The phenomenon of displacement is a fundamental source of social, political and economic tensions in the contemporary world. Despite this centrality there has been relatively little sustained theoretical engagement with this phenomenon within the discipline of International Relations (IR). In this thesis I will therefore develop a phenomenological approach, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, in order to explore ways in which the placed experience of ethical proximity is disrupted through logics of spatial mediation. I will then apply this phenomenological approach to a reading of four fundamental narratives of displacement in the western philosophical tradition: Exodus, Odyssey, Crusade and Conquest. Through these narratives, I will argue, that we find a process of the subsumption of place within spatial totalities in which inter-personal relations are mediated in relation to the projects of the totality. Ultimately, I will suggest this process of totalisation has shaped the fundamental structure of modern international theory. I will also suggest, however, that the placidness of everyday life constantly disrupts this totalisation.

This thesis focuses on the main factors leading to terrorism, the connections between terrorism and civil wars and how terrorism and civil war can affect each other. For the theoretical clarity, I decided to deal only with ethnically motivated domestic terrorism since I argue that ethnic component as well as domestic focus significantly affect mobilization and targeting strategy. For the purpose of the PhD research, the Database Ethnically Motivated Terrorist Attacks (DEMTA) is built using the Ethnic Power Relationship (EPR) dataset, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), information from the Terrorist Organizations Profiles (TOPs) and other sources. The first chapter introduces the concept of ethnically motivated terrorism and a newly built database providing information on terrorist attacks committed on behalf of ethnic groups. The chapter connects theories on causes of terrorism and ethnic violence to build a complex theory on causes of ethnically motivated domestic terrorism which is empirically tested. The second chapter explores the relationship between terrorism and civil war. Studies on terrorism show that intensity of terrorist incidents varies over time. A closer look on data on ethnically motivated terrorism shows that frequency of terrorist incidents is higher in post-war period than in pre-war periods. I explain the increase in the number of terrorist attacks by radicalization of the ordinary people which is caused by exposure to a systematic violence. The third chapter adds the concept of the lethality of terrorism to the classic explanation of motivation and capabilities as the main factors affecting the likelihood of of civil war. Motivation and capability are not enough to explain the occurrence of civil war as while they might address the potential for action they do not address the resolve to use this potential. The main findings of this thesis show that political exclusion leads to mobilization often resulting to civil war which radicalizes people. Subsequently, radicalized people are more prone to the use of violence, including terrorism. Lethal terrorism further mobilizes people and increases likelihood of civil war.

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This thesis explores the ideological bases of the global governance of nuclear weapons by analysing the role of civil society, an actor generally left aside by nuclear scholarship. Here the question of nuclear order is tackled with an unconventional approach that combines critical works in nuclear studies, critical constructivist works on security, and Antonio Gramsci’s theory of civil society. Such approach brings civil society to the forefront of analytical attention in order to show the cultural domination exercised by the bomb by inquiring into the common sense nature of nuclear discourse. This rests on the assumption that uncritically accepted ideas about what nuclear weapons do have been instrumental in generating the current nuclear order that, although under mounting challenges, remains based on a hierarchy between states protected by the bomb and all the rest. To understand how civil society challenges and reproduces that order, this thesis analyses the calls for nuclear disarmament advanced by organised collective actors and inquires, in a Gramscian way, into the common sense ingrained in those calls as well as their ability to constitute a united front. As a result, the thesis problematises the notion of disarmament, marking the importance of a struggle on its very concept between reductionist and abolitionist frames. It indicates that while the latter are involved in a radical opposition, the former are culturally dominated by the system of deterrence, thus coming to represent two distinct historic blocs: a counter-hegemonic opposition, on one hand, and an unwitting part of the hegemonic apparatus, on the other. This thesis concludes that 1) civil society is far from having created a unity of intent; and 2) the bases for the reliance on nuclear weapons are deeply entrenched, because of the pervasiveness, even inside civil society, of a common sense view of the nuclear threat.

In different ways both academics and politicians are asking similar questions about the future of the Asia-Pacific: Does it still make sense to talk of narchy” and egemony” a time when co-operative systems are developing? What are the implications in any such trends led by a group of small states, especially those of ASEAN if these are stable states with complementary assets and interests and legitimate governments committed to economic development? International relations theory, especially in the security field, is built on a narrower empirical foundation. Some of the traditional theories (realism) make a universal claim that power is both the means and end of international politics. Others address questions relevant only to the Great Powers. Other theory, such as neo-liberalism, argues that International co-operation, meaning co-ordinated and joint initiatives between actors, has the potential to provide a new basis for international security. To illustrate the range of security and economic interactions in the Asia-Pacific region, this thesis examines the causal influence of the various interactions between economics and security in the region in general, and on ASEAN and Taiwan cooperation in particular. This thesis therefore seeks to highlight some of the important issues concerning international co-operation between weak states in a debate of both theoretical and practical significance. Furthermore, expanding the case of ASEAN-Taiwan cooperation in the Asia-Pacific context helps to provide an analysis of the independent and dependent variables, and allows for greater generalisability of results. However, since mid-1997, the ASEAN system in Southeast Asia, which used to be characterised as the most co-operative and highly developed regional system and was very valuable for theory-building and testing, has become less certain as the Asian economic crisis has weakened its spirit of co-operation. Does it signal the impractical concept of egional solutions to regional problems”? Or does it mark the beginning of egional awareness” that draws regional states together? The answer still depends heavily on the policies and initiatives of major individual players in international co-operation.

Developing countries have signed over a thousand tax treaties, at a cost of millions of pounds a year, based on a myth. The predominant legal rationale for so-called ‘double taxation’ treaties is outdated, while the evidence that they attract investment into developing countries is inconclusive. Although the financial gains from tax treaties are split between the treasuries of capital exporting countries and their multinational companies, most of the costs are incurred by the fiscs of capital importing countries. Rational actor models alone cannot explain the diffusion of tax treaties to the global South. The missing piece of the picture is ideas. As developing countries have formed their identities as fiscal states, a century-old narrative describing the deleterious effects of double taxation resulting from international fiscal anarchy has shaped different actors’ preferences. From the perspective of those focused on investment promotion, tax treaties are part of what a state does when it wants to compete for investment, regardless of the evidence about their actual effects. Meanwhile, officials developing the tax system have looked to the OECD as the source of sophisticated technical knowledge, and learned to regard tax treaties as the way to ensure ‘acceptable standards’ for taxing multinational companies. This thesis uses interviews with treaty negotiators, observations of international meetings, and archival research, including case studies from the UK, Zambia, Vietnam and Cambodia selected through a mixed methods strategy. It identifies three diffusion mechanisms: competition by developed countries for outward investment opportunities, ‘boundedly rational’ competition by developing countries for inward investment, and efforts by tax specialists to disseminate fiscal standards. It also highlights two scope conditions. First, competition for inward investment can be blocked if political actors are concerned about raising corporate tax revenue. Second, where the preferences of specialists and nonspecialists in a country do not align, control over veto points is a prerequisite to diffusion.

“The Design of National Human Rights Institutions: Global Patterns of Diffusion and Strength” explores patterns of institutional design in the case of national human rights institutions (i.e. ombudsman, national human rights commission), seeking to understand why countries establish these bodies and give them certain mandated powers as reflected in their institutional design. The project answers two main questions about the global variation of institutional strength as a function of the design of these institutions: (1) What are the main global patterns of the institutional design of national human rights institutions? and (2) What explains variation in the institutional strength of national human rights institutions across borders? The project makes two main contributions to the scholarship on international organisation and cross-border diffusion: the dataset of institutional design features, which operationalizes and measures six different dimensions of an institutional design index on the basis of report-based and survey data, is the first global dataset of its kind. Institutional strength is the original dependent variable that represents an index of six design features, as a synthesis of main mandated functions: 1) de jure legal independence; 2) nature of the mandate; 3) autonomy from government control; 4) predominant de facto duties; 5) pluralism of representation; and 6) staff and financial resources. Institutional strength is a ranked categorical variable with three values (weak, medium, strong). An additional contribution is the explanatory framework, which derives a number of hypotheses about global and regional determinants of institutional design from four main mechanisms that draw respectively on domestic and international, as well as material and social, factors (socialisation, incentive-setting, cost & benefit calculations and domestic identity). The global analysis has found statistically significant evidence that participation in the United Nations-led peer-review process for national human rights institutions accreditation makes countries more likely to have stronger institutions. This is in line with recent work about the role of UN-led peer review processes and provides support for socialisation and acculturation explanations that are facilitated by a global network. At the regional level, social learning and acculturation across borders takes place in regions with high density of strong such human rights institutions (i.e. Europe and the Americas) and where more ‘early adopting’ countries are located. Countries with strong democratic identities, which established their human rights institutions prior to 1990, are both more likely to have strong institutions themselves and to motivate other governments to follow their lead. The analysis of global trends finds also that incentivesetting plays a role both at the global and the regional levels, as countries that receive higher amounts of Overseas Development Assistance from the United States or states that are subjected to EU membership conditionality are more likely to have stronger human rights institutions. The project follows a nested multi-method research design, which begins with a quantitative analysis of global trends as a backdrop for a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) focused on Europe, complemented by illustrative country institutional case studies. QCA finds two paths that are sufficient for European countries to establish strong institutions. Thirteen case studies present illustrative evidence of the QCA findings at the country/institution level.

This thesis explores the evolution of the European Union’s (EU) Latin America policy through an analysis of factors internal to the EU’s foreign policy decision-making system. Its policy towards the region has changed in important ways over time and appears to have come to be more and more incoherent. Adapting existing Foreign Policy Analysis frameworks to the specific context of the EU’s foreign policy, this thesis seeks to understand how factors of bureaucratic politics shape the EU’s foreign policy towards third actors. It is hypothesized that where an analytical perspective which evaluates the EU’s increased policy incoherence towards Latin America as the result of rational decision-making is not satisfactory, bureaucratic politics need to be considered instead. Under this perspective, the EU’s policy incoherence is influenced by policy inertia arising out of previous commitments, the divergence of views between different internal EU actors, the autonomy of these to take decisions without prior consultation or coordination with others, and lastly the complexity and duration of EU foreign policy decision-making processes themselves. This research framework is then applied empirically by analysing the EU’s negotiations for international agreements with partners in the Latin American region, and particularly those with regional organizations since the 1990s. This thesis finds that despite attempts to strengthen foreign policy coordination and coherence in the EU over time, the coherence of its Latin America policy has indeed been affected by bureaucratic politics arising out of factors such as changes to the internal organization of the European Commission or the disruption of established coordination mechanisms through the Treaty of Lisbon. The findings contribute to our understanding of the evolution of EU-Latin American relations, on-going debates on the study of interregionalism, as well as more generally to the literature on EU foreign policy-making.

While research on developments in minority rights field in the South and East European countries has shown that political incentives in the form of International Organization (IO) membership conditionality was a driving factor in facilitating transposition of minority rights norms into domestic legislation, compliance with IO recommendations post-conditionality remains a puzzle. This thesis contributes to the broader literature on ‘Europeanisation’ by first, examining transposition of and compliance with minority rights norms once the main ‘carrot’ of membership conditionality is consumed. Secondly, it presents a comparative perspective on adoption of minority rights reforms in EU and non-EU countries (Latvia and Georgia respectively). Last, by incorporating analysis of both ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ processes of change, it contributes to the emerging research on the role of ‘bottom-up’ processes in Europeanization of domestic policies. This study shows that the influence of IOs on states after accession is very limited. However, it is not defunct. Adoption of the FCNM in both countries is explained in terms of the ruling government’s reputational concerns to safeguard an image of being ‘good European citizens.' In turn, reputational concerns, when and if present, were only effective to the extent of forging formal (as opposed to behavioural) compliance. Behavioural compliance, on the other hand, was tamed by the ruling government’s stance towards minorities and domestic political considerations (including domestic opposition to reforms). Importantly, this study also shows that bottom-up processes in the postaccession period take place indeed. While their effects on forging positive changes are limited, these processes are more influential in Latvia, rather than in Georgia. The study concludes that legacies of the communist past and their geographical location make the states in question subject to (sometimes) conflicting norms. It thus suggests, in addition to analyzing the influence of IO membership, the further research in the area should take the influence of other regional states/players into consideration.