Pakistan is regarded widely today as a country continuing turmoil, in which multiple centres of political and armed power compete with each other, using violence as much as due democratic processes to settle their differences. And yet, as this dissertation seeks to show, there is also a tradition of democracy that has been fought for and won in ongoing nonviolent movements For almost half its life since its creation in 1947, military dictators, of whom there have been four in all, have ruled Pakistan. Amongst these, General Zia-ul-Haq ruled the longest at more than eleven years from July 1977 to August 1988. He not only executed Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan former Prime Minister but he was also able to bring about fundamental changes in the legal, political, religious, social and cultural affairs of the country. His rule is often considered a ‘dark age’ in the history of Pakistan. Two movements – the campaign to save Bhutto 1977-1979 and the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) 1981-1988 – were launched and led by political parties, of which the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) was leading member, against Zia’s rule. Historians have generally considered both these movements to have been a failure. In this dissertation, it is argued that although MRD took much longer than the originally-envisaged three months to achieve its aim, it did not in the end fail. It should, rather, be seen as a gradualist democratic movement, which eventually brought the country back to democracy in 1988. The process took longer than expected for several reasons, the most important of which were a lack of unity amongst the leaders of its constituent political parties, particularly the PPP, the absence of an operational corps, and Zia-ul-Haq’s ruthless response to the nonviolent resistance to his rule. Additionally, Zia’s regime was supported for many years by international powers of the Western bloc, due to the war against Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

This thesis investigates the role of temporary, ad hoc commissions of inquiry appointed to investigate corruption in Uganda from 1999 to the present. It is based on a qualitative research study that involved analysing the relevant literature, official documents such as inquiry reports, newspaper reports and web-based materials; as well as interviews and focus group discussions. The study locates itself in an analysis of and inter-relationship between two dynamics - of global 'good' governance, and of the influence of neo-patrimonial politics that characterise local governance - on the appointment, processes and outcomes of commissions of inquiry into corruption in Uganda. In looking at these factors, the thesis aims at explaining why the institution of the ad hoc commission of inquiry has emerged as the anti-corruption "instrument of choice" during this period of Uganda's history. The findings suggest that the global anti-corruption framework signified by the good governance agenda is hindered by various factors such as the self-interest of donors, the moral hazard inherent in aid and the illegitimacy of conditionality; all of which contribute to the weak enforcement of governance-related conditionalities. This in turn causes aid-recipient countries such as Uganda to do only the minimum necessary to keep up appearances in implementing governance reforms. National anti-corruption is further hindered by the government's tendency to undermine anti-corruption by selective or non-enforcement of the law, the rationale being to insulate the patronage networks that form the basis of its political support from being dismantled by the prosecution of key patrons involved in corruption. Thus, the need to appear to be a "good governor" whilst protecting patrons from possible prosecution necessitates a symbolic approach to anti-corruption that nonetheless seems authentic. Ad hoc commissions of inquiry chaired by judges, which facilitate a highly publicised inquisitorial truth-finding process, therefore emerge as the ideal way of tackling corruption because they facilitate "a trial in which no-one is sent to jail." Commissions of inquiry into corruption in Uganda have therefore played a complex and multiple role in anti-corruption and governance in Uganda. They enabled the government to prove its credentials as a good governor especially at a time when it was being discredited for its reluctance to adopt a multi-party system of government. They also served to appease a public that was appalled by the various corruption scandals perpetrated by a regime that had claimed to introduce "a fundamental change and not a mere change of guards" in Uganda's politics. Nevertheless, while they enabled the regime to consolidate power by appeasing donors and the public, they also constituted significant democratic moments in Uganda‘s history by allowing the public- acting through judges and the media- to participate in holding their leaders accountable for their actions in a manner hitherto unseen in a country whose history had been characterised by dictatorial rule.

This thesis compares the political culture of university students in South Korea before and after the democratic transition in 1987. It identifies the changes in the following: the attitudes to politics, government and media; the political socialization process; the experience of political participation; and the reasons for political participation and non-participation. Qualitative analysis was used to analyse the data collected from interviews and surveys conducted on respondents who were university students in the 1980s and current university students. It was found that compared to university students in the 1980s, current university students held less intensely negative attitudes towards the government. However, although current university students were interested in politics, they were still distrustful of politicians, did not have a political party they supported and had low levels of perceived political efficacy and political participation. Based on these findings, this thesis examined three different types of theories to explain the changes in the political culture of university students. First, demand-side theories that focus on underlying socioeconomic changes to explain changes in the political culture were used to analyse the changes in the reasons for political participation and the changes in the political socialization process. Second, intermediary-side theories that emphasise the role of media were used to examine the changes in the attitudes towards the media and the experience of latent political participation. Finally, supply-side theories that focus on the supply of politics and governance were used to explain the changes in the other elements of political culture. Close examination into the workings of democracy in South Korea since the democratic transition in 1987 revealed that there were indications of cartelisation of the political party system, which explains the low levels of political trust and perceived political efficacy reported by current university students.

Recently, the field of comparative political economy has turned to the Chinese economy. Coherent interpretation of the drivers and fundamental institutions of China’s economic system had been frustrated by the coexistence of, on the one hand, continuously developing capitalist institutions and a burgeoning market economy, and on the other, the persisting and proliferating authoritarian system of economic administration. Therefore, commonplace dichotomous frameworks of capitalism/ socialism, or coordinated/market economies are but of little avail. Building on concepts from regulation theory, this thesis argues that the current system is one wherein state and market institutions support a distinctively industrialist orientation. The Leninist apparatus of bureaucratic controls has come to instill a dynamic wherein economic performance begets political influence, and political stature commands control of capital. Financial markets complement industrial demands for capital, while the ostensibly ‘liberalist’ reorganization of the public sector and welfare system have attenuated the financial pressures on enterprise exerted by labor. As a result of the common interest of political actors and industrialists in the continuous expansion of productive capital, growth has occurred predominantly through investments in fixed capital. Stringent limitations exist which undermine achievement of long-term sustainability of the current state-industrialist nexus. Lack of compensatory mechanisms for disenfranchised constituents and the dearth of indigenous innovation are pertinent problems, and moreover, mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, without a continuous increase in relative surplus value (i.e. output per worker) a more egalitarian distribution of income seems unlikely, while on the other, the lack of individual purchasing power subverts intentions to transition towards a model of growth premised on domestic consumption. Indeed, exceptions exist (for example within the telecommunications industry), but ultimately growth in upstream sectors requires commensurate growth in downstream industries. The Chinese ‘variety of capitalism’ is indeed an idiosyncratic one, but seems to have exhausted its potential.

This study aims to comparatively explore how the politicisation of criminal justice would appear in several new democracies with the institutional combination of presidentialism and a civil-law prosecution system, by focusing on the strategic interaction between an incumbent president and prosecutors, in South Korea and Russia, in the new institutionalist perspective. Civil-law prosecutors could damage particular politicians’ moral foundations with specific timing and extent, manipulating criminal proceedings through their broad power within the centralised criminal procedure. This is why they must be cautiously checked by any other body of government, contrary to their common-law counterparts who exercise a limited power due to the decentralised criminal procedure. Fortunately, in most civil-law countries, prosecutors are accountable to democratic bodies, in spite of the global tendency of judicial independence. Also in practice, civil-law prosecutors have not often been involved in the politicisation of criminal justice, despite their extensive influence over criminal procedure, in the continental European countries wherein the tradition of parliamentary supremacy is strong. By contrast, in new democracies with the institutional combination between a civil-law prosecution system and presidentialism, prosecutors have often taken partisan behaviour in favour of or against an incumbent president. For instance, two South Korean Presidents, Young-sam Kim and Dae-jung Kim, and Russian President Boris Yel’tsin, had exploited civil-law prosecutors for the politicisation of criminal justice, but were faced with their defection immediately before their retirement. Unusually, only Vladimir Putin could avoid this unfortunate fate, even at the last phase of his tenure, among the South Korean and Russian Presidents after democratisation. According to this study, high-ranking prosecutors generally pursued their own career advancement, and consequently the prosecution service was loyal to an incumbent president during most of his tenure, but betray him in his last phase, during South Korean President Young-sam Kim’s and Dae-jung Kim’s periods, and in Russian President Yel’tsin’s period. Only in the Russian President Putin period in the two countries after democratisation, prosecutors unusually continued to serve the president even when he left the presidency. This could be because they had no incentive to betray the outgoing president in order to further their career development under the next presidency, given that Putin would undoubtedly maintain a strong political influence over their careers, even after his retirement, according to this research. On the other hand, South Korean President Moo-hyun Roh frequently came into conflict with prosecutors, and had his close allies investigated or even indicted by them, during his entire period, while repeatedly attempting major reform against the civil-law prosecution service, which President Young-sam Kim and Dae-jung Kim had abandoned, in order to maintain the alliance with the power apparatus. According to this study, prosecutors made their organisational resistance based on their far-reaching power over criminal procedure, against President Moo-hyun Roh, for protecting their great prerogative, and therefore he failed in the reform. By contrast, Russian President Putin was exceptionally successful in large-scale reform against civil-law prosecutors, which not only President Yel’tsin but Putin himself in his first term had also suspended, by establishing the new ‘investigative committee’ in June 2007. According to this research, this outcome was possible because the prosecutors could no longer enjoy the political opportunity structure enabling them to effectively defeat the president’s reform against their collective interests, and consequently President Putin could circumvent their organisational resistance, in the absence of political competition under his electoral authoritarian regime. This study provides three important academic implications. Firstly, under the institutional combination of presidentialism and a civil-law prosecution system, prosecutors are not likely to preserve political neutrality, but to display a partisan behaviour either in favour of or against an incumbent government. That is, the institutional factor of combination of a civil-law prosecution system and presidentialism tends to induce the prosecution service, as a judicial body, to behave differently from the expectations of both the democrats and the liberals. Secondly, the variation of political competition can seldom influence judicial officers, who are responsible to the other branches of government, to behave independently of politicians, but can influence them, especially the top rankers, to betray an incumbent government in the last phase of its tenure on specific institutional and political conditions. Thirdly, and most importantly, the variation of political competition can influence judicial officers to take collective action for protecting their collective interests. In particular, if the judicial officers could exercise far-reaching power over criminal procedure, as civil-law prosecutors, their organisational resistance against an incumbent government which pushes for reform encroaching on their collective interests, such as prerogative powers, would be threatening enough to make the incumbent abandon the reform plan.

This thesis aims to expand scholarship on civil society and peace-building through exploration of civil society’s experiences, perspectives, and practices in relation to the politics of peace-building and human (in)security in instances of victor’s peace, using post-war Sri Lanka as case study. It adopts Human Security as an analytical approach calling attention to insecurities operating on and through Sri Lankans but also the nature of power dynamics underlying these insecurities based on the subjective and political nature of ‘peace’ itself. The thesis contributes conceptually and empirically to knowledge of the operation of victor’s peace and its implications for civil society in peace-building. This thesis’s central contention is that acts of securitization and governmentality carried out by Sri Lanka’s central governmental elite within and enabled by the victor’s peace have constricted spaces for civil society to articulate alternatives or engage in critical dialogue within the political process fostered under the victor’s peace. This study, thus, questions romanticized notions of the potentiality of ‘local’ resistances to shift structural inequalities and power asymmetries in victor’s peace. At a disciplinary level, the thesis also deepens knowledge, first, on civil society as complex and contested sphere. It argues that to conceptualize civil society as homogenous or inherently altruistic risks drastically oversimplifying its highly diffuse nature and politics within the sector in which certain actors may benefit within the victor’s peace and engage in ‘peace’-building activities in order to both capitalise on those benefits and sustain the victor’s peace. Second, the thesis addresses the nexus between civil society and peace-building, and specifically the politics of peace-building, in the victor’s peace. In not being constrained by negotiated peace settlement it asserts that, as in Sri Lanka, instances of victor’s peace can quickly transition into repressive environments. Here it is unlikely that civil society, despite innovative methods of exercising agency, can significantly alter the trajectories of the ‘peace’, and further that those civil society actors that support the victor’s peace may seek to exploit the benefits they gain from it at the expense of the human security of others. Finally, the thesis asserts that, ultimately, Human Security’s utility may lie not as political agenda that validates external intervention based on a ‘responsibility’ to intervene, but as a conceptual framework for developing deeper understandings of the nature of (in)security and factors driving (in)security at multiple levels of analysis within different articulations or ‘types’ of peace.

Modern security studies have demonstrated that military insecurity or confrontation create crucial obstacles in trade relationships between states. Unlike this widely accepted conclusion, the trade relationship between the ROK and the DPRK from 2002 to 2006 showed a stable growth despite increasingly hostile political confrontation and military tension caused by the North Korean nuclear program. This study analyzes under what conditions the security instability did not undermine economic interdependence and which factors predominantly affected the actors' behavior by focusing on South Korean SMEs. It will conclude that substantial change of inter-Korean relations after the summit talks in 2000 enabled the SMEs to continue to engage with the DPRK under the nuclear crisis. In terms of what actually motivated SMEs in these transactions, it will argue that South Korean businessmen's desperate desire to took for lower-cost production provided a key driving force for them to risk the military instability. This study will substantiate this argument by providing a result of structured survey of South Korean entrepreneurs who actually were involved in the inter-Korea trade in this particular period. By analyzing how security agenda and economic interest relates each other, this study will overcome either security-dominated or economy-centered bias in capturing the changed essence of inter-Korean relations.

This thesis investigates how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has tactically managed and defused major crises between 2002 and 2008 which put its credibility and legitimacy to the test. Contrary to conventional wisdom that major crises are likely to challenge and threaten regime stability in authoritarian systems or even undermine their viability, this thesis argues that the CCP has managed to sustain its political hegemony to date through the manipulation of these major crises and through the maximum tinkering with the current political system it reigns over. In order to explain why manipulation is the key in the CCP’s successful crisis management, this thesis first develops a critical reassessment of the conception of crisis and elaborates on crisis’s tripartite political utilities. These are (a) shift the dominating paradigm, (b) centralise political power and (c) (re) gain popularity and legitimacy. These altogether form an analytical framework for crisis, which is followed by a chapter that sets the backdrop against which our case studies unfold and explains why the Chinese context is particularly favourable for crisis manipulation. The thesis then proceeds with three case studies: the 2003 SARS epidemic, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Sanlu milk scandal occurred in the same year. The thesis suggests that although the CCP’s responses were not flawless, and not always timely, it managed to manipulate all three crises in its favour via the aforementioned political utilities and subsequently defused these crises. At the same time, its Leninist structure was able to unleash formidable mobilisation capacity to help the regime rapidly bring situations under control. Overall, the CCP’s crisis management efficacy was satisfactory in the short term. Nevertheless, the thesis concludes that despite the short term usefulness of crisis manipulation, in the long term the efficacy of the same strategy as well as the political utility of crisis are decaying, as illustrated in reference to more recent crises that stretched the CCP’s credibility. Therefore, the CCP is in need of embarking on substantive political reform in order to develop an alternative crisis displacement mechanism. This thesis makes an original contribution to the existing literature in the field. It complements the public administration and public management literature by bringing politics back in. It also updates the empirical knowledge base of past studies as well as offering a comparison of crisis responses. This is a timely contribution to the study of Chinese crisis management and to the study of the nature of Chinese politics.

The initial hypothesis of this research was that divergent regional perspectives on Asia- issues of security, political alignment and economic models- were a primary cause of the thirty-year Sino-Soviet Cold War. This implied that future stable relations between Russia and China would continue to be strongly influenced by the compatibility of their regional perspectives. Sustaining such compatability would become increasingly complex, however, due to change within Asia itself, particularly with regard to Asia's emergence as one of the centres of the new global economy. Asian modernisation is significant for Russia and China not only in terms of domestic development as they abandon the command economy, but politically since the creation of a regional economy is being promoted as a means of neutralising the tensions in the region which arise from Asia's heterodox nature in terms of culture, ethnicity and social system. The central chapters of the thesis are, therefore, concerned with comparing Russian and Chinese assessments of the Asian economy on several levels: Asia's place in their foreign economic relations in the reform era; Asia's role in their domestic development: and their assessment of the significance of the Asian economy as an economic model and as an emerging regional economy. These assessments are then set against Russian and Chinese perspectives on their role as Asian powers and their security and diplomatic relations in Asia. The conclusion of the paper is that Asia is rising in importance for both states, though not equally.

This thesis' central aim is the application of a Wendtian-constructivist expansion of Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT) on a specific case study: the South Caucasus. To that effect, three concepts of RSCT – amity/enmity, state incoherence, and great power penetration – are expanded and developed within the broader above-mentioned ontological-epistemological framework. Amity-enmity is elaborated into an integrated spectrum founded on varying ideational patterns of securitisation alongside objective characteristics, and encompassing conflict formations, security regimes and security communities. States are conceptualised as ideational-institutional-material "providers of security"; their incoherence is characterised over three tiers and two dimensions, leading to a distinction between vertical and horizontal inherent weakness, ostensible instability and failure. Great power penetration is dissected into its objective, subjective and intersubjective elements, resulting in a 1+3+1 typology of its recurring patterns: unipolar, multipolar-cooperative and multipolar-competitive, bounded by hegemony and disengagement. After the specification of a methodology incorporating both objective macro- and interpretive micro-perspectives, two working hypotheses are specified. Firstly, that state incoherence engenders high levels of regional enmity, and, secondly, that patterns of great power penetration primarily affect transitions of regional amity/enmity between conflict formations and security regimes. The framework is subsequently used to triangulate these hypotheses through an application of the theoretical framework on the post-Soviet Southern Caucasus. An initial macro-overview is subsequently provided of the Southern Caucasus as a regional security complex; the three expanded concepts are consequently investigated, in turn, from the discursive micro-perspective. The South Caucasus is categorised into a "revisionist conflict formation", the nature of its states' incoherence is characterised, and existing patterns of great power penetration are identified as competitive-multipolar. In the final chapter, the hypotheses are largely confirmed, and various scenarios as to the possible emergence of a regional security regime are investigated.