This thesis is a collection of ethnographic studies of ways in which governments and other public authorities amongst the western Dinka and Nuer (South Sudan) have directly or indirectly remade the moral boundaries of lethal violence during times of war and peace. The thesis goes beyond discussing the causes of specific national episodes of armed conflict in South Sudan but instead pays attention to the normative regimes of lethal violence that span across times of war and peace. I echo those who have challenged the assumption of a rupture between times of war and peace, and additionally assert that normative and legal regimes made during times of ‘peace’ can shape modes and patterns of war. The thesis argues that governments, chiefs and Nuer prophets have all tried to build their own authority through their governance of the moral, legal and spiritual consequences of lethal violence. Different public authorities have contested and coopted each other’s regimes. Governments, chiefs and Nuer prophets have played powerful but contrasting roles in interpreting and remaking the moral and legal limits of lethal violence. The thesis specifically looks at the examples of the remaking of landscapes and laws as ways in which moral boundaries have been reshaped and materially embedded. The doctorate focuses on the tumultuous 2005 – 2015 period, but also draws on histories dating back to the 19th Century.

Social networking sites (SNSs) are an emerging channel of political mediation in Thailand for political figures to establish and develop their relationships with Thai citizens. Through focusing on the online political public relations work by candidates (and their teams) in the 2013 Bangkok gubernatorial election campaign, this thesis contributes a Thai perspective and experience to the growing literature on the use of SNSs globally in election campaigning. This research utilises multimodal textual analysis and interviews with Thai politicians, candidates and public relations personnel to explore the management of candidates’ images on Facebook via photographs, text and interactions, the management relationship between candidates and public relations personnel and citizens, the dynamics of what can be understood as ‘digital vote-canvassing networks’, and the various associated possibilities and challenges of using SNSs to contest for political power in the Thai context. This thesis finds that the political public relations work carried out via Facebook during the 2013 election campaign constituted a new and complex process of managing content and of managing human resources and relationships. The construction of candidates’ political images integrated existing Thai archetypes and connotations with more global images and strategies. The publication of campaign content on Facebook over the entire election campaign was managed to facilitate followers’ interpretations of the candidates’ campaigns. Election campaigns on Facebook developed digital vote-canvassing networks as candidates and their teams used different tactics to engage, interact with and manage citizens, as well as attempt to maximise the ‘spreadability’ of their content and thus extend their reach. As candidates campaigned on Facebook under election campaign rules not defined particularly for Facebook, the decentralisation of interaction among Facebook users was a major concern in controlling their election campaign on Facebook.

This thesis offers an alternative narrative why the Juba Peace Talks between the Government of Uganda and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its political wing, the Lord’s Resistance Movement (LRM), did not produce a Final Peace Agreement. Widely considered the most promising peace effort in the history of a violent conflict that began in 1986, talks were mediated by the Government of Southern Sudan from 2006 to 2008. During this time, the parties signed five separate agreements on a range of issues, yet in 2008 the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, failed to endorse them through a final signature. An aerial attack on the LRA by the Ugandan army spelled the end of the Juba Talks. It is commonly argued that as the first peace talks conducted with people wanted by the International Criminal Court, the Juba Talks collapsed because the arrest warrants made a negotiated agreement impossible. Another widely accepted reason is that the LRA/M were not committed to peace. This thesis, however, argues that how the LRA/M experienced the muddled and convoluted peace talks was the crucial factor because the dynamics of the process confirmed existing power dynamics. Internally, the LRA/M’s dynamics were profoundly influenced by their perception of being trapped in an established hostile system, causing a struggle to transform their own dynamics constructively. Offering an analytical chronology of the Juba Talks with an empirical emphasis on the perspective of the LRA/M and an analysis of LRA/M structures and behavioural patterns that emerged in the process, this thesis further outlines that judging success or failure of a peace process on whether agreements have been signed is misplaced. Despite not producing a final agreement, the Juba Talks contributed to peace and change in Uganda.

The US Democrats, Australian Labor Party and British Labour Party adopted the issue of childcare assistance for middle-income families as both a campaign and as a legislative issue decades apart from one and other, despite similar rates of female employment. The varied timing of parties’ policy adoption is also uncorrelated with labour shortages, union density and female trade union membership. However, it is correlated with two politically-charged factors: first, each party adopted childcare policy as their rate of ‘organised female labour mobilisation’ (union density interacted with female trade union membership) reached its country-level peak; second, each party adopted the issue within the broader context of post-industrial electoral change, when shifts in both class and gender-based party-voter linkages dictated that the centre-left could no longer win elections by focusing largely on a male, blue-collar base. Were these parties driven to promote childcare in response to the changing needs of their traditional affiliates (unions), or was policy adoption an outcome of autonomous party elites in search of a new electoral constituency? Using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, this research analyses the correlates of policy adoption and the specific mechanisms through which party position change on the issue took place (e.g. legislator conversion versus legislator turnover). It finds that parties largely adopted the issue as a means to make strategic electoral appeals to higher-educated, post-materialist and in particular, female voters. However, the speed in which they were able to make these appeals (and hence, the time at which they adopted the issue) was contingent on the speed in which elites were able to reform their party’s internal organisation and specifically, wrest power away from both the unions and rank-and-file members in order to centralise decision making power on election campaigns, executive appointments and candidate selection processes into the hands of the leadership.

This project seeks to bring a critical utopian methodology to bear upon the institution of citizenship in the hope of imagining a theoretical formulation that could encourage active, anti-hierarchical, participatory and empowering practices. The critical utopian approach disrupts conventional disciplinary boundaries, and allows theories and practices that would not normally be associated with citizenship to be brought into dialogue with the concept in thought and imagination, as part of a strategic intervention. This produces a perspective that is simultaneously estranging and creative, deconstructive and experimental. The body of the work considers three themes in particular: territory, authority and rights, which are frequently posited as foundational for politics and citizenship, and proceeds to deconstruct their dominant formulations by imagining an infinitely critical utopian ‘outside’. Diverse bodies of theory including post-structuralism, anarchism, post-structural and post-left anarchisms, ecology, critical geography and feminism are drawn upon to articulate critical utopias of space without territory, decision-making without authority and ethics without rights. The project then brings another ‘outside’ into dialogue with the theory: practices in what are termed ‘autonomous utopian communities’; including intentional communities, autonomous social centres, housing co-operatives and eco-villages. The aim of the project is to use a dialogue between critically resistant theories and practices to expose the obscured normative and indeed utopian foundations of many dominant theories of citizenship, and to consider the ethical and practical effects of hegemonic and truth-claiming discourses. The project also posits something different: a contingent and open-ended critical utopian citizenship that favours perspectival multiplicity, process over closure, and contingency over certainty, that can be engaged in by citizens and non-citizens in everyday life.

Corruption has firmly taken centre stage in the development agenda of international organisations, developed and developing countries. One area in which corruption manifests is in public procurement and as a result, states have adopted various measures to prevent and curb corruption in public procurement. One such mechanism for dealing with procurement corruption is to disqualify corrupt suppliers from bidding on or otherwise obtaining government contracts. The disqualification of corrupt suppliers raises several issues, many of which are examined in this thesis. Implementing a disqualification mechanism in public procurement raises serious practical and conceptual difficulties, which are not always considered by legislative provisions on disqualification. Some of the problems that may arise from the use of disqualifications include determining whether a conviction for corruption ought to be a pre-requisite to disqualification, bearing in mind that corruption thrives in secret, resulting in a dearth of convictions. Another issue is determining how to balance the tension between granting adequate procedural safeguards to a supplier in disqualification proceedings and not delaying the procurement process. A further issue is determining the scope of the disqualification in the sense of determining whether it applies to firms, natural persons, subcontractors, subsidiaries or other persons related to the corrupt firm and whether disqualification will lead to the termination of existing contracts. These issues and the others considered by this thesis illustrate the limits to the efficacy of the disqualification mechanism in fighting procurement corruption. The thesis compares and contrasts the legal, practical and institutional approaches to the implementation of the disqualification mechanism in the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United States, the Republic of South Africa and the World Bank. The thesis examines how these jurisdictions have implemented a disqualification mechanism and whether their approaches may be regarded as appropriate.

This thesis analyses citizens' perceptions of standards in public life. It attempts to understand whether perceptions such as these are important substantively for questions of citizen disaffection, and begins the task of analyzing how citizens come to hold the perceptions they do. The thesis presents a systematic investigation into this topic, placing perceived standards in the context of a discussion about citizen disaffection and the perceived legitimacy of political systems. As they are conceived of in this thesis, 'standards in public life' can usefully be thought of as the 'rules of the game' or the 'spirit of public service'. Standards in public life are less a set of formal, prescriptive rules, more an exhortation to the appropriate exercise of public office. Such a focus upon the 'rules of the game' results in the primary concern of this thesis being about the process of governing, as opposed to the outcomes governors can produce. The thesis investigates perceptions of standards in two parts. Part 1 considers broad questions of the conceptualisation, measurement and structure of citizen beliefs about government in general, and perceptions of standards in particular. The findings of Part 1 therefore provide a base upon which future analyses can be built. Part 2 investigates the causes of perceptions of standards, focusing upon three aspects of political ‘conditions’: partisan co-alignment, the ‘scandal’ concerning Derek Conway’s use of parliamentary expenses to employ his son to do essentially no work, and the MPs’ expenses scandal. The analyses in this thesis are primarily quantitative, and investigate a series of four datasets, which contain data collected in the United Kingdom between 2003 and 2011.

Who gets what, when and how? Each of the three papers in this thesis makes a distinct contribution to answering this question in the context of the political economy of South Africa. The first paper examines how South Africa’s public financial management system distributes central government funds to its provinces. Using a unique panel dataset comprising all provinces and three elections over the period 1995-2010, I demonstrate that provinces where the national ruling party has higher vote margins receive higher per capita equitable shares in pre-election years. This result suggests that even in a dominant party framework, electoral competition can function as an incentive to implement political budget cycles. The second paper evaluates how the extension of the franchise affected the delivery of electricity to South African households. The dataset combines nightlight satellite imagery, census data and municipal election results, making it possible to exploit the heterogeneity in the share of newly enfranchised voters across nearly 800 municipalities with a difference-in-differences approach. The analysis demonstrates that enfranchisement has a significant positive effect on household electrification. Moreover, the findings show that political parties have a potential mediating role in accounting for service delivery patterns in new democracies. The third paper addresses the problem of measurement in studying public service delivery by examining a novel methodology for combining census-based data with satellite imagery of the world at night. Using cross-national data and South African census data, the paper provides a roadmap for how to navigate limitations and thus make the most of this technological advance in quantitative social science research.

Across the European Union (EU) persistently high levels of unemployment amongst young citizens risk the creation of a 'lost generation' of individuals. In response, the European Commission has launched a number of measures aimed at fostering strong levels of youth employment, including the Youth Employment Package (YEP) and the Young Employment Initiative (YEI). Their ultimate delivery however, depends heavily on the aspirations and capacity of the member states, both at the national-level, and crucially, at the local level. This thesis investigates the extent to which the concept of multi-level governance (MLG) can help us to understand policy-making and implementation in the field of EU youth employment policy. It focusses specifically on the distinct national and subnational experiences of two highly unitary EU member states, the UK (England) and France. Unitary states, often overlooked within the MLG scholarship in favour of decentralised and federal states, offer a valuable opportunity to identify the specific internal and external factors that serve to enable, support, hinder or block instances of multi-level governance- which may be missed in more conducive settings. Indeed, at first glance, this thesis finds that national state-executives dominate the policy-making and implementation processes around EU youth employment policy. Critically, however, a deeper investigation discovers that they are unable to monopolise these processes. Instead, the picture painted in this thesis is one of contestation, rivalry, and conflicting interests between the supranational, national and subnational tiers. The thesis consequently reveals important implications for the MLG literature.

This thesis provides a theoretically driven investigation with empirical evidence on the contexts in which judicial and political institutions promote human rights. In the first chapter I argue that judicial independence is not enough for courts to protect human rights. I found the empirical evidence supports my hypothesis, both judicial independence and judicial enforcement are necessary for courts to have a positive impact on human rights. The second chapter offers a deeper look at how courts function in autocracies. I argue that even with the best judicial institutions, courts in autocracies will not perform as well as in democracies to protect human rights. The dictator designs independent courts and enforces the decisions, to attract foreign investment (mainly), and not to limit his own capacity to repress. I found the empirical evidence to be broadly supportive of my hypotheses. Whereas judicial constraints in democracies promote the respect of all the types human rights surveyed (expect for extrajudicial killings because of the ceiling effect), in autocracies judicial constraints promote only private property rights (and unexpectedly reduces the number of extrajudicial killings). In the third chapter I revisited the impact of political institutions in autocracies on physical integrity rights. In the literature there seems to be contradictory claims of what that impact would be, based on divergent interpretation of why political institutions emerge in autocracies in the first place. I found that after correctly specifying the model estimation, political institutions are not significantly correlated with worse physical integrity rights. Furthermore, the evidence shows that political liberalization (the positive change towards more political institutions) is not significantly correlated with either physical integrity rights, or civil and political rights.