Kuwait's leaders from 1961-77 maintained a foreign policy that reflected the country's territorial vulnerabilities. They sought to discretely cultivate an Anglo-American defence relationship without fatally compromising an ideological fealty to at least the slogans of Arabism. The thesis emphasises Kuwait's essential need to offset its international "hard" security component with, as far as practicable, a regional non-alignment posture and adherence to Arab policy norrns. In the process neo-realist and constructivist theory are used to bring out the duality at the heart of the amirate's foreign policy. Differences between key Al-Sabah over foreign policy were differences of emphasis, while domestic security concerns did not so much determine policy as emphasise Kuwait's regional challenges, against which the amirate chose to deploy ideology. Arabism inevitably had contradictions as a tool of Kuwait foreign policy, and was often more about the cash subventions that accompanied policy stances, than the value of the stances themselves. However deploying ideology was indicative of the ruling Al-Sabah's desire to strike the right tone for external and domestic consumption; a desire to accommodate or befriend key regional players without, it hoped, alienating others. The inherent contradictions of Kuwait's foreign policy were born of the country's relative weakness, save its one precious asset, oil. In the 1980s Kuwait's strategically vital location and key resource would see the amirate forced to abandon its sometimes illusory regional nonalignment; after 1990 it maintained an overt US alliance. Events post- 1977 therefore emphasised what had been the fragility of Kuwait's foreign policy since independence. The country's limited ability to act to prevent these crises only underscored what had been the limits of the amirate's policy options.

Debate about how populations can be protected from mass atrocities is well-established in international affairs. Beset with a raft of ethical, legal, political and normative questions, the rapid development of the ‘responsibility to protect’ has been held up as evidence of emerging, and even settled, consensus in this area. Indeed, from the perspective of well-established models of norm construction, notably the “Norm Life Cycle”, R2P’s institutionalization in the 2005 World Summit Outcome may signify momentum towards full acceptance. However, based upon a detailed tracing of R2P’s path into the Summit Outcome, this thesis questions how R2P is increasingly characterized as well as the theoretical explanatory frames used by scholars to describe the development and impact of international norms. It challenges the twin problems of linearity and norm exogenization which distort our understanding, and which are evident in overly optimistic portrayals of R2P’s development. With these in mind, the thesis adopts a framework constituted by a constructivist-inspired hypothesis and a process-tracing methodology defined by elite-level interviews and extensive documentary analysis. It shows how tracing the micro-processes of R2P’s development generates a very different story to those derived from broader theoretical frames. Indeed, the empirical findings show how and why the agreement was possible, and – through an analysis of the complex political negotiations – in what form R2P was collectively defined. This leads to the introduction of the concept of the ‘structured outcome’ to describe how R2P was propelled towards agreement more by a series of factors relating to the design and effect of the negotiation process than by the progressive acceptance of states. Accordingly, R2P’s formulation was purposefully limited to navigate pronounced dividing-lines and as a political agreement was more cosmetic than transformational. Resultantly its normative foundations were far shallower and far less significant than oft-rendered in mainstream perception.

This thesis addresses a perceived limitation of Ole Wrever's securitisation theory resulting from the undertheorised nature of the effects of securitisation and desecuritisation. This thesis challenges this minimalism and proposes a coherent set of systematic tools by which the effects of either can be analysed. The key here is the idea that not all securitisations are the same, but rather that they differ in terms of who is benefited by a given securitisation or, in other words, securitisation for whom. Starting from the idea that it matters who benefits from a given securitisation, this thesis develops with agency-benefiting securitisation and with problem-benefiting securitisation two types of securitisation. In tandem with this, the thesis develops two types of desecuritisation namely, 'desecuritisation as politicisation' and 'desecuritisation as depoliticisation'. For the environmental sector of security this thesis further develops normative conceptualisations of positive and negative securitisation and desecuritisation, whereby positive and negative are derived from what in moral philosophy is known as a consequentialist ethic, whereby the moral rightness (or wrongness) of an action is evaluated in terms of its consequences. This thesis finds that in the environmental security sector positive and negative securitisation/desecuritisation correspond to the categories of problem- and agency- benefiting securitisation, and desecuritisation as politicisation/depoliticisation respectively. The theoretical framework is applied to the case of U.S. environmental security from 1993 - 2006. This application affimls the existence and the merits of types of securitisation and desecuritisation, it further affirms the logic and intrinsic worth of a consequentialist evaluation ofsecurity and it offers valuable insights into the theory and practice of environmental security.

East Asia and East Asian regionalism have gained greater attention. Given this, what makes this region and who determines its shape are very important questions, which are, in turn, highly relevant to questions of regional leadership. This thesis thus aims to examine and explain the nature of Sino-Japanese regional leadership and explore its impacts on the shape of the East Asia region and East Asian regionalism. It does so particularly with reference to the CMI and regional organisation-building from the APT to the EAS. The thesis explores two key themes. First, it seeks to bridge a gap in the study of East Asian regionalism in particular and East Asia in general by focusing on the dynamics of Sino-Japanese leadership competition. There is still a lack of a dedicated study to examine the dynamics of regional leadership in the region and its impact on the East Asia region and East Asian regionalism. It addresses why regional powers assert regional leadership and how their assertions of regional leadership change their interests and behaviours with regard to regional cooperation. By doing so, it can help better comprehend the interests and strategies of China and Japan and their impacts on the shape of East Asian regionalism. Secondly, this thesis aims to fill in a gap in the study of global or regional leadership by developing a constructivist analytical tool to define leadership and examine the dynamics of leadership. It highlights that neither the realist and liberal approaches to international leadership nor the emerging literature on regional powers provides a good analytical tool to conceptualise regional leadership and to examine the dynamics of regional leadership competition. It argues that some insights of constructivism help to better comprehend the dynamics of regional leadership.

This thesis is about the idea of defective polities. It addresses two important understandings in the literature which inform current theory and practice surrounding failed states. First, the thesis addresses the conventional standpoint that the end of the Cold War generated a new challenge for international society, widely known as the challenge of failed states. It aims to counter the ahistoricism of the literature on failed states in IR and cognate fields by showing that the nature of the issue of ‘failed states’ precedes the emergence of the concept in post-Cold War international society. Second, we respond to the view that international law/the doctrine and norm of state sovereignty have been essentially instruments in the hands of the most powerful members of international society, often used to justify practices of imperial and colonial nature. According to this perspective international law/state sovereignty explain or are crucial in the perpetuation of the idea and category of defective polities. By looking at the history of the relationship between the doctrine and norm of state sovereignty and the idea and category of defective polities, our aim is to show that these views about the role of international law are, to a great extent, misleading. Bearing in mind the possibility that concepts perform functions, the central hypothesis this thesis will be testing is the following: failed states are the latest of a number of concepts prevalent in international society that refer, or did so in the past, to the idea and category of defective polities. Although this argument implies a sense of continuity, the history of this idea is characterised by an evolving normative context. Thus, this thesis combines an English School approach with history of ideas, a meta-theoretical choice that is simultaneously sensitive to notions of continuity and change. This framework involves an attempt to: (a) identify and comprehend these concepts; (b) understand what functions these concepts served; (c) shed light on the kind of motives and legitimating arguments used by the actors uttering the concepts; and (d) understand if and how conceptual changes are related to normative changes in international society.

This thesis sets out to challenge the assumption widely held among IR scholars that Scientific Realism (SR) is the definite and final interpretation of realism. The introduction of SR into IR as the latter’s proper meta-theory has been the incentive for very intense debates about both meta-theoretical and theoretical IR issues. I argue that IR has uncritically adopted the strongest version of SR. This can be seen by comparing the different versions of SR and their anti-realist alternatives - as these have developed in the Philosophy of Science literature - to the version of SR which was introduced into IR. It is Critical Realism (CR), however, a version of SR that originated with Roy Bhaskar, which has dominated the SR debate in IR. This development has had negative consequences with respect to the quality of the argumentation about realism in IR. This notwithstanding, a positive implication of this situation is that IR scholars who belong in various traditions of thought have criticized SR from different theoretical angles and thus shed light on many of its shortcomings. I elaborate on the comments that have been made on meta-theoretical as well as theoretical issues and come up with my own conclusions about SR and CR. In this framework, I also deal with two special issues which have arisen from this debate’s problematique: the question about whether reasons can be causes, which lies in the foundations of Wendt’s ‘constitutive explanation’, and the challenge of ‘meta-theoretical hypochondria’, according to which the extensive concern with meta-theory takes place at the expense of theorizing real-world political problems. Last, I show, by a way of a novel contribution, that Wendt’s latest undertaking, of a ‘quantum social science’, although compatible with SR, suffers inconsistencies and misunderstandings in terms of its methodology, metaphysics, use of quantum mechanics, and application to IR. This thesis is an interdisciplinary study, which draws upon the Philosophy of Science, IR and Physics (namely Quantum Mechanics), in order to scrutinize the use of SR and CR into IR along with its implications for both IR metatheory and IR theory.

The aim of my thesis is to excavate and interrogate the history, structure, and impact of the new Global Internal Displacement Regime that seeks to apply international law and humanitarian relief mechanisms for the protection of vulnerable populations within their sovereign borders, from the effects of civil conflict and social breakdown. It will demonstrate that at each level of inquiry the IDP Regime has been a vehicle to secure the interests of the powerful. The Origins of the IDP Regime are a product of a geo-political game that has been played between UNHCR, Western states, and Third World states since the 1940s. Similarly the Evolution of IDP norms were designed to eclipse and replace the 1951 Convention in order to contain refugee flows from the Global South to the North. This history ran parallel to the wider history of internal displacement as a function of population control practiced by states in both war and peace, with humanitarian mechanisms now justifying and employing similar structures and rhetoric. The Structure of the IDP Regime reveals a series of discursive reproductions of power by the manner in which vulnerability, paternalism, and control are constructed and intertwined with IDPs presented as passive, voiceless, victims; NGOs as altruistic saviours; displacement as an endemic condition of crisis prone Third World states; and IDP protection mechanism promoted as solutions for balancing the rights and privileges of humanitarians with the predatory and coercive goals of fragile states. Finally the Impact of the IDP Regime was evident in the civil war in northern Uganda where the application of humanitarian protection mechanisms became incorporated into the political economy of violence with aid agencies legitimating the government’s precarious counter-insurgency campaign. By trapping displaced masses into IDP camps, a lucrative humanitarian economy emerged that turned northern Uganda into a permanent zone of crisis and relief under the Cluster Approach system, which had initially boasted greater aid agency co-ordination and efficiency. The consequence of which was that 1.8 million citizens who were existing under an alternate bureaucratic category, in an alternate territorial space, and governed by an alternate external entity, suffered and perished from starvation, disease, exposure, and unchecked rebel attack.

This thesis weaves together the themes of complexity, technology, and power. It does so by examining how actors in world politics gain leverage over complex systems through the use of specialised ‘representational technologies’ that make these systems intelligible and amenable to manipulation. In response to the increasing complexity of regional and global systems, political actors are expanding their use of these representational technologies in order to augment limited individual and institutional means for cognition. A first conclusion from this research is that through these technologies, power is being expanded in novel and unique ways. Building upon an insight from actor-network theory (ANT), power is examined here as something that must be constructed via material technologies. Yet unlike previous research which has focused primarily on infrastructural technology, this thesis examines the unique role of representational technologies in constructing power. Following constructivism, this thesis accords a significant role to knowledge, discourse, and representations in how world politics are presented and acted upon. However, a second conclusion of this thesis is that the standard idealist accounts in constructivism must be expanded by examining the increasingly material means through which such ideational representations are constructed. Thirdly, this thesis aims to illuminate a neglected type of technology within International Relations (IR) scholarship - by moving away from the standard analyses of military and communication technology, and instead showing how representational technology contributes to the practices of world politics. Lastly, in emphasising the materiality of power and knowledge, this thesis also aims to revive a moderate version of technological determinism by arguing that technology is a platform which shapes both possible political behaviours and pathways for technological development.

The objective of the thesis is to study the concept of state identity and its role in foreign policy decision-making through a constructivist analysis, with particular focus on the Saudi–Iranian rapprochement of 1997. While there has been a recent growth in the study of ideational factors and their effects on foreign policy in the Gulf, state identity remains understudied within mainstream International Relations (IR), Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), and even Middle Eastern studies literature, despite its importance and manifestation in the region’s foreign policy discourses. The aim is to challenge purely realist and power-based explanations that have dominated the discourse on Middle Eastern foreign policy—and in particular, the examination of Saudi–Iranian relations. Saudi Arabia and Iran have played key roles in Gulf security for the past four decades, yet there have been few studies addressing their bilateral relations. Traditionally, differences—including sectarianism, nationalism, revolutionary ideology, competition over regional hegemony, oil prices, policy towards US military presence in the Gulf, and disagreements over the hajj—are often cited as reasons for their rivalry, yet these differences do not on their own offer a convincingly clear explanation as to why the rapprochement took place at that particular time, or why it thrived—and subsequently declined—despite the continuing presence of these issues. The primary purpose of the thesis is to analyse and understand the reasons behind the rise and demise of the Saudi–Iranian rapprochement of 1997. By focusing on ideational and materialist factors, the thesis seeks to demonstrate how changes in state identity—particularly in the official foreign policy discourse—indicates changes in policy, and therefore a shift in the amity–enmity pattern between the two states. Without discarding the value of realist explanations, the thesis will argue that the rapprochement process of 1997 has been significantly (though not exclusively) influenced by changes in state identity in each state. Moreover, this thesis provides a theoretical framework based on the concept of state identity and role theory (“self versus other”) to study the evolution of enmity, the rise of the rapprochement process during the Khatami presidency (1997–2005), and the subsequent revival of Saudi–Iranian rivalry during President Ahmadinejad’s first term (2005–2009). The main argument of this thesis is that ideational and materialist factors were instrumental in the demise of the rapprochement process, but the change in Iran’s state identity during the first term of President Ahmadinejad altered the perception of each state towards the other. Thus, the relationship transformed from a state of relative friendliness to a state of enmity and rivalry. This is explained by examining the muqawama–mumana’a discourse and the “moderates” versus “radicals” debate that consumed the narrative of Saudi–Iranian relations between 2005 and 2009. The methods employed in answering these research questions and hypotheses are largely structured around a chronological account of the development and formation of state identities and an analysis of each state’s foreign policy discourse during the period in question. This will be supplemented by qualitative interviews with individuals who participated in the rapprochement process, and will draw upon new archival material that has hitherto not been utilised in the literature on this subject.

This thesis offers a study of the impact of American domestic politics on President Jimmy Carter’s role as diplomat-in-chief during the Camp David peace process. It argues that Carter’s personal involvement in fostering an Egyptian-Israeli dialogue, the Camp David Accords and Palestinian autonomy talks created a circular pattern of influence between domestic politics and foreign affairs. Carter’s role as president-mediator engaged political actors, focused public attention and raised the domestic stakes. As his term progressed, he subordinated diplomatic objectives to political needs, which in fact had grown more urgent by controversy in Arab-Israeli negotiations. As chief diplomat, Carter became intimately identified with American policy, which was completely imbued with his own political character. That activated a number of reinforcing domestic factors, some general to American foreign policy and others specific to the Arab-Israeli arena, which served to constrain what he could achieve. By examining newly released archival material, and engaging with news reportage and opinion polling, this thesis demonstrates how advice reaching the president from multiple sources – his domestic, foreign and media advisors – served to augment the other. This thesis does not purport to offer a complete history of the Camp David peace process, Egyptian-Israeli negotiations or Carter’s presidency. Instead, it examines the possibilities and the hazards of presidential diplomacy. It argues that the domestic aspects of the dispute narrowed Carter’s options, limited public debate and influenced decisions at pivotal moments. These forces circumscribed what was politically possible, and interacted with strategic and diplomatic considerations to affect policy. Broadly, this thesis offers fresh perspectives on the nature and limits of presidential power, the role of the news media in American life, U.S. public opinion and foreign policy, and public engagement with the Arab-Israeli conflict.