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.

This thesis departs from the traditional historiographical views that portray Philby as having no political influence either while he was serving his country or after his resignation from government service when he was settled in Saudi Arabia. It also departs from picturing him as a man who tended to undermine British policy, arguing that he was loyal to his country, as was plain during his years of service. The thesis examines his background, from his early years to the work he did for his country in India, Iraq and Transjordan and takes an analytical and historical approach. It seeks to present a more comprehensive understanding of Philby’s mission to Arabia, its objectives and outcomes, focusing on his political work in Arabia and his efforts to solve problems which otherwise might have threatened British interests. This thesis deals with Philby’s efforts in the conflict between Najd and Hejaz and his actions in the border dispute between Ibn Sa‘ūd and his rival, Hussain, and assesses whether Philby played a major part in the collapse of the Hejazi kingdom. It considers Philby’s contribution to the American recognition of Saudi Arabia. It examines Philby’s method of settling political conditions after the Idrisi revolt against Ibn Sa‘ud. It asks why Philby visited Yemen and if it would somehow have enhanced Ibn Sa‘ūd’s position. It focuses on Philby’s role in the Buraimi crisis between Britain and Saudi Arabia and illustrates the persuasive arguments by which Philby upheld the Saudi opposition to Britain’s demands over Buraimi.

The security dilemma mechanism has been widely used to explain interstate conflict since its original conceptualisation in the 1950s, but it has been applied to the study of civil wars only since the early 1990s. Despite valiant attempts, major theoretical gaps remain unaddressed in the literature, the most important of which is the missing link between the security dilemma and the outbreak of armed violence. This thesis intends to fill this gap, employing process tracing methodology on the post- independence civil wars that erupted in Angola and Mozambique after the collapse of the Portuguese empire. The research engages alternative explanations for the causes of civil war, assesses the role of the security dilemma in this context, and demonstrates that mutual insecurity was instrumental to the outcome of violence in the studied cases. Hence, this research dispels concerns about the concept's fundamental incompatibility with civil wars and advances the literature discussing several issues related to the intrastate application of an originally interstate concept. The application of the model to two novel cases enhances the theoretical and empirical relevance of the concept for the study of civil wars and reinforces claims of its potential generalisability.

This thesis examines Bulgarian migration to the UK since the lifting of work restrictions in 2014. Contesting the economic reductionism of mainstream migration literature, my aim is to provide an in-depth understanding of the diverse motivations, experiences, and meanings that migration holds for those who engage in it. By following the journeys of two groups of Bulgarians who share two different perceptions of class identity, I juxtapose their pre-migratory imaginations of life in the UK with the lived realities of migration. The phenomenon of migration is approached through the native concept of the ‘West’ (Zapadat), which simultaneously denotes the geographical region of western Europe and a place offering possibilities for a more meaningful life and a better future. By deconstructing this notion through the conceptual prism of the ‘imaginary West’ I grasp the connection between individual imaginations and globally circulating discourses and ideologies of Western modernity and civilisation and corresponding ideas about social hierarchy and class. I show how this idealised and in fact utopian version of the West foregrounds individual decisions to migrate and to sustain migration projects despite unforeseen hardships and unrealised expectations. I thus conclude that the ‘imaginary West’ is a major force structuring and sustaining migration between Bulgaria and the UK, and between global centres and peripheries more generally.

Under what conditions are states more likely to trade-off human rights when cooperating on sensitive areas of international security? We now know that during the post-9/11 period, a number of countries have cooperated with the United States of America on a range of controversial security matters. The clandestine nature of counterterrorism cooperation makes it difficult to study the causes and dynamics of trading off security and human rights in international politics directly. However, one example of these post-9/11 practices (extraordinary rendition) has the advantage of being observable (ex-post), as we can analyse detainee testimony and suspected extraordinary rendition flight paths using publicly available data. This thesis capitalizes on an opportunity to provide theoretically driven and empirically testable answers to questions on the causes and consequences of contentious forms of international security cooperation. What influenced more than a quarter of the world’s countries to participate in rendition, secret detention and interrogation operations during the post-9/11 period? What explains the variation in the political costs of participation in the post-9/11 Central Intelligence Agency extraordinary rendition, secret detention and interrogation programme? This dissertation focuses on the tension between common and conflicting interests among states and between parties and voters to answer these questions. This thesis provides a substantive contribution to international relations literature by suggesting both which countries are more likely to tradeoff human rights and cooperate with one another on contentious security issues and which domestic environments are most likely to generate the greatest political costs for getting caught. The main findings from this thesis have important policy implications and provide academics and advocacy researchers with new tools for detecting human rights violations and holding states to account where previous efforts have failed due to a lack of evidence.

This thesis aims at understanding the choice of terrorism in mass dissident movements and the outcomes of civil resistance campaigns that coexist with the use of terrorist tactics by radicals. Towards this end, it focuses on dissident organizations and conflict dynamics and therefore contributes to the existing literature on terrorism and conflict, both methodologically and theoretically. Study one investigates the conditions under which groups that participate in mass dissent choose to initiate terrorist campaigns. I find that groups involved in either civil war or mass civil resistance might face strategic constraints that encourage them to resort to terrorism, due to perceived lower costs and higher tactical effectiveness. These constraints are higher repression and longer duration of mass dissent. Study two contributes to the literature on ‘radical flanks effect’. I find that terrorism generates incentives for the state to accommodate civil resistance movement, especially if nonviolent movements have a centralized leadership and hierarchical structure and can thereby credibly commit to nonviolent discipline and to avoid the escalation of the conflict to large-scale violence. Study three focuses on international support to rebel groups as determinants of the variation in the portfolio of killings across rebel groups. I find that rebels that receive financial support from external non-state actors are less likely to target civilians than combatants. This is because investing financial support domestically is more economically efficient and increased rebel dependency on the local population generating incentives to restrain the use of terrorism. In turn, rebels that receive military support from external non-state actors are more likely to target civilians than combatants. Military resources are efficiently invested in warfare activities without the need to increase reliance on the population. To test these mechanisms empirically, I model the portfolios of killings of rebel groups as a proportion of terrorist-related deaths and battle-related deaths.

This dissertation examines the determinants and the impact of military conversion on conflict recurrence in post-conflict countries. The dissertation also aims to identify some of the main elements needed to design a public policy addressing conversion processes. Military conversion is the process of transferring military resources to civilian activities. This process could appear after the end of an internal war. Based on existing theoretical and empirical studies, I develop a new empirical framework that allows me to identify that democratic regimes could lead to the onset of a military conversion process, while the US military aid variable could reduce the likelihood of starting a conversion process. Likewise, I test the effect of military conversion on the risk of conflict recurrence. The empirical evidence shows that the reduction of the military expenditure could prompt the probability of conflict recurrence. Additionally, the Colombian case study complements the findings on conversion determinants in a post-conflict society, specifically how the persistence of defence and security threats and economic growth affect the onset of military conversion process. Besides those findings, the Colombian case study provides evidence about the reallocation of less-used military resources to new or existing military roles. The use of less-used military resources for fulfilling any military role could reverse conversion processes in the short term. Additionally, I identify the future and feasible conversion alternatives in Colombia according to the dual use of some military resources (e.g., military bases).

This study examines the development of Western European Communist parties (WECPs) and their post-Communist successor parties. These parties had always adapted in surprising ways as they struggled in political systems that they sought to overthrow. Following the collapse of Communism in 1989 in central and Eastern Europe (CEE) they continued to amaze. Some reformed themselves dramatically, sacrificing or transforming their policies in search of office and votes. A number of them moved into mainstream politics and became more influential as other parties brought them into governing coalitions or they expanded at elections. Several WECPs disappeared but others resisted compromising their orthodox Marxism- Leninism. These hard-line Stalinist parties managed to remain significant players in their party systems. This in-depth study analyses the reasons behind the divergent trajectories of five WECPs and their post-Communist successor parties in the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland and Portugal. It does this by importing and refining an analytical framework developed to explain the diverse adaptation of Communist parties in CEE. Extensive primary research based on elite interviews and the analysis of party programmes is used to evaluate the framework's usefulness and its implications for studying the trajectories of Communist parties in Western Europe (and beyond). There are two main empirical findings from this research. First, it was elites with experience in working with groups and institutions outside their parties that led efforts to reform WECPs, just as in CEE successor parties. Second, mid-level elites in WECPs were not necessarily hardliners bent on resisting reform. Their leaders could be extremely effective in advocating reforms and convincing members into supporting them, meaning that organisational democratisation could be compatible with reform. This meant that organisational centralisation was not as necessary as it was in the successor parties in CEE. Moreover, reformist party leaders had not, like their counterparts in CEE, learnt to be centralisers through past struggles over reform. When party leaders did pursue elitist strategies to promote programmatic transformation this usually took place through shifting power to the party in public office rather than central office.

The thesis seeks to develop understandings of dynamics in federal political systems in crisis, the nature of the relationship between crisis and process, and the range of tools available for conflict reduction that extend beyond those available in the constitutional frameworks of each system. The dissertation explores these through a comparative study of a small n of cases that meet the criterion of a period of crisis as the independent variable: the Staten Island secession crisis in New York City, the existential crisis of Quebec's relationship with the rest of Canada, and the crisis of the UK and European integration at the time of Maastricht. The data collection process for each is framed on a temporal basis, within the duration of crisis as defined, and spatially, within the territorial extent of the system. The thesis uses data gathered from primary and secondary written sources based on the relevance to the research questions and conceptual framework. The analysis, located in the comparative section, identifies a number of important findings that contribute to theoretical understandings of federalism. The evidence gives support to, and extends the understanding of, federalism by demonstrating that the crisis potential in each case becomes evident because of challenges to some communities' values that arise from the process-based nature of federalism, through identifiable demands and counter-demands made by actors. Moreover, it highlights how the constraining nature of constitutional frameworks makes the use of extra-constitutional arrangements essential, in particular with the use of instrumentalities. The thesis also develops an understanding of how federal power sharing evolves post-crisis with flexible understandings of the division of competences, and the potential for a return to crisis in systems in the absence of a deeper understanding and application of federal principles by political elites.

For the 2012 Mexican Presidential Elections, about 50 million voters went to polls to elect more than two thousand posts. The runner-up attributed the defeat to a massive vote-buying mobilisation in favour of the front-runner. Reports from electoral observers supported that version. Did vote buying modify voters choices? Although the literature has approached vote buying from several angles, there remain disputes and gaps in our understanding of the mechanisms involved and their direct implications for electoral outcomes. In this dissertation, I assess both, asking i) how are Mexican voters confronted by vote-buying strategies, ii) what mechanisms for targeting and buying votes do parties deploy, and iii) how strong are the effects on voting choices. First, I propose an extended two-stage model of vote-buying mobilisation to frame the analysis and to resolve conflations and confusions in previous research. Second, I employ a mixed-methods research design, analysing thousands of phone calls reporting vote-buying to a national hotline service, a series of semi-structured interviews with brokers, and a list experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey in Mexico. Qualitative evidence from calls and interviews confirm the two-stage model: that activists begin to target voters long time before polling days by knocking on doors, proffering rewards as an exchange for votes and compiling lists of electors. Near and during polling days, activists conduct the second mobilisation strategy to monitor voters and ensure compliance by distributing benefits broadly across the country. Survey evidence shows that 15% of those electors switching voting choices near polling days were contacted by activists during the Election Day, which suggests that further research on vote buying should be more attentive to the timing of the exchange. This research contributes to the literature on vote buying in three ways. First, it extends theoretical approaches of models of vote-buying mobilisation. Second, it provides qualitative evidence from both citizens and brokers to understand mechanisms of targeting and buying votes. Third, it highlights some indirect questioning strategies -including but not confined to the list experiment- that are helpful for estimating vote-buying.