This study has the aim of exploring aspects of youth culture in Italy during the economic boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Its theoretical framework lies between the studies around Italian youth culture and those around the Italian Communist Party (PCI), investigating the relationship between young people and contemporary society and examining, for the first time, the relationship of the former with the PCI, its institutions and media organs. The arrival of an Anglo-American influenced pop culture (culture transmitted by the media and targeted at young people) and of its market, shaped the individualities of part of the pre-baby boomers that, finally, were able to create bespoke identities somewhat disconnected from the traditional party-related narrative while remaining on the left of the political spectrum. Pop symbols that blossomed in the late 1950s, such as the striped t-shirt, would characterise the style of young protesters who included them in their collective imagination from the early 1960s onwards. Simultaneously, a flourishing pop market gave space to other cultural experiences including Cantacronache, a group of young musicians based in Turin who vividly depicted Italy of the boom through their lyrics. Their efforts can be read as belonging to a pop market that finally starts to open up towards new musical stimuli. They aimed to make their music available beyond the circle of left-wing activism as well and they were produced by a label linked to the PCI that in those years was reshaping its approach towards society, getting rid of its radical fringes and opening to a dialogue with diverse strata of the public, including young people, women and non-members. The thesis investigates how the Communists and its Youth Federation (FGCI), reacted to the development of youth culture as an aspect of modernisation in general. Through an examination of the party’s approach to the youth revolts of the early 1960s and of its formal documents targeted at young people in general, we analyse how – and how successfully – the Communists tried to engage with young people while often, internal strands, the monolithic nature of the party and other elements, posed severe obstacles in meeting their demands, creating a fracture that would grow in the following years. The thesis also investigates how the party’s attempt to address young people was translated into the promotion of magazines in which serious political topics were discussed alongside other themes such as investigations into society and into the “questione giovanile.” In this respect, we will see how the FGCI journal Nuova generazione tried, in the late 1950s, to take account of youth inclinations paying attention to other important topics such as the emancipation of young women. The generation we look at is the first to claim the right to build its individual identities by drawing on pop culture and modernisation, developing codes and behaviours that pulled away from those set by the institutions.

Many philosophers have propounded a vision of an improved society, what distinguishes Antonio Gramsci is his continuous effort to make it happen by understanding the process in order to put into practice. Gramsci's conviction about the importance of educative development came from both theory and experience. While there has been considerable examination of Gramsci's work in relation to the Prison Notebooks, this study will seek to address a lacuna in Gramsci scholarship. Using Gramsci's philological method, I analyse Gramsci's pre-prison activity; his pre-prison articles and letters, which, together with his letters from prison, formed part of his educative mission. This educative process was necessary, in order to construct a new party which would develop a collective will, collaboratively, with the masses. In this study therefore, I explore the contexts and formative experiences of the first part of his life together with the intellectual sources from which Gramsci developed his later theories, making central hitherto underemphasised connections between them which informed his writing and ideas. I intend to illustrate that Gramsci's underlying purpose in his writing, and political activity, was not only practical, on how to create a new socialist ruling class, but also educative in forming the mindset and values of his comrades. So that in addition to outlining his vision of a new order, he implicitly guided or explicitly explained the processes by which the necessary changes in social relations and moral climate could be made in order to achieve it. Each person had to engage with the values of the new order so that each could contribute to the construction of a new robust state. It was essential to build a hegemony at the most profound level, one which was dependent on collective understandings and a collective will.

This thesis aims to examine the ways in which national identity can be discursively created within a state. I consider the case of Nicaragua in the 1980s and investigate how the government of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) established a conception of the national in the country through official discourse. Despite various studies into the political situation of Nicaragua during this time period, little research has been done in the role of language in constructing a sense of national identification in the country, and this thesis is a contribution to addressing that gap in the research, following the examples of Ruth Wodak et al. (1999) and Nicolina Montesano Montessori (2009). I challenge the dominant Eurocentric theories on national identity as to their relevance in a Latin American context. Particularly, Anderson (2006), Smith (1991), Gellner (1983) and Hobsbawm (1990) are shown to each have partial applicability to studies of the region, but ultimately are not sufficient in themselves to fully address the unique circumstances seen in Latin America. I propose that two other elements must be included as contributing elements to national identity formation: radical Marxism and liberation theology. In analysing the data, I adopt a critically oriented discourse analysis approach as I research the strategies employed in a government led redefinition of the nation. Applying the discourse-historical approach (Wodak et al. 1999), I probe the data for particular structures aimed at creating hegemony over the discursive terrain. Through a comparison of three separate corpora composed of government publications, opposition publications and ethnographic interviews, I consider the questions of how the FSLN discursively created a sense of national community and whether and how that discourse was adopted by non-governmental actors. In answering these questions, the discourses are situated in the specific cultural, political and historical milieu of post-revolutionary Nicaragua.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the high point of class struggle in the twentieth-century. For the first time in world history, a social movement predicated on the overcoming of class exploitation succeeded in gaining state power. In the days and weeks following October 1917 insurrection, a self-declared Marxist government set about the task of constructing a socialist society. However the Russian Revolution was more than the mass political mobilisation of class resentments. In addition to proletarians and peasants, the Bolsheviks also mobilised national minorities, for whom October represented the opportunity to put an end to centuries of national oppression. The Bolshevik promise, therefore, entailed not just class solidarity, but national self-determination and internationalism as well. In the very moment of revolution, however, these sentiments were put to the test as mass outbreaks of antisemitic pogroms spread across the vast regions of the former Pale of Settlement. The pogroms posed fundamental questions for the Bolshevik project, since they revealed the nature and extent of working class and peasant attachments to antisemitic and racialised forms of consciousness. This dissertation has two broad aims: first, it sets out to offer the most comprehensive analysis to date of the explosive articulation between antisemitism and the revolutionary process. It reveals, for example, the extent to which class struggle and anti-bourgeois discourse could overlap with antisemitic representations of Jewishness, often with devastating consequences. Second, it offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the Soviet government attempt to arrest this articulation between antisemitism and revolutionary politics. Contrary to existing understandings, the dissertation argues that the ‘Bolshevik’ campaign against antisemitism was led not the Party leadership, as is often assumed, but by a small grouping of non-Bolshevik Jewish socialists who worked in the Party and Soviet government throughout 1918 and 1919. Having brought into focus an almost entirely overlooked moment in the history of Jewish experiences of, and responses to, antisemitism, the dissertation concludes by reflecting on how this reframing of the Russian Revolution might offer insights for anti-racists and socialists engaged in struggles for social justice today.

The sectarian tactics of the Comintern's Third Period prevented the Communist Party of Great Britain from articulating an effective response to the rise of fascism during 1933. The CPGB leadership saw the main threat of fascism in Britain coming from the National Government, whose measures were portrayed as leading to the gradual 'fascisation' of British society. This led to the Party leadership ignoring the BUF as politically irrelevant. However, sections of the CPGB rank and file felt differently, linking up with their Labour movement counterparts; organising activity on a mass scale to prevent BUF activity on the streets of Britain. In mid 1934, reflecting pressure from below and the change in Comintern anti-fascist strategy as advocated by Dimitrov, the CPGB leadership changed tack and sanctioned counter-demonstrations to BUF meetings. In October 1934 it offered a united front electoral pact to the Labour Party. In 1935 the CPGB embraced the popular front policy adopted by the Comintern at its Seventh World Congress. The popular front movement was designed to change the 'profascist' foreign policy of the National Government and replace it with a people's government favourable to a military pact with the USSR. This guiding principle lay behind the popular front activity of the CPGB during 1935- 39. By 1939 after six years of hard work the CPGB had little to show for its struggle against fascism. Despite a small increase in membership, and a slight growth in influence amongst the trade unions and intelligentsia, it had failed to bring about a change in British foreign policy favourable to an alliance with the Soviet Union or to emerge as a significant force within the British Labour movement. This failure can be largely ascribed to its pursuit of an antifascist strategy determined mainly by the requirements of Soviet foreign policy and not by the concerns of British workers.

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the changing nature of contemporary China's state and society relationship by focusing on the construction of the relationship between newly emerging non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the state. The term "construction" refers to the process in which China NGOs emerge, struggle for existence, negotiate with state organizations and other social agents. In this process, how China's NGOs link with the state policies of both local and national levels, practices of both local government officers and the government organizations of superior branches is of the most interest. It has been found that Chinese social organizations often come to be congruent with the state at both local level and national policy level. Through the articulatory elements, which are the theoretical tools borrowed from post-Marxist theories, the state and the social organizations are integrated as if they are in a coherent whole under the macro state policies. Such pro forma consistency between state and social organizations provides legitimacy and room for social organizations to develop their own values and practices, which actually do not completely coincide with the state dominant orientations. A civil society constituted by social organizations with different value pursuits is likely emerging in China.

In response to the fact that academic projects on lay participation in China written in English have been very scarce, and also the views of the three schools of Chinese scholars, this thesis will conduct a thorough review of lay participation in China. Chapter 1 of this thesis firstly outlines the worldwide situation regarding lay participation. Chapter 2 sets out the historical background to the growth of lay participation in China, by recounting the various forms of and experiments with lay participation during China’s history. Chapters 3 and 4 study the status quo of the sole form of lay participation in China today, that is, the mixed tribunal system. Chapter 5 looks into the contribution that lay participation could potentially make to Chinese society. Chapter 6 offers some proposals with regard to the prospective direction for developing lay participation in China, from a realistic perspective. The thesis finds that lay participation has been neither declining worldwide, nor has been absent during China’s history. It also finds that although the mixed tribunal system in China today faces an array of problems, lay participation may potentially contribute to Chinese society in terms of a better justice system and improved democracy. After clarifying the prospects for continuing lay participation in China and proposing possible reformative measures, my thesis concludes that the system, with careful reconstruction, deserves a position in China’s future legal system; and that the leftist proposal, to abolish lay participation in China, should be rejected.

This thesis identifies and explains a fundamental philosophical problem of self-implication in Marxian ideology criticism that has led to its misuse and rejection in social theory and political philosophy. I argue that Friedrich Nietzsche's development of genealogy as a method of social criticism complements ideology criticism in a way that overcomes this problem, by addressing it explicitly, rather than trying to avoid it. In making this argument, I hope to bridge a widely perceived gap between Nietzsche's and Michel Foucault's genealogical approaches to social criticism, on the one hand, and Marxian ideology criticism on the other. The conflict between these approaches has been exaggerated in contemporary academic literature, to the loss of invaluable contributions Nietzsche and Foucault make to the theory and practice of ideology criticism. I begin by defining ideology in way that, I demonstrate, takes into account the use of the notion by Karl Marx and the early Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. I identify two central components of ideology, namely, an epistemic aspect, regarding illusion, and a functional aspect, which links ideology to its role in maintaining oppression. I also defend the notion of ideology against major objections to each of these aspects. In Chapter 4, I introduce the problem of self-implication that, I take it, poses the greatest challenge to the coherence of ideology criticism. The remainder of the thesis examines two alternative ways of dealing with this problem, namely immanent and transcendent criticism. I explain the weaknesses with each approach and, in doing so, show why Marx and Adorno each succumb to the problem of ideological self-implication. In the final chapter I argue that Nietzsche's method of genealogy is compatible with ideology criticism and can complement such criticism, to overcome the problems that have been examined.

The thesis is divided into ten chapters and 3 parts. Following an introductory chapter on the literature on the main issues of the period, Part I opens with a chapter on the social and economic transformation of the city of Moscow during war communism, and its second chapter analyses the role of the trade unions and the pattern of labour relations in this period. Part II is concerned with the internal transformation of the party and the development of its relationship with society; and discusses recruitment, organisation, the nature of militarisation during the civil war, the party's ideological work, and its relationship to mass bodies. It ends with a study of the Moscow soviet and the development of bureaucracy. In Part III the debates at the end of war communism are considered in the light of the foregoing economic and political developments. The conclusion assesses the nature of war communism in Moscow.

Since 9/11, both in the Middle East and worldwide, the academic, political and religious focus on extreme radicalisation has intensified. The attacks carried out in Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, by Al-Qaeda in 2003, motivated a succession of bombings within and outside of the Kingdom. These events have led to a plethora of general and specific studies to understand the phenomenon of extremism. This thesis investigates radicalisation in Saudi Arabia since 2001, focusing on the impact of Al-Qaeda and its impact on individuals and the state. It specifically focuses on the role of the Mohammed bin Naif Centre for Counselling, Rehabilitation and Care, in this context referred to as ‘the Centre’, analysing its function as a tool for the ‘soft power’ strategy that has been initiated by the Saudi Arabian Government, intended to de-radicalise individuals who are perceived by the state to have been misled. The study uses a detailed literature review to unpack the historical trends regarding the origins of Saudi Arabia, the political differences therein, as well as the different religious interpretations which are attributed as being a root cause of discontent which thereby leads to radicalisation and violent extremism in the region. In this thesis, I trace the various schools of thought regarding the treatment of religion and governance in relation to local and international politics, and how this impacts upon the radicalisation of individuals. A Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) approach is used to highlight the need to view studies on security from a reflexive perspective, both in the researcher and the researched subject matter, namely the terrorist organisations and the governments against which they are fighting. The concept of governance is analysed and how this either precipitates or prevents dissent that results in violence. In addition, the political and religious solutions to radicalisation are assessed, with a specific focus on the de-radicalisation process, as reflected through a qualitative research on the views and thinking of the practitioners working in the Centre. In this context, I investigate the motives, roles, responsibilities and strategies used in executing their roles, with the aim of seeking possible explanations for the causes of radicalisation and the challenges faced in de-radicalising individuals. Their views are used to form the main basis for the data for this research. This study should be of interest to politicians, security experts, academics, religious leaders, Islamic scholars and interested individuals. It will be a valuable contribution towards an understanding of the causes, consequences and possible solutions to addressing Islamic extremism and radicalisation.