This thesis analyses the establishment and development of a new police force in Halifax, considering the question through the tenures of the chief constables from its inception in 1848 to the start of the Great War. It considers what existed before the police, how effective that was and how much actually changed after the incorporation of the borough. The early chapters explore the extent of the hostility to the new regime and at what point and how far it came to be accepted. The structure of the force is examined and through it the recruitment and turnover of men and the development of a career pattern for promising candidates. The later chapters assess how the force changed and consolidated towards the end of the nineteenth century, developing a shared sense of pride and camaraderie as policing became a recognised career for a working-class man. The question of how far the role of chief constable was influential in the formation and determination of policing in Halifax is considered, along with the careers of individuals, illustrating that the situation was both complex and fluid. The overall argument of this thesis is supportive of Swift’s contention that local, not national considerations underlay the reform of the new police and continued to dominate the aims and focus of policing in the boroughs throughout the nineteenth century. Borough chief constables were accountable to locally elected councillors and their actions reflected the concerns of the ratepayers. The history of borough police forces is embedded in the social, economic and geographical priorities of local government.

This research project has two interconnected goals. First, it attempts to unpack and redefine ‘hybrid regimes’ – a concept that has emerged from the ‘third wave’ democratisation literature in the late 1990s and shares with this literature its underlying cultural, ideological and teleological assumptions. I start with a critique of these dominant assumptions and point to the need to rethink hybrid regimes outside of these parameters. I then propose a more limited and lucid definition for hybrid regimes as political systems built on two contesting sources of legitimacy – elitist and popular – and corresponding institutions of guardianship and democracy. Hybrid regimes, in other words, are not ‘diminished democracies’ or ‘competitive autocracies’, but an altogether separate regime type that feature clearly defined tutelary and electoral institutions. Based on this redefinition, I present five hypotheses regarding the dynamics of change in hybrid regimes, which are subsequently applied to the two case studies: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey. The second goal of the thesis is to present a new comparative framework to analyse the post-Cold War dynamics of change in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Turkey, two countries with political systems that scholars have found difficult to categorise and observers often treated as polar opposites due to their seemingly inimical official ideologies, Khomeinism and Kemalism. Through studying their hybrid institutional characteristics and the role of structural factors and human agency at the critical political junctures that the two countries experienced in the late 1990s and the 2000s, I endeavour to contribute to the scholarly discussion on the dynamics of interaction and legitimation between popular and elite rule.

The study of mass public opinion and political behaviour has developed a substantial corpus of theoretical claims and empirical results linking political, attitudinal and demographic variables to different policy attitudes. Still, the research literature has, to date, paid scant attention to how space – that is, proximity and distance to salient geographic features – influences policy attitudes. Research in political behaviour has long proceeded as though policy attitudes among mass publics ‚come from nowhere.‛ The unifying argument of the four articles comprising this thesis is that mass public opinion does indeed come from somewhere: spatial dynamics matter for policy attitudes in a variety of domains. The articles develop the argument that spatial proximity to geographic features act as an indirect measure of intergroup contact, localized knowledge, issue awareness, and issue salience. The articles deal with three substantive topics: the Canada–United States relationship, attitudes toward energy transportation infrastructure, and attitudes toward immigration policy. Specifically, the thesis draws on survey data to investigate: (1) the mutual perceptions of the Canadian and American publics, (2) Canadian attitudes toward North American integration, (3) attitudes toward the Keystone XL pipeline in the United States, and (4) American attitudes toward illegal immigration. The major finding in each article is an interactive relationship between proximity and political attitudes: depending on the political context, proximity serves to either amplify or mute the effects of political party identification or ideology on policy attitudes. An innovative aspect of this research is the integration of spatial data through geocoding (appending latitude–longitude coordinates to) respondent-level data and calculating distances to relevant geographic features (e.g., the Canada–United States border, oil pipelines and the United States–Mexico border).

This thesis is centrally concerned with the ‘democratic debate’ and assessing the prospects for democratic transition in contemporary China. The first part of the thesis (including Chapters 1 and 2) reviews the (primarily) Western academic literature on democracy and democratisation. It is argued that while this literature is useful-up to a point-in understanding how the debate of democratisation is unfolding in China, and the processes that are generating political reforms and other changes that are conducive to democracy, it has wholly neglected the specificity of the Chinese case. The third chapter of the thesis duly embarks on a discussion of both the history of debate and discussion in China historically, arguing that this debate and discussion has to be understood in the context of Chinese history and culture specifically. This chapter identifies two strands of thought about democracy among academic commentators in China: first those who foresee a swift transition to democracy and the ‘gradualists’, who are primarily concerned with how problems of attendant social and political instability will impact on the prospects for democratisation. The second half of the thesis assesses the impact of Chinese economic reforms since the late 1970s, along with contemporary globalization and China’s growing integration into the global economy on the trajectory of political change in China. It explores important political changes within the regime, the emerging civil society forces, focusing specifically on changing state-society relations evidenced in growing village autonomy, changes in press media, and in other areas. The thesis combines the technique of discourse analysis (‘reading’ and analysing the changing discourse among state and civil society actors, including official political documents and speeches; and media -television and newspapers- and NGO sources) with an assessment of institutional changes within the party (elite), changes in power structures (the limited diffusion of power to civil society through electoral reform and changes in media operation and control), and changing state-society relations.

This thesis examines the development war memorialisation from 1860 until 2014 in the UK, France and the USA. It represents the first holistic and longitudinal study of war memorialisation as a continuing process. Previous approaches to memorialisation are critically reviewed and a unique new methodology is proposed. This approach challenges assumptions that memorials are only important to the generation responsible for their creation. Moving beyond an understanding that is based wholly on the socio-political circumstances surrounding their construction, it conceptualises memorials within a framework of three parallel time scales; the point of development within the war memorial tradition, the time that has passed from the conflict being commemorated and the time that has passed from the construction of the memorial. This methodology is used to demonstrate that these objects continue to have meanings for many years after the conflict they commemorate. This illustrates the many ways in which individuals continue to engage with war memorials, appropriating and re-appropriating them and transforming their meanings. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates that themes can be defined within the memorialisation process, and that these themes are not bounded by geographical context or period of time.

The thesis investigates, from a contextual and user perspective, the implementation processes of microfinance interventions and the effect of the implementation processes on households and businesses. The thesis’ central argument is that microfinance discourse has neglected the perspective of microfinance users and this can negatively affect microfinance interventions as development tools. The study examines two microfinance interventions, Nsoatreman Women Empowerment Programme and Sinapi Aba Trust, in Nsoatre, a rural community in Ghana. Data for the study is from secondary sources, 26 interviews and 100 questionnaires. The study was guided by the philosophical ideas underlying the Sustainable Livelihood Approach and the Interpretive Approach. Using qualitative, cross-tabulations and ordinal logistic regression, the analysis found that the microfinance institutions studied essentially employ top-down approaches and that the perception of microfinance as non-paternalistic is not supported by this study. The mode of group formation has significant ramifications on subsequent group activities and peer monitoring played a limited role in mitigating moral hazard. Service users exhibited noticeable lack of knowledge on intervention activities. Microfinance interventions contribute to household consumption more than it does to household asset accumulation. Poorer service users reported more household and business benefits. The findings suggest a reappraisal of the design of microfinance interventions, especially in rural areas.

This research sought to examine the relationship between material and virtual space for Transnational Advocacy Network members in Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta. In the decade since the seminal work of Keck and Sikkink’s ‘Activists Beyond Borders’ there have been significant technological advancement and the ensuing literature has positively portrayed the possibilities for network members and other activists. Through extensive semi-structured interviews with members of Transnational Women’s Networks in Jakarta, Bangkok and Manila and thorough review of the literature it sought to establish the relationship between traditional, material spaces and emergent virtual spaces across four main themes; access to technology, relationships, freedom in virtual space and collective identity. These themes emerged from the fieldwork and presented themselves as trends within the literature which then led to their consideration within this research. This work argues that there is a continued relationship between material geography and virtual space and that an individual or groups physical location continues to have overriding implications on their online presence both in terms of their direct access, legislative obstacles and their perceptions of relationships and identity.

This thesis presents a critique of the Copenhagen School's conceptualisation of security via an exploration of the socio-political situation in post-Akaev Kyrgyzstan. Centrally, I consider how different forms of knowledge can inform our interpretations of security. I argue that it is vital to challenge the underlying normative assumptions of the securitization and societal security, which manifest as a disciplinary "Westphalian straitjacket", if we are to produce accounts of places such as Kyrgyzstan that are not founded on stereotypes and untested assumptions. I argue that it is necessary to prioritise context when using theoretical concepts in order to fully situate our research. Adopting an interpretive approach not only in relation to Kyrgyzstan, but also securitization theory, I highlight the pluralities and contradictions of how security means in different settings and on different analytical levels. The issues raised are explored via the reflexive consideration of a number of protests in Bishkek, as well as discussion of the wider socio-cultural and political setting of post-Akaev Kyrgyzstan. I conclude that loosening the Westphalian straitjacket that currently restricts the normative and empirical utility of the Copenhagen School, and IR more generally, is a crucial step towards a more complex and nuanced understanding of security.

In the contemporary political world order that continues to be structured by the principle of national sovereignty, states remain the most important instrument for the delivery of rights. If we want to understand how human rights can be realized in practice, we therefore have to study the conditions and processes of their institutionalization on the state level. While the United Kingdom was relatively slow, compared to other western European democracies, in the domestic institutionalization of international human rights norms and standards, governments in Britain have between 1998 and 2008 created a complex human rights regime that still awaits a comprehensive analysis and assessment. This thesis fills that gap. Focusing on the Human Rights Act as the legal centerpiece, the Joint Committee on Human Rights as the parliamentary scrutiny body, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission for Great Britain as the largest human rights commission, this thesis examines the extent to which the British Human Rights Regime has contributed to the institutionalization of human rights in the UK. To that end, it develops and deploys the sociological ideal type of the human rights state as a qualitative analytical framework and as an external benchmark that is able to integrate the legal, political, and wider societal dimensions of effective human rights institutionalization. Based on the thematic analysis of case law, official documents and elite interviews with public officials, this thesis argues that the Human Rights Act, the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Equality and Human Rights Commission have contributed to a significant institutional change in the domestic recognition and protection of human rights. They have introduced new rights norms and safeguards into British law, established new mechanisms for judicial and political rights review, and brought about important legislative and policy changes. Yet, their efficacy suffers from structural limitations that have been imposed so as not to fundamentally disturb the concentration of political power in the executive which is preserved by the constitutional doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. In the Westminster system of parliamentary government, this doctrine continues to allow the executive to dominate the legislative process without strong constitutional human rights safeguards that would be domestically enforceable against primary legislation. While the preservation of parliamentary sovereignty was a key political requirement that enabled progress to the present state of domestic human rights institutionalization, it also prevents the sustainable entrenchment of human rights as fundamental and universally binding norms for the legitimate exercise of all juridical, legislative and executive state power, thereby leaving the British Human Rights Regime at permanent risk of abolishment or degradation.

This study focuses on health and well-being amongst the Roma community in the "Old Camp" settlement in the Neapolitan Municipality of Scampia. The research is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the camp, amongst Romani residents and non-Romani people who played a role in the life and health of the camp's inhabitants. The study is informed by the World Health Organization's (1946) holistic definition of health, and by work on the social dimensions of health which has grown following Marmot and Wilkinson's (1998) seminal volume. These approaches see health not just in clinical terms, but rather understand well-being as including physical, psychological and social dimensions which are inextricably linked. The study argues that Roma communities should not be perceived as unique "monolithic" populations, but as being composed of individuals, with personal thoughts, feelings and perceptions, different ways of leading their lives and different life experiences including recent migration histories; struggles to exercise their right as asylum-seekers; and conflicts resulting from being born in a territory that does not easily recognise their right to citizenship. During fieldwork, Roma explained their personal perceptions of wellness and illness and of the impact of state and local policies on their well-being. Key-findings were that Roma's sense of well-being is affected by racism, discrimination, and intercommunal mistrust which has adverse effects on relationships between Roma communities and government agencies. A further significant finding was that there are generational tensions within the Roma community, opening the possibility of changes in communal customs and structures. By presenting the perceptions of the Romani themselves regarding their well-being, and their congruence with a holistic approach to health and well-being rather than a narrowly clinical one, the study may inform effective health policies at a local, national and international level.