This thesis addresses the question of why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has remained in power since the Tiananmen Incident in 1989 by deploying the concept of political legitimacy. In this, the focus is not on whether the CCP is legitimate per se but rather on how the Party has legitimated its authority in this period. To that end, the Weberian conceptualisation of legitimation is situated within the Strategic-Relational Approach and, in so doing, allows, through the concept of "discursive selectivity", for legitimation to be reconceptualised as a dialectical relationship consisting of both material and ideational factors. The effect of this move is to provide a suitable framework in which to consider additional legitimating strategies that are employed by the CCP. Consequently, this paper moves beyond the conventional explanation of "economic performance + nationalism" to argue that the CCP's use of the stability discourse in the post-Tiananmen period has contributed to the regime's legitimation. In order to understand how this discourse has been used, a critical discourse analysis is performed on selected articles from the People's Daily published during the Beijing Spring, the "anti-Falun Gong" campaign and the "anti-Japan" demonstrations on the basis that these exceptional instances inform its usage in conventionalised slogans. This analysis found that the term "stability" took the form of an "empty signifier", making most use of positive argument schemes to project a negative Chinese future without CCP authority. Finally, this thesis concludes that, in terms of legitimation, the events in 1989 constituted a strategic moment in the formation of the stability discourse, in that the Party's hegemonic interpretation of these events allowed for this discourse to "resonate" with people in the period that has followed.

This thesis examines secret intelligence cooperation between three asymmetric partners – specifically the UK, US and Turkey – from the end of the Second World War until Turkey’s first military coup d'état on 27 May 1960. The thesis shows that our understanding of the Cold War as a binary rivalry between the two blocs is too simple an approach and obscures important characteristics of intelligence cooperation among allies. To reveal a more comprehensive analysis of intelligence cooperation, this thesis develops our understanding of it more broadly, by developing a model called ‘intelligence diplomacy’. This model explores a vital, if little understood, aspect of contemporary international relations given the prevalence of transnational threats today. Intelligence diplomacy involves negotiations and the exploitation of different aspects of joint intelligence activities, synchronized between diplomats and specialized intelligence officers. While such efforts often result in overlap between diplomats and intelligence liaison efforts, there is strong evidence that the acts of intelligence services vary from the instructions of their foreign ministries. The thesis also shows that a pragmatic approach offers states new opportunities to protect national interests, by conducting intelligence diplomacy to influence crucial areas such as nuclear weapons and to exploit cooperation in support of their own strategic imperatives. By doing so this thesis not only reveals previously-unexplored origins of secret intelligence cooperation between Turkey and the West, but also contributes to wider academic debates on the nature of the Cold War by highlighting the potential agency of weaker states in the Western Alliance.

Academic knowledge production on Palestine and its people has been very resonant for decades. Yet, and despite the high frequency of production, some aspects of Palestine and Palestinians have not been investigated nor brought together thus far. This composition fuses three reverberations that accompany Palestinians living away from their homeland: statelessness, diasporisation, and (de)mobilisation. The dissertation is approaching the study of the Palestinian diaspora as a musical composition which has not been heard yet, for that the study of Palestinians as a diaspora is yet to generate audible sounds, the study of stateless diasporas in general still falls under the category of abnormal, an investigation of the Palestinian diaspora’s political mobilisation is nonexistent, and the study of Palestinian statelessness under a non-legal lens has been mute so far, leaving a wide gap deserving further investigation. By studying the cases of Palestinian diasporisation in the heterogeneous settings of Belgium, Jordan, and Lebanon, and fusing a set of methodological approaches including taxonomy of analysis, (participant) observation, exploring verbal and nonverbal communication via interviews, and examining space & material culture, this research aims to investigate the effects of statelessness on the shapes, intensities, and dynamics of diaspora organisation and mobilisation. Investigating the heterogeneities of the Palestinian diaspora’s political mobilisation in the three studied cases echoed the criticality of the role of statelessness in homogenising what would otherwise remain heterogeneous due to the immense differences in the settings enabling or disabling movement. The effects of this statelessness, this absence of a backbone, touch various diaspora-specific elements including Palestinian-ness, historiographies, geographies, temporalities, autonomization, organisation, and mobilisation. All of which are aspects this composition investigates thematically by mapping theory to empirical findings. Fusing statelessness, diasporisation, and political mobilisation can open alternative doors to understanding peoples belonging to homelands not enjoying a state status in the era of states, examples of which are Kurds, Circassians, and Roma, to name a few. It helps comprehend the actions of peoples attempting to embrace their homeland by mobilising for its causes despite being isolated from it. Furthermore, studying the abnormal is a way to understanding both abnormal and normal alike; therefore, studying the stateless diasporas can help in reaching to better understandings of the stateless and the state-linked diasporas.

Programming China: The Communist Party’s Autonomic Approach to Managing State Security, introduces the new analytical framework called China's “Autonomic Nervous System” (ANS). The ANS framework applies complex systems management theory to explain the process the Chinese Communist Party calls “social management”. Through the social management process, the Party-state leadership interacts with both the Party masses and non-Party masses. The process involves shaping, managing and responding and is aimed at ensuring the People’s Republic of China’s systemic stability and legitimacy—i.e. (Party-) state security. Using the ANS framework, this thesis brings cohesion to a complex set of concepts such as “holistic” state security, grid management, social credit and national defence mobilisation. Research carried out for the thesis included integrated archival research and the author’s database of nearly 10,000 social unrest events. Through ANS, the author demonstrates that in the case of the People’s Republic of China we may be witnessing a sideways development, where authoritarianism is stabilised, largely through a way of thinking that both embodies and applies complex systems management and attempts to “automate” that process through technology designed based on the same concepts. The party's rule of China, thus, evolves away from traditional political scales like reform versus retrenchment or hard versus soft authoritarianism. The ANS framework should be seen not as an incremental improvement to current research of China’s political system but as a fundamentally different approach to researching and analysing the nature of Chinese politics.

This thesis examines the role of the military in Tunisia and Libya during the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings by asking why the two states’ military forces chose to either defect from or defend the ruling administration. Using a comparative case study methodology, this study demonstrates that the joint configuration of energy capacity, military structure and the strength of protests led to the different outcomes in these two cases. The data indicates that one can understand the impact of these three factors using theories that focus on the correlation between rational action, institutional identity, economic inducements, and ideological stances. Thus, I employed approaches from rational choice and institutionalism as the theoretical framework for this study. This study shows that the actions of the Tunisian and Libyan military forces should be read through this theoretical framework. While informative, conclusions drawn from these cases do not allow for universal generalizations. Additionally, it is important to note that the three influential factors are not the only elements that influenced the variations in outcome during the Tunisian and Libyan conflicts. Moreover, I do not make a comparison in terms of the absolute values of the factors, but rather in terms of relative values.

Studies of e-government have shown how strategic use of e-government systems helps government agencies to improve public service delivery and gain more efficient governance. The success of this initiative is seen to be dependent upon the role of government’s key implementation tasks in managing alignment between the organizational, technological and human-related factors; which ultimately lead to improved delivery of public service. However, very little work has been carried out to understand the issue. This study helps to fill this gap in the important research area by investigating the role of government’s key implementation tasks in managing alignment for improved delivery of judicial service. This exploratory qualitative research carried out an in-depth case study of the implementation of E-Syariah system within different Syariah Court Offices in a state in Malaysia namely Kelantan. By analyzing the collected data from the case, findings were drawn up in which it confirms the existing literature that government’s key implementation tasks play a significant role in the successful implementation of E-Syariah. New government’s key task emerged from the case data – (i) informing values of ICT, (ii) inculcating inner-connection to Islamic values and (iii) establishing collaborative relationships between government agencies through central coordination approach. An insight into the case uncovers enabling roles of these key implementation tasks for organization – human dimension, human-technology dimension and technology-organization dimension. This study also discusses the implication of improved delivery of judicial service to good governance in light of the following identified attributes; efficiency and effectiveness, transparency and empowerment. In summary, this research extends our theoretical underpinning of the role of government’s key implementation tasks in managing alignment for improved delivery of public service; and provides useful insights for public officials (e.g. top management, policy-makers) in managing e-government implementation.

Since the regime was brought down by coalition forces in 2003, Iraq has been undergoing the process of democratisation through some significant political changes, namely, relatively free and competitive elections, and the freedom to form political and civil organisations. However, it faced crucial challenges that undermined this process such as ethno-sectarian violence/conflict. This thesis examines the impact of ethnic and sectarian conflict on the failure of the power sharing democracy. The thesis covers the period from 2003 until April 2014. The main themes that the thesis analyses are societal security/ethnic and sectarian violence, ethnic and sectarian inclusion, proportionality, and power devolution/federalism. For the purposes of the thesis, the societal security dilemma (SSD) theory, which focuses mainly on the roles of elites and external actors in societies that experience a power vacuum or institutional collapse in divided societies, is adopted. This theory is used for two purposes: firstly, to examine why and how the ethno-sectarian behaviour of elites affects societal security and the failure to establish a stable democracy; and secondly, to examine the viability of consociational design for the Iraqi case with the existence of distrust, fear and uncertainty among identity groups. The thesis argues that, due to fear, distrust and grievance among groups, the implementation of ethnic regions that draw lines between groups and localise the armed and security forces under a locally elected government is one of the mechanisms for reducing identity based violence and ensuring an effective power sharing democracy.

This thesis focuses on the role of agency during political transition processes in divided societies. To be more specific, it examines how the Iraqi political elites view democracy and what type of political institutions they support. The years between 2012 and 2015 are of great significance and the final US withdrawal at the beginning of the period marked the conclusion of military occupation. That event made the Iraqi political elite central to the political process. Previous studies have focused on structural issues in post invasion Iraq, highlighting factors that could facilitate democracy or systems that could undermine prospects for a democratic system in the country. A gap in the literature on Iraq is identifiable as there is a lack of any real attention to the issue of agency. The theoretical contribution of this study is that it illustrates and underlines the importance of elite perspectives for the democratisation process in a country divided along ethno-religious lines. The study argues that democratic institutional arrangements are needed as the means to reconcile different, and at times conflicting, political interests. Having established this point, the research analyses the role of agency in terms of key political players in forming, arranging, and setting up institutions. Extensive field research collating original empirical data was carried out in Iraq, Baghdad and Erbil, from 2011 to 2015. This study surveys the Iraqi House of Representatives, the Iraqi Presidency, and the Iraqi Council of Ministers, and involves interviews with highly placed decision makers in the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, as well as members of the Constitution Drafting Committee. Key participants include; the President and the Prime Minister, Speakers of the Parliament, and the Chair of Iraqi Constitution Drafting Committee. The participants include members from all the main ethno-religious groups in this divided country. Based on this new data, the specific views of Iraq's political elites are analysed, and their preferred types of political system are articulated, providing a concise contribution to current knowledge of democracy building in Iraq. The first empirical finding is that elites of the minority groups conceive democracy as power sharing, while members of the majority understand it as majority rule. The second finding is that larger groups support majoritarian institutions, while smaller groups support consensual ones. Those findings confirm previous academic thinking, for example Lijphart's theory on consensus democracy. The third finding is more surprising. All groups support a consensual arrangement of federalism and a majoritarian constitution. This unexpected support for these types of institutional arrangements required investigation in more depth to determine how political elites view federalism in Iraq, and how the constitution, if the opportunity arose, might be amended. It is argued that the future possibilities of Iraq’s polity depend largely on political agreements between the political elites representing the main groups in Iraq. The stability of the country rests mainly on the ability of its elites to arrange political institutions in such a way as to accommodate the different interests of the groups they represent.

This thesis provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the contentious “sovereignty” dispute between Taiwan and China, especially following the signing of the Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) in 2010. Distinctive from many contemporary studies of cross-Strait relations, this research analyzes Beijing’s and Taipei’s political agendas regarding sovereignty in the broader context of East Asian economic integration, as the ECFA is in fact the byproduct of their regional strategies. Commercial diplomacy and interdependence theory constitute the theoretical framework of this thesis. Moreover, this thesis employs various definitions of sovereignty in order to evaluate the extent to which China has impacted upon Taiwan’s sovereignty in the process of economic integration. By employing document analysis and elite interview methodologies, this thesis finds that Taipei has a limited ability to protect its sovereignty from China’s commercial diplomacy in the post-ECFA era. This outcome can be explained by Beijing’s efforts to marginalize Taiwan during the construction of East Asian regionalism, which has driven Taipei to shift its strategy from confrontation to cooperation with Beijing so as to secure its economic and sovereignty interests. To date, economic integration features centrally in Taiwan’s new Mainland policy. This has increased the degree of Taiwan’s economic dependence on China, which gives greater scope for Beijing to wield commercial diplomacy to infringe upon Taiwan’s domestic, functional, and de jure sovereignty. This thesis makes two overall contributions. The most significant contribution of this thesis is its pioneering research approach, which analyzes how China and Taiwan reconcile their economic interests and sovereignty concerns through the lens of commercial diplomacy. Furthermore, by categorizing sovereignty according to its different aspects, this thesis also contributes to the understanding of the effectiveness of China’s commercial diplomacy in furthering its sovereignty interests with regards to Taiwan.

China’s transition from planned economy to market economy (economic liberalization) has catalyzed the private sector’s emergence and growth, as well as given birth to new forms of business associations within the private sector, such as Non-local Chambers of Commerce (NCCs, hereafter). NCCs emerged from mid-1990s, and have proliferated rapidly across China’s localities and industries. Unlike traditional official business associations, NCCs have significantly participated in local governance and demonstrated new types of state-society relations. However, they have not yet reached the attention of scholarly researchers, and have been understudied within and outside of China. At the same time, political scientists working on policy processes have begun to include China as a case to enrich their theory, but find it hard to adapt established models to China’s policymaking system. Research on the Chinese policy process have gone from elite politics in the 1950-1960s, to “fragmented authoritarianism” in the 1970-1980s, then to “fragmented authoritarianism 2.0” after 2000. During the evolution of these theories, it has been noticed that more and more non-bureaucratic actors have been involved into the policymaking process if not being the prominent actors. There have been studies on “policy entrepreneur”, environmental NGOs, international NGOs, Chinese think-tanks and different forms of business lobbying. However, within the spectrum of business lobbying, there is a gap in understanding business associations’ influence in policy processes, especially the new type of so claimed “grass-roots” business associations. This thesis sheds lights on this new type of private sector business association - NCCs and their influence in the local urban policy process. NCCs have been widely involved in local governance and political engagement. However, their political participation shows great variation due to differences in regions, organizational forms, industries and policy spheres. So the question of what lead to the variation of NCCs’ policy influence has become the highlights of this research project. By using the empirical materials from participant observation and interviews, this thesis aims to answer two main questions: How did NCCs influence the local policy process and what explains the difference in their policy influence? In this thesis, I develop a typology for NCCs by using the dimensions of “origins” and “networks”. Thus all the NCCs have been categorized into four types: “Dependent NCCs”, “Independent NCCs”, “Coupling NCCs” and “Decoupling NCCs”. Through in-depth case analysis, I argue that NCCs’ networks and their ability to mobilize resources within their networks determine their policy impact. In terms of NCCs’ network orientation, the state networks of NCCs directly affect their access to policy lobbying, while the business networks directly affect the resources for their lobbying, thus determine NCCs’ lobbying capacity in the local policy process. In terms of NCCs’ network strategy, network span influences policy making while network intensity influences policy implementations. To be specific, NCCs with network span strategy could influence more general policy agendas and policy spheres, while NCCs with network intensity strategy could exert more influence in specific policies especially in the policy implementation stage.