This thesis asks why some ethnic insurgencies in Myanmar have de-escalated since 2011, while others re-escalated concurrently. It investigates this puzzle by zooming into the country’s most important ethnic armies: the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO). Findings from nine months of ethnographically-informed field research in the Kachin and Karen borderlands reveal that internal contestations within both movements have driven their respective conflict and negotiation strategies with the state. These intramural conflicts were sparked in the context of changing political economies in the country’s borderlands that enabled the enrichment of individual rebel leaders but eroded their authority within their movements. The original contribution of this thesis is two-fold: Theoretically, the thesis contributes to the emerging literature on the internal dimensions of rebel groups by moving away from the prevalent focus on rebel elites and rationaldecision making. Instead, it conceptualises insurgency as a social process between differently situated elite and non-elite actors, grounding itself within relational sociology. This appreciates how social dynamics - including figurational interdependencies, reciprocal power relations, and embodied practices - develop a momentum of their own in driving political violence. In doing so, it is suggested that the emergence and erosion of leadership authority in rebel groups depends on whether elites address their grassroots’ claim to recognition, enabling the latter to develop and maintain self-perceived positive social identities through affiliation to the insurgent collective. Empirically, the thesis contributes to a better understanding of one of the world’s longest ongoing but least researched civil wars by presenting original findings on its most important rebel groups, particularly with regards to the often uneasy relations between rebel elites and their grassroots and the ways in which internal contestation drives their strategies. Its findings also have implications for policy in so far as they highlight the pitfalls of counterinsurgency and peacebuilding approaches that aim at fragmenting rebel movements and/or privilege the material interests of elites over issues surrounding recognition and identity that – as this thesis shows – are underpinning ethnonational insurgencies.

<p> This research aimed to understand, explore, and find meaning in the participants&rsquo; experiences with the phenomenon of overcoming adversity to pursue higher education. The structure and methodology employed in this qualitative research endeavor were guided by hermeneutic phenomenology. Data collection was conducted over the course of five weeks with partner organizations in the cities of Yangon and Mandalay in Myanmar. Interviews were conducted with Myanmar students who were in the process of seeking higher education in the U.S. Observation and informal interviews with professional staff were also important data collection methods that were used to build an understanding of the situational context for the participants&rsquo; experiences. The analysis procedure followed a phenomenological reduction procedure and sought to illuminate the essence of the phenomenon by producing narrative descriptions of the participants&rsquo; experiences, as well as identifying and reflecting upon shared experiences among the participant group.</p><p> The topic of this research had particularly timely importance because Myanmar&rsquo;s government and society were going through a period of significant transition, moving from decades of military rule to a parliamentary republic. This research examined ways in which this change and other situational factors impacted students&rsquo; abilities to access higher education abroad. This study also addressed a gap in the existing research, specifically the need for qualitative research concerning Myanmar students&rsquo; experiences in education and access to higher education abroad. The research approached this need by collecting and sharing the voices of individuals who had direct, personal experience with the changes and challenges in the education system and access to higher education in Myanmar. </p><p> The findings of this study indicated that Myanmar students experienced systemic adversity and individual challenges that negatively impacted their access to opportunities for higher education abroad. For the participants, these challenges began at the primary education level and followed them through the college application and enrollment process. For many of the students, the instructional methods and curriculum content they experienced in local primary and secondary schools was inadequate and left them ill-prepared for higher education abroad. For the participants in this study, their educational aspirations led them to seek additional advising and support to help them reach their goals in higher education. Despite finding help from advisors and educators, it was clear that these students were struggling in a flawed system, which included many barriers that impeded students&rsquo; access to higher education abroad. For most of the students, their families were unable to pay the full cost of tuition for college in the U.S., so they needed to apply for scholarships or to colleges that provide need-based assistance to international students. The international reaction to violence in their home country and the election of U.S. President Trump added to the students&rsquo; feelings of anxiety in an already complicated process. Despite the individual challenges and systemic adversity that they faced, the student participants maintained a sense of hope for themselves and their country. They believed that they would each be able to continue to overcome the difficulties they faced and be able to achieve their dreams of studying at a U.S. college or university. They also knew that if they could better their own lives with higher education, then they would be in a position to have a greater positive impact on the lives of others and the situation in their home country of Myanmar.</p><p>

In order to understand whether US training of military forces from the South has resulted in the use of repression or improvements in human rights, we need to situate the training within the broader context of US foreign policy objectives and strategies. The main aims of US foreign policy are to maintain its dominant global position and to ensure control of resources and markets in the South. These objectives are being pursued through an emerging, US-led transnational state, using the instruments of legitimation at least as much as repression. This contrasts with the Cold War, during which US foreign policy strategy towards the South emphasised repression. US training of military forces from the South during the Cold War played a key role in a US-led network, through which many states in the South were connected to the US and each other by cooperation between their militaries, police and intelligence services. The training was dominated by a particular form of counterinsurgency instruction which advocated repression of groups that might potentially threaten US control of Southern economies and assets. This contributed to widespread human rights violations, particularly in Latin America. Following the end of the Cold War, reliance on coercion diminished, and it was subsumed within the emergent transnational state. In line with this shift in US foreign policy strategy in the South, some aspects of the training began to be characterised by the promotion of legitimation. In the wake of 9/11, the US has intensified both its legitimation efforts and its use of repression, and the training continues to play a significant role in the service of US foreign policy objectives.

No description available.

The 1980s saw the wider availability and growing consumption of illicit drugs. The increase in drug trafficking and drug use has occurred despite increasing international action to prevent it. In describing the situation as a "drug problem", policy-makers have responded to the concern as if it were a single issue. However, the drug phenomenon is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. It is the concern of numerous state and non-state actors, it necessitates multi-lateral co-operation among governments, it involves the participation of numerous departments of government and a complex web of issues exists which affect and are affected by the phenomenon. In this sense the "drug problem" clearly demonstrates the characteristics of interdependence. The undeniable growth of interdependence in the world in the last half-century has caused a rethink of the traditional Realist approach to international relations. Neorealists were principally responsible for introducing the concept of an international regime as a means of revamping the power politics philosophy of Realism. In this approach, international regimes are understood to rise and fall in line with the powers of the state-actors comprising them. An alternative approach to international relations challenges the belief that change in world politics is defined in terms of changes in state power and that the emergence of regimes is similarly defined. The Global Politics approach asserts that agendas are determined by the attempt of actors to allocate values authoritatively on specific issues by forming issue-systems. According to this approach, issue-systems, consisting of all actors for whom a particular issue is salient, can be abstracted from the international system as a whole. Previously the two concepts of international regimes and the concept of issues forming issue-systems have developed in isolation and have suffered from lack of clarification. In order to develop a theoretical framework for an analysis of the drug phenomenon this research has attempted to clarify and develop the concept of an "issue", central to both concepts, for an understanding of international regimes which gives them an independent impact on world politics. In developing the concept of an issue, an understanding of the nature and role of values and norms in international affairs, lacking development in current regime literature will be seen as central.

This thesis assesses the extent to which sub-national authorities from two regions within two unitary states in Europe have become autonomous international actors and attempts to determine whether the European foreign policy arena has been transformed as a result. The empirical examples, which the thesis subjects to analysis, consist of the international activities of the sub-national authorities of the Stockholm Region and the Oresund Region within the context of the Baltic Sea Region. Theoretically, it identifies the challenges from above and below to the authority of the state, and examines rational and reflectivist conceptions of sovereignty, authority and territoriality in order to characterise and delimit the possibilities for action of subnational authorities of unitary states at the international level. The thesis then undertakes a critical evaluation of the role attributed to sub-national authorities within theories of international relations and foreign policy, and assesses the explanatory power of state centric, supra-national, multi-level, and neo-institutional conceptions of the European system of governance in accounting for the international activities of sub-national authorities. It also discusses the characteristics of the European foreign policy arena and criteria for actorness within this arena. Following these conceptual considerations, a comprehensive multi-level framework is proposed which accommodates the international activities of actors at different levels of governance. This framework is subsequently applied in an empirical study of the international activities of the sub-national authorities of the two Nordic regions of Stockholm and the Oresund within the context of the Baltic Sea Region. Based on the empirical analysis, the thesis concludes that the international activities of sub-national authorities in the Stockholm Region and Oresund Region have increased in scope and significance, and that the degree of autonomy, which sub-national authorities have acquired is significant, but depends on the policy area.

The post-conflict territories of the Western Balkans have been subjected to an unprecedented level of international attention since the mid-1990s. The EU, NATO and OSCE in particular converged on the region intent on redefining their image - if not purpose - in the first major crisis of the post-Cold War era. Responding to the horrific inter-ethnic violence that defined conflict in the region, International Organisations continually emphasised the importance of upholding standards regarding the protection of, and respect for, ethnic minorities. While literature acknowledges that military forces were deployed to establish and maintain a safe and secure environment for post-conflict peacebuilding to emerge, few scholars have explored the substance of the military role beyond the separation of former warring factions and provision of a secure humanitarian space. This research demonstrates that military actors adapted their approaches to contribute across the spectrum of the peacebuilding effort, including on rights based issues; specifically ethnic minority returns and participation. On the basis of case studies in Kosovo and Bosnia Herzegovina, the thesis adopts an empirical approach to exploring the reasons for military engagement on these issues and their respective successes and failures. It examines the sources that projected ideas on ethnic minority issues – international policy development, peace treaty composition, and domestic acceptance – and how they influenced military decision making processes. Through post-conflict phases it analyses the domestic footprint of international intervention – international administration and civil-military actors – and discusses thematically the means of military engagement, the receptiveness of domestic actors at multiple levels and the nature of compliance. Acknowledging the overarching civilian framework for intervention, where from the outset the prospective of NATO and EU membership were held forth as the 'prize' for a successful return to 'a Europe of integration, democracy and ethnic pluralism', it establishes the utility of strategic mechanisms – conditionality and normative pressure – in military hands acknowledging the potential for linkage to enlargement frameworks. It argues that in spite of principled objections, military operations can and do have influence in delivering policy on rights based issues.

Despite the shadows cast by their history, Turkey has developed relations with the Kurdish government to the level of a strategic partnership within the last decade, following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This thesis contextualizes this unexpected rapprochement from a globalist perspective. To do so, the research first identifies and analyses important developments taking place during 2003-2013, then it seeks the motives that led to the emergence of this strategic partnership between these two regional actors, first at regional, then at global level. In conclusion, it argues that it was mainly the power shift in global political system that led Turkey to abandon its traditional policy towards the Kurdish Region of Iraq.

The development of an energy role for the European Union has been a divisive area of EU policy. The competing interests and differing perspectives of member states, EU institutions and commercial energy players have hampered the development of downstream European internal energy markets, obstructed the construction of mid-stream transportation routes that would diversify European energy supplies and hindered the EU’s ability to ‘speak with one voice’ towards major suppliers. However, despite widespread scholarly coverage of EU energy issues, the tri-lateral upstream interaction between European institutions, member states and energy companies in the countries where oil and gas are produced has received less academic attention. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna in the literature through an examination of upstream intra-EU cooperation in the Caspian region. This study finds that the EU’s upstream oil and gas policy in the Caspian is, relatively speaking, more coherent than many other areas of European energy policy. In the Caspian, European convergence forms, in particular, around the EU’s collective political risk mitigation and market facilitation role. Employing an interdisciplinary International Political Economy approach, the thesis examines how the EU’s model of European energy supply entails dependence on the commercial sector which compels political actors to support companies in strategic regions through milieu-shaping energy governance and commercial (energy) diplomacy. The thesis demonstrates how European actors share similar upstream risk perceptions, promote overlapping security and market-based policy perspectives and how both member states and companies increasingly encourage an EU foreign policy role in meeting these upstream challenges. In doing so, this research examines the EU’s risk-mitigating external energy governance, the EU’s diplomatic practice in upstream energy and the dynamics of European politico-commercial interaction in the Caspian - core aspects of an under-researched, but ultimately increasingly cooperative, part of EU external energy policy.

This thesis contributes to a growing body of literature on the role of transparency in public life. Analysing EU transparency through three levels of analysis, the thesis investigates how and why the expert advice proffered to EU policy makers is made transparent to EU citizens. At the institutional level, the study compares the transparency provided through the online registers to assess the extent of compliance with the rules and guidelines on the provision of information. It shows significant errors and gaps in the publicly available data, and demonstrates that these inaccuracies are the result of poor quality assurance at the institutions. At the group/actor level, the study draws on data from a series of elite interviews with policy-makers to consider the purpose of EU transparency. It shows that, whilst individual actors overwhelmingly frame transparency in wholly positive terms, collectively they bestow it with multiple attributes. The thesis posits that the EU has multiple transparencies and that the transparency tools - intended to improve citizen trust in the EU institutions - are frequently used by groups to undermine this trust. The process level of analysis examines the nature of the expertise used in the policy process in two distinct areas. It shows that, overwhelmingly, individuals apply to join an expert group following an informal approach from officials at the relevant Directorate General, and that those appointed in a personal capacity are likely to be already known to the Commission official responsible for the appointment. The study argues that, for the Commission’s expert group appointments, the non-transparent nature of these informal processes undermines the Commission’s rules and guidelines on transparency. Finally, the thesis recommends a number of specific and low cost measures to improve the transparency of the expertise used in the EU’s policy-making process.