This thesis investigates the creation, operation and impact of four industrial developments in the Highlands of Scotland in Corpach, Aviemore, Dounreay and Invergordon in the period 1945 to 1982. The thesis is structured as follows: the introduction details the development of economic policy towards the Highlands and Scotland more generally, encompassing a literature survey to provide the necessary background and context of the developments, followed by individual case study analysis of the four developments, followed by a conclusion that assesses the overall themes present in the preceding case studies and introduction. Within the conclusion is a discussion of the regional policy aspect of the four developments, the effect the developments had on the areas in which they were located in terms of population and unemployment change and the political economy and politics of Highland development. The argument developed in the thesis is that the motivations behind the four industrial projects detailed in the case studies were more complex than the publicly and privately stated justification for creating and establishing the developments that they would act as growth centres and attract further industries to the areas in which they were located. The thesis posits that developments in the Highlands only took place as a consequence of Scottish Office actions ‘winning’ large industrial projects for the area and only when Scottish Office policy aims converged with UK national economic and political interests. Consequently, short-term political goals usurped effective long-term economic development, resulting in a lack of infrastructural development that severely hindered the stated aims and justification of each development acting as a growth centre. Further, the argument is made that as a result of these short-term political goals, a policy of grand gestures of large-scale industrial developments that were inappropriate for the areas in which they were located was pursued, resulting in the eventual closure of all but the Aviemore complex. In short, the thesis is about the implementation failure of large-scale industry in the Highlands, post-1945.

In September 2001 several states launched a series of counter-terrorism policies under the banner of the 'War on Terror' that were unprecedented in their scope, intensity and cost. Extensive domestic legislative agendas and surveillance programmes at home were matched by increased military interventionism abroad, most significantly in Afghanistan and Iraq. This thesis is concerned with examining how this 'War on Terror' was possible: how it was conceivable for policy-makers and how it was 'sold' to domestic audiences. More specifically, this thesis considers three principal members of the 'Coalition of the Willing' in Iraq - the United States, Britain and Australia. Aside from adopting similar and overlapping policy responses in the context of a commitment to the 'War on Terror', these three states share a common language, intertwined histories and institutional similarities, underpinned by perceptions of cultural proximity and closely related identities. However, despite significant cultural, historical and political overlap, the 'War on Terror' was rendered possible in these contexts in different ways, drawing on different discourses and narratives of foreign policy and identity. In the US, President Bush employed highly reductive moral arguments within a language of frontier justice, which was increasingly channelled through the signifier of 'freedom'. In the UK, Prime Minister Blair framed every phase of the 'War on Terror' as rational, reasoned and proper, balancing moral imperatives with an emphasised logical pragmatism. In Australia, Prime Minister Howard relied upon particularly exclusionary framings mutually reinforced through repeated references to shared values. This thesis explores these differences and their origins, arguing that they have important implications for the way we understand foreign policy and political possibility. They demonstrate that foreign policy is both discursive and culturally embedded. And they illustrate that foreign policy discourse impacts on political possibility in rendering some policy responses conceivable while others unthinkable, and some policy responses acceptable while others illegitimate. This thesis thus contributes to our understanding of political possibility, in the process correcting a tendency to view the 'War on Terror' as a universal and monolithic political discourse.

Justifications for state interventions which seek to influence the consumption patterns of goods, services and activities are usually based on notions of equity or efficiency: the market either fails to offer a fair outcome in distributional terms or it fails to arrive at an efficient outcome in terms of aggregate welfare. But these justifications, implicitly and unintentionally, often incorporate elements which focus on the correction of another kind of failure: that of individual reasoning. They do this either because the concepts of equity and efficiency are invoked to justify state intervention beyond the analytic competence of these principles, or because support for specific public policies or institutions require additional principles to justify the particular form these institutions take. In short, justifications from equity and efficiency are underdetermined. But in order to support interventions which are at least partly correcting individual reasoning failure, we need a defensible theory of state paternalism. Existing discussions of paternalism fail to explain why the state should know better than the individual what is in his or her own best interests, even if it is acknowledged that individual reasoning can be sub-optimal. The thesis concludes with a discussion of criteria which do support the superior decision-making of the state in certain circumstances: where the benefits (or costs) of consumption are likely to occur a long period into the future; where direct experience of the particular form of consumption is problematic; and where technical complexities make judgement about appropriate consumption difficult. The thesis concludes with an analysis of some applications and implications of these proposals for state intervention in consumption.

The dissertation is about the ethnicisation of social relations in Israeli society and its reflection and manifestation in education. My main aim in this study is twofold: first, to offer a critical account of the development of ethnic relations in Israeli society and to examine the role ethnicity has played in the processes of nation-building and state-formation; and, second, to propose a history of the educational system in Israel which accounts for the role of education in creating and perpetuating ethnic identities. The first part of the dissertation consists of a critical reading of existing analyses of ethnicity in Israel. Its aim is to bring the state into the analysis of ethnic relations and demonstrate that such an approach is vital to the understanding of ethnic relations and identities. In the following part, I trace back the processes of nation-building and state-formation demonstrating how governments and major political actors became involved in the formation and re-production of ethnic boundaries within Israeli society. In these two parts, I am arguing against both functionalist and critical accounts of ethnicity in Israel, which tend to ‘essentialise’ ethnic categories and thus deny the political nature of ethnicity and its power as an organising basis for political action. In the third and major part of the dissertation, I seek to re-construct the history of the Israeli educational system within an understanding of ethnicity as a structural feature of state-society relations. This re-construction reveals how ‘ethnicity’ became an organising feature of this system since its inception as a Zionist national educational system in the early days of the Jewish colonisation of Palestine. Whereas the ‘national’ educational system was characteristically sectorial, non-European (mizrahi) Jews were denied the same autonomy that their European counterparts enjoyed. With the transition to statehood, and the massive influx of Jewish immigrants, the educational system was re-organised under the aegis of the state. Yet, it turned out, this new system retained the ‘old’ lines of division between Arabs and Jews, and between European and non-European Jews, thus imposing upon the latter the stigma of being ‘non-modern’ and ‘non-Zionist’. This re-emphasised ethnic boundaries, and entrenched ethnicity as a powerful basis for political action. In the 1960s, when the state engaged itself in reforming the educational system, making it compatible with the new needs of industrialisation and nationhood, ethnicity again played a critical role in legitimising state policies. ‘Integration’, that is, the de-segregation of the educational system, turned out to be nothing but a political token and, in fact, a means for entrenching ethnic boundaries and identities. The state, I argue, has thus been a crucial factor in perpetuating those ethnic images and realities, and hence a focus of ethnic discontent in the 1980s and 1990s.

The thesis compares Argentine and Australian fiscal systems from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. It uses institutionalist and endowments approaches to evaluate the importance of state credibility and taxation on long run economic development. After rapid convergence in the early twentieth century, Argentina and Australia clearly diverged in the latter twentieth century. Divergence emanated from different institutional experiences, which ultimately originated from dissimilar experiences of state credibility. State credibility is the extent to which society trusts the state to act in its interests. Fiscal institutions are a clear and comparable measure of state credibility over time as they frankly express underlying political economy. As Argentina and Australia were once similarly successful settler economies with comparable geographic prospects for development, the comparison promises to transcend geographically deterministic explanations for development. Geography primarily consists of factor endowments and location. In fact Argentina was better placed to succeed in geographic terms than Australia. Yet Australia, not Argentina, secured the status of a developed country. Australia and Argentina exemplify the relative insignificance of geography in shaping development. Divergence resulted from a failure of Argentine institutions to generate sufficient space for negotiation and compromise, and a ‘latent civil war’ was entered from the 1930s until the early 1980s. A key finding of the thesis is that divergence in fiscal institutions, especially differing capacities to embed progressive systems of direct taxation was crucial to divergence in development. This finding is based upon the discovery of new evidence and the harmonisation of fragmented time series which enable comparison over a long period of time. Argentina and Australia took different paths in the latter half of the twentieth century due to distinct institutional environments and their legacies for social consensus and development.

This thesis examines the role of international organisations in disability mainstreaming policies in Turkey. Turkey is a particularly interesting case study, as it combines traditional values coupled with ambitions to be an internationally respected European state. International organisations include the European Union, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Children’s Fund and Organization of Islamic Cooperation. A multidisciplinary approach was taken which involved social policy, history, disability studies, international relations, and politics. The research used a case study based on analysis of 275 policy documents, 47 semi-structured and two focus group interviews. The participants have all been directly involved in decision-making processes at international and/or local level. The thesis argues that disability mainstreaming is partial and selective as a result of the interaction between the traditional values and structures in Turkey and the aims and practices of international organisations.

The world views of Economics and History which derive from the writings (themselves often derivative) of Karl Marx have been further progressed through two channels - which I here first categorise as STATIST and ANTI-STATIST. The historical Communist parties, and those Social Democrats who accepted a measure of Marx's analysis, have sought to gain control of some form of State apparatus. In this, they shared an objective with other groups to the Right who may well have been travelling the same route for much longer. To the Left, in the other channel, are those who refute any claimed superiority for statist formulations and who, as an alternative, offer the concept of federation among localities. In instrumental terms, this is the difference between Parliamentary or representative 'democracy' and Councillist or participatory 'self-government'; between the delegated and the mandated. It should be noted that both systems offer potential for extended, cross-boundary, co-operation; in the self-governing mode through a. federation of federations for specific purposes. This latter arrangement, which may be properly termed 'Anarchist', allows for negotiated contract as in the international postal service. By definition, Anti-Statist concepts contain the eventual intent of a total break with, and replacement of, the historically developed 'State' - which latter is seen as a ruling-class invention and as maximising reification. Local institutions, economic and more widely cultural, can be created within the interstices of existing states as seeds of desired, post-State, circumstances. But, again by definition, Anti-Statists cannot look to take over existing Governmental systems. Rather, they must view a different perspective of change and the practice of their ideas in modern times has so far been restricted to short experiments during, for example, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Spanish worker-managed co-operatives of 1936-1939. These were both genuinely 'bottom-up' growths, but the Anarchist dream (or tendency to be pursued) has also influenced the decentralised organisation of some more conventionally originating Socialist states - as in Algeria, Libya and Yugoslavia for different periods during the second half of the twentieth century. The linking of Anarchism with trade-union activity in large-scale industry (Anarcho-Syndicalism) is usually associated with the nineteenth-century school of Michael Bakunin, but anti-statists also connect with more general examinations of 'freedom' such as those set out in William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice of 1798. This Thesis is concerned with the acceptance of Marx AND Bakunin's thinking into the mindset of Libertarian British working-men during the four decades immediately preceding the First World War, and relates that acceptance to longerstanding notions of 'rationalism' It does so with particular reference to the intellectual journey of one very special artisan: Samuel Mainwaring (1841-1907), South Wales born but lastingly internationalist. A fuller summary of the content of Chapters is given in the Introduction, but the salient points are as follows. In Chapter One, I look at Mainwaring's earliest subversive, neighbourhood, links with Welsh Unitarianism and the most radical elements in the seventeenth-century English Revolution. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine the nature of early nineteenth-century proto-Syndicalism in England and its 1850s influence on the first of the New Model trade unions, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers – which Mainwaring joined as soon as he was of an age to do so. In Chapters Four and Five, I find similarities between Capitalist Exploitation in the United Kingdom and the United States (where Mainwaring lived for some years during the 1860s and 1870s), compare the writings of American mechanic Ira Steward with those of Marx and Bakunin, and discuss the Marxist-Bakuninist split in America following the transfer of the First International's controlling Council from London to New York. In Chapter Six, I show the existence of a 'Bakuninist' strand on the British Left in the last quarter of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Explaining Mainwaring's prominent position in that alignment, I also indicate his leading role in international Anarchist initiatives. My research involved what I believe to be a closer reading of three relevant London-based periodicals (The Crisis, The Pioneer, and The Leader] than had previously been carried out by historians, and I also draw on largely unpublished material held at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and at the State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin. In my Conclusion, I compare the 'hidden from history' story of the Anarchist Left with that encountered by Feminist researchers.

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Iran has been in the headlines in the recent years and decades for many socio-political reasons. Many of these involve the confrontation between Islamic revolutionary values and the foreign policies and aspirations of Western governments. Among the Iranian state’s revolutionary values there are no articulated aspirations to isolate the country from the outside world but progress and globalisation are defined within Islamic, revolutionary and nationalistic discourses and therefore the status of English as a foreign language in Iran has been controversial and questionable. Of course the English language is in demand in Iran and it is associated with globalization and progress. However, in the dominant official discourses it is often considered a threat because it incorporates Western values, allows access to these values, and could thus be deemed harmful to local cultures and identities. The two paradoxical perspectives on the English language in Iran are among the main reasons for tension and difference between top-down official policies and the bottom-up grass-roots English language learning practices of contemporary Iranian society. The state prescribes mainstream English language teaching (ELT) provision from the age of twelve, but parents who can afford private sector ELT provision encourage their children to learn English outside the limited mainstream education system. Restricted and limited mainstream ELT could therefore be seen as the English language learned by the masses, but private sector ELT remains for the privileged few. The aim of this thesis is to make a contribution to studies of language policy and planning in general and to an understanding of language policies and practices in Islamic states in particular, with a special emphasis on Iran. In principle, language policy as a sub-discipline of sociolinguistics can be studied in all communities and nation-states, including Iran, but at the same time one of the main aspirations of the thesis is the introduction of this critical field of research to a context to which it has not previously been applied.

The present study considers the treatment of failed States in international law. State failure represents a relatively recent phenomenon, which presents novel problems for the international community to deal with. For international law, the principles and experience of dealing with the creation, continuity and extinction of States present the nearest analogies, and so will form the basis of its responses to failure. Failure is defined as governmental and societal collapse in a State, so severe as to render it incapable of exercising internal and external sovereignty. It is likely to take the form of either conflictual implosion - such as in Somalia; or fragmentary explosion - as in Yugoslav ia. Accordingly, an examination of the treatment of these two failed States, during the early 1990s, provides the substantive basis of the study. The key aspects of Statehood under which the study proceeds are: loss of government as a criterion of Statehood; self-determination, including the emerging right of democratic governance; and recognition. Consideration of the Somali and Yugoslav experiences of failure, and their treatment under the three areas identified, evidences a strong inertia in the international system against findings of State failure - the Somali experience. The only exception is if such a finding is coupled with a potential solution, such as the possible emergence of new States - the Yugoslav experience. The determinations constitute a meta-legal process, which can be seen as indicative of a new conception of 'political international law'.