England’s population is ageing. Older people’s issues have entered political agendas. Yet much remains unknown about older people’s political lives. Although older people can be unfairly treated by governments and public employees, an ‘older people’s political movement’ has not emerged. For example, some older people require publicly financed social care services to continue living in their own homes. But as demand for social care increases, political decisions make it increasingly difficult to access these services. This thesis seeks to explore older people’s political understandings and experiences through qualitative semi-structured one-to-one interviews. Three research locations were selected as potentially deviant socio-political contexts, where local politicians set either the lowest threshold (Calderdale) or the highest threshold (Northumberland and West Berkshire) for individuals’ eligibility to access publicly funded social care services. In the run-up to the 2010 general election, interviews were conducted with 41 people aged 51 to 90. This research reveals some of the rich diversity and complexity of older people’s political behaviour and understandings. Some research participants demonstrate openness to learning from their socio-political context. And some people are choosing to change long-standing political behaviour. Therefore, older people’s political participation should not be taken for granted by politicians.

Oil resources are the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, but also a major source of affliction to the village communities in which they are located. This study uses the oil village communities in Nigeria, with particular focus on Delta state. It seeks to explore the extent to which the presence of oil fuels violent conflicts in these village communities, and how the moulding of socio-economic and political structures in local oil village communities by the presence of oil resources gives rise to economic opportunism and grievance characteristics. The research employs a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews, FGD and documentary sources to collect and analyse data for the study. It adopts structural conflict theory as the anchor theory of the research, with the support of environmental scarcity theory and greed vs. grievance theory for the analysis and interpretation of data. The research also applies micro-level analysis and non-state perspectives, which is a deviation from previous studies, which have applied macro-level analysis and state-centric perspectives in exploring oil resource conflicts. With literature positing that behaviours such as rent seeking, greed and the pursuit of grievances arise in many oil abundant states, the research demonstrates that oil resources fuel violent conflicts in oil village communities through the changes it brings to local socio-economic conditions: changes such as poverty, unemployment and land struggle; and changes from traditional power structures to new ones in which there are fierce struggles for power, arising out of the need people feel for access to oil opportunities and benefits.

This thesis charts the trajectory of a strand of film-theoretical optimism in texts by Walter Benjamin (1882-1940), Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and Alexander Kluge (1932–) from different moments in the twentieth century; the empirical corpus looks to post-reunification German and Austrian cinema to find evidence of this theoretical optimism in contemporary filmmaking practices. The thinkers advocate the leftist-political potential of film to stimulate a critical mode of spectatorship, and are to varying degrees influenced by Brecht and the neo- Marxist politics of the \({Frankfurter Institut für Sozialforschung}\). The objective of this thesis is thus twofold. First, it illustrates the continuing relevance of the following principal strands in the film-theoretical texts of Benjamin, Kracauer and Kluge: the representation of the figure of the worker in the \(Arbeiterfilm\) genre; the possibilities and limits of capturing reality using different modes of realism; the imperative of challenging viewers in order to transform them from ‘consumers’ into collaborators; and, following on from this, notions of shock and distraction, focusing on Benjamin’s concept of the ‘Schockwirkung’. Second, it shows how this diachronic, neo-Marxist approach can continue to illuminate facets of the political in contemporary cinema by German-speaking directors in an age of advanced capitalism and digital reproducibility.

This thesis examines the theoretical and empirical relationship between modes of governance and public service efficiency. We argue that different modes of governance yield different levels of efficiency depending on the nature and scale of the transactions upon which they are deployed. The experience of OECD countries is used to examine the effects of different modes of governance on the efficiency of education, health, and social protection systems. In the education sector, the share of public providers is found to exert a negative effect on efficiency whereas the degree of decentralisation of the decision-making procedures of public providers is found to exert a positive effect on efficiency. In the health sector, the introduction of market-type mechanisms to public integrated health systems is shown to have positive effects on efficiency, whereas further movement towards a market model of health care insurance and provision is shown to depress efficiency. In the social protection sector, we conclude that as public social security systems exceed their remit to assist individuals smooth their income across the life cycle and/or states of nature and to provide basic social safety nets to the destitute, the efficiency of social transfers in reducing poverty is damaged.

This thesis argues that transnational corporations (TNCs) bear primarily negative moral duties in relation to human rights, i.e. to avoid doing harm, and that they can be held responsible when they fail to discharge such duties. Thus, their duties are not primarily to protect human rights, as some commentators have argued. To defend the negative duties claim, I detail ways in which corporations inflict harm not only directly through their operations, but also by shaping and supporting a global institutional arrangement that foreseeably and avoidably produces human rights harms. Therefore, the negative duties of corporations should be understood to include refraining from engaging in harmful institutional practices, or participating overall in a harmful institutional order without providing adequate compensation to the victims of harm. If they fail to do so, TNCs can be held accountable for the negative outcomes engendered by the global order.

This research is an attempt to understand the relations between the Ottoman imperial government and the local administrators of Egypt, namely the mamluk beys. Gaining more financial and political power, they commenced to challenge the authority of the Ottoman governor of Egypt in the mid-eighteenth century alongside the incessant struggles between each other. Using a variety of Ottoman archival documents and contemporary narrative sources, I examine the factors behind the mamluk beys’ authority expansion that resulted in uprising of Ali Bey al-Kabir (Bulutkapan). Throughout the dissertation I pursue two arguments, which address key issues in Ottoman political historiography. The first argument concerns with the underlying causes of the mamluk beys’ extended authority. I show that short-tenured governors encountered with financially and politically powerful local components, which may be considered as a result of the decentralized administration system of the Ottoman Empire. Mamluk beys’ ambition to accumulate more financial income led them to contact European consuls directly in order to open Suez trade for them. The second argument concerns the centre-periphery relations of the Ottoman Empire. I show that, although they gained power and challenged the pasha, the mamluk beys did not establish an autonomous administration during the eighteenth century. The Ottoman Empire managed the short-term uprising of Ali Bey quickly by taking due precautions.

In this thesis I investigate the intellectual foundations of International Political Economy (IPE) in order to develop a more complex account of agency than that currently provided to the subject field by neoclassical economics. In particular, I focus on the thought of Adam Smith, whose ideas are gaining interest in IPE owing to an increasing recognition of his seminal contribution to the subject field. I investigate the secondary debate on Smith, his influences, his distance from his peers in the Scottish Enlightenment and his ongoing influence across the social sciences. I also analyse the thought of William James, and argue that his similarly influential concept of agency offers a complex view of the self that is complimentary to Smith’s account. I suggest that the framework of the self that these thinkers provide can present critical IPE theorists with an alternative concept of agency than the reductive account currently employed in the subject field. I argue that these theorists are unable to countenance such an alternative owing to their implicit acceptance of the analytical separation of economics and politics that became institutionalised after the Methodenstreit. I suggest that this is obscured by their commitment to normative interventionism, which I argue threatens to reiterate the universalist claims that they seek to challenge.

This thesis seeks to develop a conception of the political traditions operating in the UK and then apply it to the development of Scottish Devolution. I argue that the concept of tradition has been under-valued and theorized in social science and that the notion of political traditions has heuristic value when applied to British politics. Discussion of a distinctive British Political Tradition has been kept to the margins in explanations of the British political system with only a few authors seeking to explore the ideational underpinnings of the institutions and process of British government and the Westminster Model. The recent work of Bevir and Rhodes has raised the profile of political traditions, however I contend that their conceptualization is flawed and thus, heuristically limited. I argue that we can identify a dominant political tradition, the British Political Tradition, which has decisively influenced the nature and conduct of British political life over time. This tradition expresses and facilitates the ideas and interests of dominant socio-economic groups in UK society. However it has not gone uncontested. We can also identify the existence of competing political traditions which challenge aspects or the entirety of, the British Political Tradition. Although competing political traditions resonate asymmetrically, it is through the process of conflict and contestation that changes in the British political system can be explained. From this I then narrate the history of Scottish Devolution to date and offer comment on how this interactive and iterative process continues to inform outcomes since 1999. Overall I argue that the dominant political tradition continues to have a major impact on the British political system.

This study investigates the relative impact of state sponsorship on the democratic effects of participation in the case of two Russian youth organisations – Nashi and the Young Guard, which were established with Kremlin support in 2005. In doing so this study questions the assumption that state involvement necessarily has a corrosive influence on participation and asserts the value of studying state-sponsored participatory initiatives. It concludes that the potential democratic effects of state-sponsored participation should not be disregarded solely on the basis of state involvement for two reasons: Firstly, the impact of state sponsorship on the democratic effects of participation is shaped by other factors, including the socio-political environment and the agency of participants. The state may have a vested interest in supporting some positive democratic effects of participation to further its own aims. Secondly, there are limits to the state‘s power to determine the democratic effects of participation. In particular, the state is unable to control the significance attached to participation by those involved. Without rejecting scholarly work on the Kremlin‘s questionable democratic credentials or on the pro-regime youth movements‘ numerous negative tendencies, this study contends that there is much more to these Kremlin-sponsored youth movements than existing portrayals allow.

Egypt’s 2011 revolution led to debates about Salafis’ entry into politics for the first time. The socio-political vision and character of Salafi groups were relatively understudied. As such, the primary question of this thesis is what is the Salafis’ vision for social and political change in post-revolution Egypt? The vision is traced through Salafis’ discourse concerning change. The texts analyzed were collected from Al-Da’awa Al-Salafyya (DS), and its political arm the Al-Nor party: the latter is the only surviving Islamist party, following the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in 2013. The texts were gathered through field research, and analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis. This analysis enabled what is the first mapping of DS’ vision for change. Based on this, the thesis argues that following its entry into politics, DS reproduced its long-held discourse of social and political change. It achieved this by introducing changes to the form of its discourse, while preserving its core content. The thesis demonstrates that “continuity and consistency” of DS’ key discourse for change (Manhaj), was central to its framing processes towards mobilizing political participation. More broadly, the thesis concludes that the wider movement and the specific political party are both intellectually and structurally connected.