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The aim of this thesis is to examine certain aspects of the thought of the orator Demosthenes, which relate to foreign affairs. Starting from the Demosthenic corpus, the investigation goes beyond the question at issue in any particular speech in order to note some of the permanent principles which governed the politics of the orator and determined his choices. / It deals particularly with Demosthenes' position on certain ideas, such as interest, power, alliances, reputation and law, his choice of war or of peace, and the importance which the orator gives to chance and opportunity. / After a contextual examination of these ideas, the thesis suggests the existence of an ensemble of principles the foundation of which was the interest of the city; in view of the instability of the times, this interest required an extent of power which only alliances could ensure. To achieve them, a city needed to cultivate its image, since it had no ability to impose alliances. As for chance, it is suggested that, without being a fatalist, Demosthenes took serious account of it.

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One of the most perplexing issues for students of politics is the proper role of externalization in accounting for interstate conflict. This process, which connects events at the domestic and international levels, also has been referred to as conflict linkage, conflict and cohesion, diversion and projection. The diverse terminology is fitting, because the pursuit by national elites of internal cohesion through external conflict is anything but a matter of consensus among scholars. / The present investigation will seek a more precise delineation of causes and effects. Following a review of the research program on conflict linkage, a reformulated model of externalization will be presented. Propositions will be derived from the model. Data pertaining to the experiences of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France at the domestic level and in international crises during the post-World War II era will be used to evaluate the propositions. These results will be in turn compared to the more traditional explanation on the causes of international conflict; namely, theories derived from the Realist perspective. The study then concludes with some recommendations for further research on the linkage of domestic and foreign conflict.

The restricted approach to peace in theories of international relations (peace as the absence of war or state survival) is not conducive to the long-term alleviation of human suffering. This thesis uses the philosophy of ecology, with its holistic approach to "positive peace", as a means to critique the peace conceptions and prescriptions in the realist and liberal strands of IR theory. A review of ecological thought stresses the convergence of deep ecology and social ecology under a radical umbrella. Inspired from anarchist/naturalist philosophy, radical ecology seeks peace by defending an ethic of detachment and cooperation, a decentralized polis and economy, and a holistic epistemology: such prescriptions are shaped by a reading of nature emphasizing finiteness, wholeness, diversity, and long age. Realism is criticized for its ontology of conflict and aggression, its hierarchical view of nature, its elitist view of the polis, its endorsement of political and/or cultural homogeneity, and its materialism. Liberalism's emancipatory framework is likewise hampered by policies favoring homogeneity, materialism and "order"-through-technicity. In both cases, non-ecological (and peace-threatening) values are reinforced by positivism. The thesis concludes with a review of current challenges to IR theory, assessing their compatibility with ecological precepts. We argue that critiques from the WOMP, feminism, neomarxism, structurationism and postmodernism do play an important role in reconstructing the bases of a new "peace theory" in International Relations, but that an ecological approach can subsume such contributions under a distinctly coherent framework.

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This thesis addresses a perceived limitation of Ole Wrever's securitisation theory resulting from the undertheorised nature of the effects of securitisation and desecuritisation. This thesis challenges this minimalism and proposes a coherent set of systematic tools by which the effects of either can be analysed. The key here is the idea that not all securitisations are the same, but rather that they differ in terms of who is benefited by a given securitisation or, in other words, securitisation for whom. Starting from the idea that it matters who benefits from a given securitisation, this thesis develops with agency-benefiting securitisation and with problem-benefiting securitisation two types of securitisation. In tandem with this, the thesis develops two types of desecuritisation namely, 'desecuritisation as politicisation' and 'desecuritisation as depoliticisation'. For the environmental sector of security this thesis further develops normative conceptualisations of positive and negative securitisation and desecuritisation, whereby positive and negative are derived from what in moral philosophy is known as a consequentialist ethic, whereby the moral rightness (or wrongness) of an action is evaluated in terms of its consequences. This thesis finds that in the environmental security sector positive and negative securitisation/desecuritisation correspond to the categories of problem- and agency- benefiting securitisation, and desecuritisation as politicisation/depoliticisation respectively. The theoretical framework is applied to the case of U.S. environmental security from 1993 - 2006. This application affimls the existence and the merits of types of securitisation and desecuritisation, it further affirms the logic and intrinsic worth of a consequentialist evaluation ofsecurity and it offers valuable insights into the theory and practice of environmental security.

East Asia and East Asian regionalism have gained greater attention. Given this, what makes this region and who determines its shape are very important questions, which are, in turn, highly relevant to questions of regional leadership. This thesis thus aims to examine and explain the nature of Sino-Japanese regional leadership and explore its impacts on the shape of the East Asia region and East Asian regionalism. It does so particularly with reference to the CMI and regional organisation-building from the APT to the EAS. The thesis explores two key themes. First, it seeks to bridge a gap in the study of East Asian regionalism in particular and East Asia in general by focusing on the dynamics of Sino-Japanese leadership competition. There is still a lack of a dedicated study to examine the dynamics of regional leadership in the region and its impact on the East Asia region and East Asian regionalism. It addresses why regional powers assert regional leadership and how their assertions of regional leadership change their interests and behaviours with regard to regional cooperation. By doing so, it can help better comprehend the interests and strategies of China and Japan and their impacts on the shape of East Asian regionalism. Secondly, this thesis aims to fill in a gap in the study of global or regional leadership by developing a constructivist analytical tool to define leadership and examine the dynamics of leadership. It highlights that neither the realist and liberal approaches to international leadership nor the emerging literature on regional powers provides a good analytical tool to conceptualise regional leadership and to examine the dynamics of regional leadership competition. It argues that some insights of constructivism help to better comprehend the dynamics of regional leadership.

This thesis is about the idea of defective polities. It addresses two important understandings in the literature which inform current theory and practice surrounding failed states. First, the thesis addresses the conventional standpoint that the end of the Cold War generated a new challenge for international society, widely known as the challenge of failed states. It aims to counter the ahistoricism of the literature on failed states in IR and cognate fields by showing that the nature of the issue of ‘failed states’ precedes the emergence of the concept in post-Cold War international society. Second, we respond to the view that international law/the doctrine and norm of state sovereignty have been essentially instruments in the hands of the most powerful members of international society, often used to justify practices of imperial and colonial nature. According to this perspective international law/state sovereignty explain or are crucial in the perpetuation of the idea and category of defective polities. By looking at the history of the relationship between the doctrine and norm of state sovereignty and the idea and category of defective polities, our aim is to show that these views about the role of international law are, to a great extent, misleading. Bearing in mind the possibility that concepts perform functions, the central hypothesis this thesis will be testing is the following: failed states are the latest of a number of concepts prevalent in international society that refer, or did so in the past, to the idea and category of defective polities. Although this argument implies a sense of continuity, the history of this idea is characterised by an evolving normative context. Thus, this thesis combines an English School approach with history of ideas, a meta-theoretical choice that is simultaneously sensitive to notions of continuity and change. This framework involves an attempt to: (a) identify and comprehend these concepts; (b) understand what functions these concepts served; (c) shed light on the kind of motives and legitimating arguments used by the actors uttering the concepts; and (d) understand if and how conceptual changes are related to normative changes in international society.

This thesis sets out to challenge the assumption widely held among IR scholars that Scientific Realism (SR) is the definite and final interpretation of realism. The introduction of SR into IR as the latter’s proper meta-theory has been the incentive for very intense debates about both meta-theoretical and theoretical IR issues. I argue that IR has uncritically adopted the strongest version of SR. This can be seen by comparing the different versions of SR and their anti-realist alternatives - as these have developed in the Philosophy of Science literature - to the version of SR which was introduced into IR. It is Critical Realism (CR), however, a version of SR that originated with Roy Bhaskar, which has dominated the SR debate in IR. This development has had negative consequences with respect to the quality of the argumentation about realism in IR. This notwithstanding, a positive implication of this situation is that IR scholars who belong in various traditions of thought have criticized SR from different theoretical angles and thus shed light on many of its shortcomings. I elaborate on the comments that have been made on meta-theoretical as well as theoretical issues and come up with my own conclusions about SR and CR. In this framework, I also deal with two special issues which have arisen from this debate’s problematique: the question about whether reasons can be causes, which lies in the foundations of Wendt’s ‘constitutive explanation’, and the challenge of ‘meta-theoretical hypochondria’, according to which the extensive concern with meta-theory takes place at the expense of theorizing real-world political problems. Last, I show, by a way of a novel contribution, that Wendt’s latest undertaking, of a ‘quantum social science’, although compatible with SR, suffers inconsistencies and misunderstandings in terms of its methodology, metaphysics, use of quantum mechanics, and application to IR. This thesis is an interdisciplinary study, which draws upon the Philosophy of Science, IR and Physics (namely Quantum Mechanics), in order to scrutinize the use of SR and CR into IR along with its implications for both IR metatheory and IR theory.