Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.

The European Union's (EU) identity as a nonnative power rests in its ability to construct norms within itself and in third countries. Russia has proven challenging for the EU's norm construction. Through constructivist analysis this thesis attempts to understand the EU's process of norm construction with Russia and domestically and consequently its construction of a nonnative identity. Looking at the period between 2000 and 2008, this thesis presents two main arguments. First, in the EU's attempt to construct its norms of human rights and market liberalization it faced difficulties because as the context shifted, other norms, deemed more important, triumphed over the norms of human rights and market liberalization. This resulted in three identifiable nonnative shifts. Secondly, it focuses on the domestic formation of norms and argues that member states playa significant role in the EU's difficulty to construct norms, in that they have been unable to speak with one voice on human rights and market liberalization.

South Africa's unique history of racial segregation and spatial dynamics severely undermined the role and tradition of small-scale agriculture among the black population. In order to redress past injustices, the post-apartheid government aims to re-invigorate agriculture to improve food security and economic growth, with a particular focus on establishing a class of black small-scale farmers. However, changing livelihood trajectories, threats to sustainable agriculture, and the diverse and complex rural-urban interface challenge the sustainable role that small-scale farming can assume in peri-urban areas. On these premises, the study offers a critical reflection of the future of small-scale farming in one peri-urban community located in one of South Africa's former homelands -- KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). The overarching objectives of this thesis are: 1) to draw upon the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to gather data in order to explore livelihood strategies of small-scale, peri-urban farmers in Umzinyathi, KZN; 2) to analyze the effects of rural-urban transitions on small-scale farmers in Umzinyathi, KZN using a political ecology framework, with an emphasis on marginalization and degradation; and 3) to reflect upon the current policy framework that has been drafted for small-scale farming in South Africa. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used for data collection and analysis. Participatory research methods included: (a) the collection of semi-structured interviews and surveys from forty small-scale farmers, focusing on the respondent's livelihood; and (b) semi-structured, key informant interviews with two academics, three development practitioners, a tribal chief, and two commercial farmers. The fieldwork was conducted over three months between October and December 2010. The results of the survey suggested the following trends: tribal authorities play a large role in allocating land to resource-poor households, but land tenure is weak, and access to land is still limited to some; livelihood diversification is low and households assume their income primarily from social assistance and farming activities; farmers' access to markets is restricted due to infrastructural and production barriers; and the climate conditions are perceived to have changed the nature of farming, but adaption strategies to climate shocks and stresses are limited. Through comparing field data with the literature on agriculture and livelihoods in South Africa, the study identified several trends, which could either foster agricultural livelihoods in peri-urban areas, and which could not. It was found that rural to urban transitions could explain themes of marginalization and degradation in the research site related to the degradation of the natural resource base, the disintegration and marginalization of tribal authorities, and the marginalization of livelihoods through diminishing numbers of economic opportunities. This in turn had tremendous impacts on the feasibility of small-scale farming to improve food security, peri-urban livelihoods, and inspire economic development. The study believes that South Africa's current policy framework for small-scale farming can make vital contributions to both the farm and non-farm sectors of the peri-urban economy, but that its uptake can improve with additional communication, monitoring, and training. To this extent, the study suggests the implementation of farming associations to act as intermediary bodies between the state, agricultural cooperatives and individual farmers. The study also suggests areas in the peri-urban non-farm sector that could thrive in an agriculturally-driven economy.

The existing literature does little to reveal the sources of escalation in international security crises. This thesis reveals some of them by means of a general analytical framework designed to sensitize us to the distinctive political context of individual cases. Most theorising about crisis focuses narrowly on decisionmaking: the cognitive and/or organisational processes that form and implement policy. Such an approach essentially treats decision-makers as autonomous actors more or less effectively securing their utility. Their broad political context--the nation-state they represent and the issue--are given. In these terms, decision-making is critical to policy. Technical prescriptions to improve the process should therefore also improve policy. However, both largely reflect political constraints immune to such ‘improvement.’ In crises such constraints apparently produce sloppy decision-making, because they drastically reduce the politically expedient options and thus the importance of the process of choosing. They can also increase escalation. I identify the escalatory political constraints of crisis, and argue for their importance by examining a case that reveals them unusually starkly: one ending in war. This is the basis of a framework for analysing the political dimension of crisis escalation. The political context is important because of the general political role of the foreign-policy-maker, and the kind of issue raised in a crisis. An individual acting for the state at least nominally represents the community--the nation--of which the state is the political expression. This is a role which, as long as he occupies it, he must in some measure perform. As such, he is constrained by the implicit or explicit obligations of his office. These are common to all states (defined as an institution with supreme authority to order the affairs of a community) though they vary greatly in form and substance. An international crisis is essentially a period of extraordinary threat to important national interests and extraordinary likelihood of war. Because crises involve the dispute of important national interests and the use of force--at least by implicit threat--they provoke unusual political and public attention. A coercive demonstration of force must be publicly legitimised, by defining the issue as important and the adversary as the wrong-doer. Depending on the salience of the issue and the character of the state, such a demonstration constitutes a lesser or greater commitment, a more or less constraining invocation of public expectations concerning the leader's obligations of office. To understand how and why such commitments tend to be more or less powerful and thus more or less escalatory, we must identify the sources of issue salience, in the character of the states and in the object of dispute. Different combinations of aspects of object and states will have more or less escalatory effects. Some will invoke a greater sense in the political constituency of that leader's obligations to escalate, for example, because the adversary has a despised political system, or because the issue involves territory populated by loyal subjects. Such a tenor of public or peer opinion, albeit ill-defined, imposes palpable political costs on conciliatory actions. The identified escalation-relevant variables are: the states' balance of power, political systemic distance, history of contact, current political instability, and the disputed object's indivisibility, preemptibility, emotive potential and utility. A crisis can be characterised according to how escalatory or de-escalatory are the effects of these variables. I characterise three case-studies thus to help us evaluate the 'characterisation' as an analytical instrument. The instrument does more than draw our attention nicely to the dynamics of crisis escalation. By emphasising the foreign-policy-maker's role as the notional person of the state, and his symbolically and practically important obligations to political constituency, it provides a more conceptually coherent alternative to the realists' anthropomorphic state, and to the crisis literature's autonomous decision-maker, as the focus of analysis. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) is an interdisciplinary normative framework that reconceptualises state sovereignty as a responsibility rather than a right. It obliges states to protect their people from humanitarian catastrophe, and in the event of state failure or unwillingness to heed this responsibility, requires of the broader international community to assume the residual duty to protect. When the principles of RtoP were endorsed by world leaders at the United Nations’ 2005 World Summit, it seemed as though the normative regime was gaining currency in international relations. However, the operationalization of RtoP continued to be dogged by controversy and conceptual ambiguity. This prompted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in January 2009 to appeal to the international community to strengthen the “doctrinal, policy and institutional life” of the norm. This study responds to Ban’s call and seeks to complement efforts of scholars across the world to refine the conceptual parameters of RtoP. Two African case studies of humanitarian crisis during the first decade of the 21st Century, respectively Darfur and Zimbabwe, are analysed. In both cases there is ample evidence that the governments in question defaulted on their sovereign responsibilities, thus necessitating RtoP-guided action by the international community. Based on an inventory of responses to the two crises by non-state, individual state and broader intergovernmental entities, the study finds that the behaviour of these actors complied at different times and to varying extents with the triadic RtoP sub-responsibilities of prevention, response and rebuilding. A specific analytical instrument – the RtoP ‘Tool Box’ developed by Gareth Evans in 2008 (and expanded on in 2013 by the International Coalition of the Responsibility to Protect) – is applied to derive at summative conclusions about the appropriateness of specific responses in each of the three RtoP sub-responsibilities. A salient finding is the extent to which politicization of RtoP undermines its operationalization. From lack of political will to implement decisions or to respond to early warning of looming catastrophe; to real or perceived agendas that mask the agendas of intervening entities, the RtoP debate is continuously subject to a political narrative. This is evidenced by the fact that neither Darfur nor Zimbabwe has seen timeous or effective responses to humanitarian crises that were induced by their own governments. As has become evident in the decade since the World Summit endorsed RtoP, there is no global consensus yet on the norm. This is glaringly evident in terms of its implementation (or lack thereof). However, based on analysis of the two cases studies the study highlights the extent to which the norm has guided responses by a wide spectrum of actors. RtoP principles have become an indelible part of the discourse on humanitarian intervention, both when the norm is invoked explicitly (the case of Darfur) and when major actors downplay its invocation (the case of Zimbabwe). The impact of the norm is thus diminished by the international community’s piecemeal, ad hoc, and uncoordinated application thereof. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Political Sciences / Unrestricted

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Over the years member states of the United Nations have created various UN mechanisms to influence states to respect human rights. This study assesses their effectiveness and concludes that international human rights standards, institutions and procedures constitute a still-evolving multilateral human rights regime that in some cases has had positive impact. UN effectiveness is rooted in fact that states are members of a community, within which they pursue goals whose achievement depends significantly on avoiding political isolation. This need has permitted the gradual development of community mechanisms that can bring steady, year-round pressure on a state to reduce abuses. After examining the conceptual and legal foundations of this emerging regime, the study compares the structural and operational advantages of treaty-based and Charter-based UN institutions, concluding that the latter are more effective. Four Charter-based mechanisms are then analyzed: two thematic agents--the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances and the Special Rapporteur on the Elimination of Religious Discrimination--and two country-specific agents--the Special Rapporteurs on Chile and on Iran. The study concludes that both Charter-based types have been significant secondary factors in contributing to improved human rights practices, at least temporarily. While domestic economic and political developments, bilateral pressures, and international economic factors normally weigh more heavily in states' policy deliberations, UN human rights mechanisms have become part of the external political environment within which states make choices. Effectiveness of any UN human rights mechanism depends importantly on how much a government desires to maintain or restore an international image of civilized and humane behavior and to avoid political isolation. In a deteriorating human rights situation, a government is more likely to cooperate with a thematic than a country-specific mechanism. The reverse is true in an improving situation, since the country-specific procedure can generate more positive publicity. Also enhancing effectiveness are simultaneous pressure by two UN mechanisms, the international community's willingness to sustain its efforts, a prudent balance between public criticism and praise, and the personality and energy of individual UN human rights agents.

This dissertation presents a constructivist approach to explain varying levels of member state support for supranational cooperation in the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy in 2002 through 2004. It examines the possible effects of three independent variables—popular identification with Europe, normative parity between national foreign policy and CFSP institutions, and national threat perceptions, on the level of support for supranational reform of the CFSP during the European Convention and Intergovernmental Conference producing the proposals on CFSP eventually adopted in the Lisbon Treaty of 2007. After an in-depth analysis of four countries, Germany, Netherlands, UK and Greece, this study concludes that in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, the two ideational variables—level of identification with Europe and parity between national and EU foreign policy norms—are positively correlated with the level of support to supranationalism. Only in the case of Greece are threat perceptions the driving reason for Greek levels of support for reforms increasing the supranational character of CFSP. This suggests that ideational factors and threat perceptions offer two different routes to member state support for supranational integration in common foreign and security policies.