This dissertation focuses on a critical factor in historical transformation of medieval China-the dilemma between war and peace. Not only does this dissertation provide a brief and comprehensive account on conflicts, battles, and treaties, but it observes the attitude toward violence and the track of searching peace during Tenth and Eleventh Century China as well. Borrowing the concept of peace by modern scholars studying grand strategy, strategic culture, and pacifism, I regard peace as realistic strategic option, institutionalized establishment, consent behavior mode, and multi-oriented culture. My discussion begins with the exhausting campaigns of the T'ang in Central Asia and the ensuing civil war during the Ninth and Tenth centuries, arguing the Sung non-active posture in external adventure as a conscious avoidance of excessive violence. The relative success of the Sung policy saw in the peace annexation of the Wu-Yueh Kingdom and the conclusion of the Peace of 1005 between the Sung and Liao with modest cost. In addition, the early Sung rulers firmly controlled the military machinery and prevented war-making by internal and institutional causes. Nevertheless, the existing institutionalized peace between the Sung and Liao did not create a norm of behavior and prevent violence proliferation. Unable to contain the Tangut expansionism, the Sung was compelled to reinstate aggressive grand strategy, relieving constrain on its war machinery. Strategic imperative stimulated career military service of the Sung civil officials and gave room to the voice of pragmatic expansionism. Sung military achievement culminated in the success of rearmament during the reform of Wang An-shih. However, the ensuing war eventually ravaged the Sung empire, its opportunity for a great leap toward a pre-modern world missed.

The United States-Mexico border region is characterized as interdependent. Research has shown that the political boundary complicates rather than facilitates communication and dialogue in border communities that are struggling to ameliorate environmental, economic, immigration, and drug trafficking problems. Likewise, the federal governments in Mexico City and Washington, D.C., in their attempts to maintain sovereignty and centralize power, mandate unilateral solutions to border problems that in some cases exacerbate them. Nevertheless, in spite of federal policies, local elites who reside in the border region, informally create solutions and linkages that help to address local concerns. Additionally, the border regions are unlike their respective nation's center of power, culturally, socially and politically. The U.S.-Mexico border region has been described as a "third country" by some scholars. The present study of border politics sought to determine the unique characteristics of border politicians, binational elites, who wield political power on both sides of the border. This study was conducted to qualitatively explore the binational linkages that political elites shared. The identification of binational elites would, in turn, shed light on how politicians in the future, and in other parts of the world, can function and understand the complexity of problems in a binational setting.

The basic idea of this study is to examine the effect of the degree of military control on economic development. It adopts a broad definition of military control (that considers direct and total military rule, as well as indirect and partial levels of military control), and focuses on the influence over the long run. The study articulates eleven interrelated hypotheses in the subject, and tests them utilizing two complementary methodological strategies: A cross-national analysis that applies OLS multiple regression technique on a sample of 138 countries for the period from 1961 to 1990; and a comparative case study of the four North African countries (of Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia). The findings clearly support the main argument of the study that military control inherent certain characteristics that impedes economic growth (i.e., GDP per capita) over the long run . The negative influence of military control on domestic investment, protection of property rights, and (to a lesser extent) domestic conflict constitute major observable mechanisms for its adverse effect on economic growth. Also, the cross-national findings suggest that military control has no significant influence on social development. However, in some individual cases, like in Algeria and Libya, military control promoted initial social development but failed in building viable political institutions. The evidence of the study suggests that future political inquiry in the subject should do the following: Reconsider the effect of the degree of military control on economic growth, improve the military control measure, and focus on its influence on the financial and economic aspects.

This dissertation uses the urban regime theory to study the influence of bi-national public-private coalitions over the land development patterns of the US/Mexico border cities. In the El Paso del Norte region, the development of the bi-national land market has been contingent on the presence of land investors with local roots and on the concentration of urban land in a few investors. In this region, local groups become dominant and influential by accumulating land properties. On the Mexican Paso del Norte, there are two types of partisan public-private coalitions influencing the process of land development. On the US Paso del Norte, the limited vacant land to promote large urban projects in Texas has consolidated the emergence of a dominant public-private coalition in Sundland Park, New Mexico. Evidences in this dissertation show that bi-national cooperation is not attainable by the majority of local public and private actors. However, the San Geronimo - Santa Teresa case study shows that public-private cooperation among the most powerful local landholders has transcended national political boundaries to promote industrial development. Bi-national urban regimes exhibit the informal integration of various scales of governments and local urban regimes to produce simultaneous outcomes from policies implemented in two different and contiguous land markets. In the El Paso del Norte region, the economic and political inter-dependency of the Mexican and American urban contexts has created the conditions to move urban regime theory into a more global scope in explaining the processes of transboundary public-private cooperation and policy elaboration.

International legalization refers to the idea that states voluntarily accept legal constraints in certain issue areas. Although the phenomenon of international legalization has become increasingly prominent in world affairs, its growth has been uneven. The purpose of this project is to perform a systematic examination of international legalization by providing an empirical survey of conventional international governmental organizations (IGOs). Due to the lack of a supranational sovereign government, most activity in the international system is not very legalized. IGOs are the most legalized international institutions. They are created by international agreements of states and they include substantive rules that states must follow as well as procedural rules that allow institutions of the organization to conduct its functions. These IGOs exhibit a wide variation in legalization. This observation raises a question as to what can account for this variation? The first step in approaching this task is to build upon the concept of legalization and develop a measure of legalization that is applicable to IGOs. An analysis of the constitutional mandates of these organizations reveals certain characteristics in their respective texts that can be used to create an index of legalization that will allow for a comparison of legal structures across organizations. The next step is to evaluate hypotheses deriving from functionalism, collective action, realism, and neoliberal institutionalism to explain the variation in these observations. These hypotheses are based upon potential explanations at the organizational and at the state level. Using evidence from descriptive data and appropriate methodologies, the findings of the project reveals that the number of members in an organization is an influential characteristic in regard to the level of IGO legalization. It also indicates that the wealth of a member state is also a positively related factor to whether a state will be a party to a highly legalized IGO agreement.

This research investigates environmental policy in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In particular, the analysis focuses on the Border Environment Cooperation Commission's (BECC) ability to facilitate sustainability in the region. Although BECC exerts some positive effects, in general, policy design flaws combined with administrative weaknesses limit the Commission's capacity to promote sustainability. The research divides into three main sections. The first section provides an overview of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and justifies the method to analyze the region's public policy. The overview portrays boom-and-bust development pathologies that lead to social, political, economic, environmental hardships. This analysis also presents several regional characteristics--policy oriented social networks, binational institutions, and an ethic of place--that serve sustainability. The methodological overview focuses on policy design theory. According to design theory, effective public policy requires a close fit between the solution and problem contexts and the policy design. The second section evaluates the solution and problem contexts. These contextual analyses include a detailed discussion of sustainability, the problematic nature of public policy in borderlands, and specific characteristics of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Several criteria for U.S.-Mexico borderlands sustainability are developed based on these contextual analyses. The third section describes and evaluates BECC's performance. The specific focus is devoted BECC's institutional and policy designs and its major program areas. The research concludes with an overview of empirical and theoretical implications and a presentation of policy prescriptions to build BECC's capacity to facilitate sustainability.

This dissertation examines the conceptualization, promotion and diffusion of the norm of population control at international and domestic levels, as well as adoption and implementation in Egypt. It also offers a critique of mainstream constructivism, an increasingly popular analytical approach to norm diffusion. Constructivists present convincing evidence that nonstate actors change state preferences through the promotion and diffusion of norms, or "shared expectations about appropriate behavior held by a community of actors" (Finnemore 1996, 22). To emphasize the independent influence of social factors, and to downplay material factors, however, constructivists select cases in which norm diffusion occurred before state sponsorship. Constructivist research answers the question, 'How are norms diffused in the absence of material constraint?' Aside from its censorship of material factors, additional constructivist shortcomings include its proclivity for examining only liberal or progressive norms, and its inattention to domestic political process and elites' broader decision-making options. This dissertation demonstrates that diffusion of the norm of population control depended on a combination of material and social factors related to an alliance among strange bedfellows, namely the United States and allied donors and INGOs, UN agencies, populationist and liberal feminist NGOs, and international financial institutions. In this case, the 'norm cascade' of formal state adoptions of population control followed formal social and material support by the United States and, subsequently, the United Nations. This research seeks to demonstrate that relationships of social and material inequality strongly condition the norms that are selected or rejected by international society and states, and the ways in which opponents conceptualize and mobilize for change. The case of population control suggests interesting answers to a different question, namely: How and why are certain international norms, and not others, successfully promoted, diffused and adopted by states? This dissertation also examines the mechanics of norm mutation, or efforts by the international women's health movement to substitute the original population control paradigm, family planning, with the new reproductive health paradigm. This new paradigm was adopted at the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), and the final chapter examines the current prospects for paradigm change in Egypt.

In this dissertation, I attempt to improve upon previous studies of globalization and human rights by employing several strategies. First, I employ an interdisciplinary theoretical analysis that draws on disparate literatures from political science, economics, international law, and feminist studies. Second, I use a methodology known as multiple imputation to deal with missing data problems that have plagued previous studies. Third, I test for the differential effects of globalization, economic development, and democracy on the achievement of female and male socio-economic rights in order to understand the degree to which these variables affect the dependent variables of female and male infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy, primary school enrollment, and economic activity rates. Overall, the main findings in this dissertation shed light on inequities of men and women as empirical categories in the context of globalization, economic development and democratization. There are two main findings of this study: (1) There is a statistically significant difference between the achievement of socio-economic rights for women and men in the context of globalization; and, (2) The differential effects of globalization, economic development, and democratization on female and male socio-economic rights are varied but in general all three of these independent variables tend to have more positive effects on the achievement of women's socio-economic rights relative to men's.

This thesis employs the critical insights of poststructuralism, postcolonial scholarship, and Third World feminisms to intervene in feminist scholarship on women and war. It is argued that gender and political violence are mutually constituted and therefore there can be no assumed relationship of women to war. This study's primary focus was to trace discursive representations of gender, violence, citizenship, and nation in Sandinista Nicaragua and the United States during the Reagan presidency. Textual analysis of three cultural areas: memoirs and testimonials, murals, and newspaper articles was used to explore dominant constructions of gender as they intersected with Sandinista nationalism and imperialist U.S. foreign policy. The process of mutual constitution of gender and political violence are then examined in the specific cases of Nicaragua and the U.S. It is concluded that discursive constructions of gender were essential to the politics of both Nicaraguan revolution and U.S. imperialism.

Since the early 1980s, significant changes have occurred in the field of international telecommunications. This thesis examines how changes in the telecommunications environment have affected inter-system coordination procedures and what the future application of these procedures may be. The historical background and organizational structure of INTELSAT are discussed in order to obtain a better understanding of the issue. The inter-system coordination procedures in the INTELSAT Agreements, including examples of coordinations that have been completed, are examined. Three main changes in international telecommunications that have affected INTELSAT are discussed: private satellite systems and deregulatory changes; fiber optic cable systems; and technical constraints as the result of increasing orbital congestion. In turn, the possible future of inter-system coordination procedures is analyzed in the light of the new strategic plan INTELSAT has adopted as a response to the changing environment.