This thesis explores the relationship between the political philosophy of Leo Strauss and neoconservative cultural politics. Arguing against claims that Straussian philosophy explicitly informs neoconservatism, I instead suggest that both Strauss and the neoconservatives share a common intellectual lineage that is a response to a pessimistic conception of modernity. Strauss is a neoconservative, but neoconservatives should not necessarily be considered Straussians. Both Strauss and the neoconservatives became notorious in the aftermath of the US led invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. Contra to the narrative that suggests that Strauss inspired the invasion or that neoconservative foreign policy presents a radical break in US history, I argue that the neoconservative project of the Bush era should be understood as a continuation of US expansionism as an inevitable effect of capitalist growth. Beyond foreign policy, my research considers the neoconservative understanding of cultural politics in particular relation to the social changes of the post war era. This thesis details the neoconservative attempt to move beyond the contradiction surrounding a distrust of modernity and the embrace of virulently nihilist capitalism. This is read through the Straussian idea that it is essential to practice care when speaking publicly. This thesis concludes that neoconservatism is an explicitly moral discourse and not a particular set of policies or strategies. Neoconservatism recognises the necessity of moral discourse and the importance of the construction of such discourses for the establishment of the community. It is argued that the neoconservative attempt to re-impose discredited moral orders has led to the exacerbation of America's contradictions and to decline in American power. Beyond this, it is also argued that Strauss does make a contribution to political philosophy in terms of the relationship between city and man; this contribution to political philosophy is used to interpret elements of post-war American history.

After the collapse of communism in Romania, in December 1989, nationalism played an important role in the development of political life. This thesis proposes an explanation for why this has been the case. I identify the Greater Romania Party as the most representative nationalist political formation in post-communist Romania and examine it as my case-study. My analysis distinguishes the core aspects of the PRM's ideology and studies how its discourse is constructed. In doing so, I argue that the success of the party could only be explained by the fact that it employs a nationalist discourse that has been consistently and continuously used over a long period of time in Romania. I begin by engaging with the debates about nationalism in order to establish a theoretical framework, which in turn provides my analytical device to examine Romanian nationalist movements in three different political, social and cultural time frames. I use this analytical tool to identify a set of themes that characterise the nationalist discourse in all the periods I examine, and to show that these themes cut across chronological sequence, political purpose and social and cultural contexts. Alongside with the continuity of the nationalist discourse across time, I argue that authoritarian tradition and the conditions of the transition from communism in Romania are also factors that contribute to the persistence of nationalist tendencies in post-1989 Romanian politics. The analysis of the case-study draws on these findings and shows that the same core ideological elements used effectively in the past are exploited again, by the PRM, in yet another context, with the same degree of success. The thesis, therefore, aims to examine the most significant nationalist party in post-communist Romania, to explain the background in which it operates and to focus on the ideological tools it uses in order to rally the support of the electorate, by mapping out the particular type of nationalist discourse, which recurs in different historical political and social circumstances in Romania.

Emerging in the mid 1990s, the dominant way in which a human rights discourse and practice has been formally incorporated within many development NGOs has been through what is commonly referred to as “rights-based approaches” (RBAs). This thesis speaks of RBAs as a ‘broad umbrella concept’, thereby acknowledging their expansiveness and what in many ways appears to be a one-approach-fits-all message. However, despite considerable research into RBAs, little attention has been directed towards the boundaries of this concept. In order to approach this, this research develops three analytical themes: ‘rights talk’; theories of voice; and concepts of framing. By invoking a broad sociological approach to the study of human rights, premised on a social constructionist view of human rights practice, this research was built on two stages. The first stage involved documentary analysis of key publications and in-depth interviews with campaigners from within eight development NGOs. The NGOs were sub-categorised as: ‘relief’, ‘faith-based’ and ‘political’. The second stage involved an ethnographic study of one of the ‘political’ NGOs. This study was used to develop an initial case study for an alternative to RBAs to be established. Grounded in the voices expressed across both stages of the research, this thesis provides a conceptual distinction between approaches ‘inside’, ‘alongside’ and ‘outside’ RBAs. It develops this by identifying three key ‘perspectives’ on rights talk. The thesis then builds on this analysis by proposing a new approach, identified as ‘rights-framed approaches’. Rights-framed approaches are proposed on six core dimensions. They contribute a new framework, revealing key ways in which campaigns can be framed through a human rights discourse and practice, whilst remaining ‘outside’ of RBAs. Through this proposal, the 1 thesis aims to move discussions within the existing literatures away from the dominance of the concept of RBAs, towards alternative approaches.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was created as a new type of international organisation. Its founders uniquely enfranchised non-state actors on its Board, hoping that decision would attract new resources to combat these diseases. Funding decisions would be evidence-based rather than politically-driven. And, the institution would be deliberately ‘lean’ to promote ‘country-ownership’ of grant proposals and implementation. The Fund’s Board (‘principals’) made deliberate choices to constrain the autonomy of its Secretariat (‘agent’). Delegation was strictly limited. In theory, this was to ensure the Fund remained a catalyst for donor funding, evidence-based decision-making and country-ownership. However, the research adduced for this thesis suggests inadequate delegation opened opportunities for direct donor influence in recipient countries. This thesis assesses three specific dimensions of the Fund’s performance in its first decade. The first concerns whether the Fund successfully mobilised more resources, from more funders and did so more reliably. The second is whether the Fund made initial and continued funding decisions in an identifiable evidence-based way. The third centres on ‘country-ownership:’ whether recipient and donor countries on the Fund’s Board had equal influence and whether grant writing and oversight can be assessed as being recipient country ‘owned.’ Data is aggregated from several sources, including: the Fund’s grant portfolio, individual grant agreements and Board documentation; the U.S. PEPFAR programme; and, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. The research reveals the Fund likely gave a ‘kick-start’ to resources flowing to its diseases but PEPFAR’s arrival a year later contributed relatively more. Broad-based support did not emerge though the Fund proved relatively more successful in converting pledges to contributions. The Fund made evidence-based decisions for initial and continued funding, but the latter is a less robust conclusion given missing grant performance data. Equal donor and recipient Board representation was insufficient to ensure recipients had influence equal to donors. The Secretariat never developed an in-country presence but donors embedded themselves in-country, through grant oversight mechanisms and providing technical assistance to implementers. Principal-agent theory generally assumes agents have more information than principals, a key source of their authority. In the Fund, that asymmetry was in the principals’ favour. The scant delegation of authority to the Secretariat left donors in a position to exert control at all levels. The Fund was an experiment in global governance but has not yet proven to be a success in establishing a new model for cooperation.

There has been much interest and attention on the representation of China as a responsible great power. Indeed, Chinese leaders, policymakers and scholars have not been hesitant to declare China as one. Yet, relatively little is known about when, how and why this proclaimed self-identity emerged in Beijing. This thesis represents an initial attempt to unpack these questions. Mobilising the idea of international identity, I map the evolution of China’s declared identity as a responsible power, and examine its attributes and drivers. My central contention is that since the early 1990s, China has been increasingly identifying—not only portraying—itself as a responsible great power. As this thesis shows, there is a vibrant epistemic terrain relating to the idea of global responsibility within China. For some time now, Chinese elites have been debating intensely the kind of responsible power that China should be. That these domestic identity debates take place frequently, away from the attention of most of the world, suggests the Chinese regard the idea of big power responsibility far more seriously than had it been purely a convenient propagandist tool. Examining how these elites think about the responsible power role, hence, may be crucial to a better understanding of the implications and trajectory of China’s rise. Nevertheless, the development of this identity has not been solely a product of Chinese domestic narratives and perceptions. The role of the United States as a moral adjudicator and pressure source is also significant.

In coercive diplomacy, actors employ the threat of force to get targets to change their behavior. The goal is to achieve the opponent's compliance without waging war. In practice, however, the strategy often falls short-even when coercers enjoy substantial military superiority. This finding inspires the central question of this thesis: What prompts leaders to reject coercive threats from stronger adversaries, and under what conditions do they yield? I argue that target leaders' affective reactions can help to explain why coercive diplomacy succeeds in some cases but not in others. Combining insights from psychology and social constructivism, this thesis presents a theory of emotional choice to analyze how affect enters into target leaders' decision-making. Specifically, it makes the case that preferences are not only socially but also emotionally constructed. The core of the theoretical framework outlines how five key emotions-fear, anger, hope, pride, and humiliation-help to constitute target leaders' preferences. This represents the first attempt to explore how a spectrum of emotions influences leaders' foreign policy decision-making. To test the analytic utility of emotional choice theory, the thesis examines nine major decisions by Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and ten main decisions by Saddam Hussein in the course of the Gulf conflict in 1990-91. The analysis yields mixed results: In the case of about a third of all decisions, the five key emotions exerted only minor effects or no impact at all. Another third of the decisions were influenced by one or more of these emotions to a degree similar to the impact of other factors. In the case of the final third of decisions, however, some of these emotions became the primary forces shaping the construction of preferences. Overall, emotional choice theory has thus advanced our understanding of the target leaders' decision-making in the missile crisis and the Gulf conflict, offering a more comprehensive explanation of why coercive diplomacy succeeded in one case but not in the other.

Over the past decades concern, legislation and research related to the phenomenon of child soldiers has increased in both scope and depth. Much is known about the experiences that children undergo, their recruitment both voluntary and forced by non-state armed groups, their training and deployment and the abuse that they are both forced to endure and forced to commit against others. This thesis builds upon this knowledge by exploring in a systematic and comparative way, not previously undertaken, how the type of conflict impacts on child soldiering. Three conflicts, each with a non-state entity which used child soldiers were comparatively assessed. One a criminal enterprise rooted in the extraction of resources, one ethno-nationalist in origin and revolving around claims and counter-claims to sovereignty over a particular territory and one a left-wing insurgency which aimed to reconfigure the social, economic and political structures of the state. Each had unique aspects but there were also some similarities. To allow for a fuller understanding of these differences and similarities it was useful to think of the conflicts as ranging along a spectrum. The spectrum that was used was that of new war/old war which allowed the conflicts to be situated according to their characteristics but which also enabled, through use of the moving continuum, the conflicts to be seen over the course of the time period in which they were conducted, as they moved along the spectrum in response to changes in the conflict. To explore how each conflict affected child soldier's experiences the research included interviews with relevant experts, the collection of quantative and qualitative data and an extensive overview of the literature. A comparative assesment of how support for the group, access to resources, the groups' use of violence, the manipulation of culture by the groups for their own ends and whether children had space to act on their initiative underpinned by the triangulation of the information collected enabled robust conclusions to be drawn. The findings showed that the hypothesis that the type of conflict impacts on children's recruitment, deployment and abuse within non-state armed groups holds true. A study of the aforementioned factors highlight that the type of conflict the groups were involved with acted to restrain, or not, the actions of the group towards children in each of the three areas, recruitment, deployment and abuse. Yet the findings showed great complexity, in some important ways the groups' behaviour showed similarities. These were related in part to the trajectory ofthe conflicts and in part to similarities between the groups in terms of motivation and support, factors that at times mitigated group behaviour and at others times allowed groups to act in extreme ways.

This thesis assesses the applicability of the neoclassical "Solow" growth model to the recent experience of the countries within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). The Solow growth model carries an implication that some key macroeconomic aggregates will grow at the same rate indicating a "balanced growth". Stochastic versions. of the model interpret balanced growth as stationarity of some so-called "great ratios". They include consumption/income and investment/income ratios, considered in Kuznets' seminal contribution (1942) for the US economy in the early twentieth century. Although Kuznet dismissed international trade as being of negligible consequence, the set of ratios examined here in the case of SAARC countries, are extended to include a trade/income ratio, in recognition of the significant role now played by international trade. The Johansen (1988) and Johansen and Jusilius (1990) maximum likelihood method has been used for estimating and testing long-run steady-state relations in multivariate vector autoregressive models. The empirical support for the balanced growth hypothesis is very limited. Econometric methods that accommodate the impact of structural reforms on economic growth still find only weak evidence for the one-sector neoclassical growth model. The study also investigates the extent of "growth convergence"- a property of the Solow model, within SAARC, by examining the stationarity of relative per capita incomes assessed by unit root tests and permitting structural breaks. It additionally employs Phillips and SuI (2007, 2009) two-factor growth model and the "flexible Fourier trend" method developed by Enders and Lee (2012). The study makes an assessment of regional convergence in the SAARC countries and identifies the consequences of non-convergence and hence draws policy implications for economic integration in South Asia. The results based on data from 1960-2011 reveal that the per capita output is not converging. The key methodologies employed developed from Carlino and Mills (1993) with modification made to them by Li and Papell (1999); Philips and SuI (2007, 2009); Ender and Lee (2012). With or without structural breaks, analyses of the SAARC5 data suggest that per capita output is not converging in these countries.

This study examines the construction of cultural nationalism in Northern Ireland and Scotland post-1979. Two particularly significant processes and practices are selected for analysis; football and literature. The methodological approach taken is a synthesis of ethnosymbolism, modernism, and cultural materialism, and nations are discussed as cultural constructs. Nationalism produced at both the elite and popular levels is considered, to provide a greater level of insight into the construction of national identity. The different nationally defined identities discussed are Scottish nationalism, Irish nationalism, unionism, and two varieties of Northern Irish nationalism. One of these is ecumenical, and is largely produced by literary elites. The other is loyalist, and is produced at the popular level. Scottish nationalism is produced through literature and through football, and is largely defined by working class values. As a consequence, literature has become a “popular” social practice in Scotland. Irish nationalism is also produced through literature and football; literature remains an elite practice in Northern Ireland, however. As well as fan groups, individual footballers play a key role in the production of Irish nationalism within Northern Ireland. The rejection of the Northern Ireland team by players of an Irish Catholic background, in favour of the team of the Republic of Ireland, is significant. Irish and Scottish nationalism have often been seen as antagonistic; however, there is an increasingly positive relationship between the two. In the novels of Irvine Welsh, Irish and Scottish identities are mutually informative; the identities of many Celtic fans, including the influential fan group “the Green Brigade”, are similarly constructed. Scottish and Irish nationalism are culturally “other” to unionism and loyalism, and are brought together by this common “enemy”. Most Rangers supporters consider themselves to be culturally unionist. Their identity is unlike that expressed by fans in other parts of the United Kingdom, and paradoxically appears nationalist as a consequence. The Northern Ireland national football team has become a symbol of loyalism, which is considered as a form of national identity because its rituals and symbolism are distinctively Northern Irish, not “British”. In adopting a nationally defined team, loyalists demonstrate the importance of Northern Ireland to their identity, rather than the United Kingdom.

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