brings in historical and political contexts to illustrate how and why people frame a new public policy with established social conventions so as to judge its impacts on self, community and public interests. A new public policy that becomes a cause for public dispute inevitably jeopardises this coordination. A change in suzerainty, then, sharply exposes work of this underlying coordination and its jeopardy. This explains the very different evaluations and actions by groups facing the same policy concurrently. Further, the thesis attempts to ascertain the reasons for such difference. Time plays a crucial role in this framework, one that supplements the critical ambit of Convention Theory. The time frame for the two case studies (1988-2008) allows for a comprehensive and continuous comparison of co-ordination, confidence and tmst between communities, society and government before and after Hong Kong's suzerainty changed from Britain to China in 1997. By contextualising two cases; the first evolving over the years 1988-2004 and the second, 2002-2008, this thesis assesses the impact of this change, both in terms of the evolution of governmental and administrative bodies and their affect on perceptions of justice, faith and trust, and on people's perceptions of how this change affected both their own self-interest as well as the interest of Hong Kong per se. Hence this study applies Convention Theory and extends it through its analysis of the role and impact of contextual socio-political change during this time. The in-depth comparative analysis reveals how the pursuit of collective private interests at the community level later evolves into a pursuit for democracy, which links the community to a wider public-whose support it both solicits and wins-as a counterweight to widespread morally and politically iniquitous, unjust and indefensible outcomes. Thus, the evidence furthers Convention Theory's dynamic view of a community's collective cognition and critical capacity that transmutes from the private and familiar to incorporate the public in the transformation from a private dispute made public. This thesis argues that the social values

In this interdisciplinary thesis I will be arguing that new configurations of state discrimination have outrun the vocabularies of liberal multiculturalism and secularism. These `majoritarianisms' are parasitic on the creeping foreclosure of secular spaces and identities from which emergent antiracist and antifascist struggles can be mounted. State multiculturalism in Britain and India has been instrumental in fertilising the sectarian soil in which the secular has decomposed. They have patronised cultural separateness only to make capital from the isolation of ethnic blocs from mainstream society by expressing exasperation at the reluctance of minorities to `integrate'. The faith and ethnic communities consolidated under the multiculturalist `management' of diversity have grown bereft of a political culture with which to interrogate the racist state. The privileging of cultural consciousness has been at the expense of political consciousness and an understanding of how discrimination cuts across cultural lines. The crisis of the secular is therefore simultaneously also a crisis of citizenship. The thesis opens with chapters that draw on sociological research and political commentary to assess the differing forms of majoritarianism and crises of citizenship in Britain and India respectively. In the third chapter I approach these issues through the prism of postcolonial theory using Gayatri Spivak's rehabilitation of responsibility as a collective right (2003) to arrive at a contemporary expression of political education. In the final two chapters I apply these principles to bring the multicultural and the secular into `productive crisis' in Indian and British contexts by circumventing the orthodox divisions that characterise intellectual approaches to anti-racism and antifascism. I argue that there is a role for a modified understanding of multiculturalism in the recovery of the secular. I conclude therefore that renewing secular culture is predicated on the Left's ability to reaffirm the reciprocity between political consciousness, citizenship and struggles for racial, ethnic and religious equality.