The concept of anthropogenic climate change is now understood in the discipline of International Relations (IR) as an urgent environmental problem enveloping the globe. It underlies recent claims that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s natural systems is so consequential that a new geologic epoch has begun: The Anthropocene, or the ‘human age’. Yet, IR’s increasing engagement and use of these scientific concepts raises significant questions the discipline has yet to address. For instance, if global climate change appeared in international politics only as recently as the late-1980s, what spurred this sudden emergence? If the Anthropocene appeared only after 2000, then how does this new concept affect the way we now think about global politics, the Earth, and even ourselves? This thesis answers these questions by arguing that the concepts of global climate change and the Anthropocene are neither immutable nor universal scientific truths or natural objects. Rather, they emerged when technological advances in nuclear physics and models tracing bomb radiocarbon intersected with the ways states govern their territories and subjects. The global nature or ‘climatic globality’ of these concepts, therefore, is a manner of conducting and steering human conduct and action by establishing the boundaries of subjectivity when they are thought. This is what Michel Foucault called governmentality. It is demonstrated in this thesis through a genealogical tracing of climate change in IR, focusing on how nuclear sciences, computational modelling technologies, and regimes of international governance, overlapped to form the climatic globality IR now takes for granted. Combining genealogy with the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, a new form of global governmentality becomes evident. Through a technological and metaphysical subjectivism with the carbon atom as its substrate, the human self now asserts itself from atomic to global scales, as the maker, master, and steward, of the Earth.

This thesis asks what the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests (‘Tiananmen’) can tell us about Alain Badiou’s philosophy of fidelity and its relationship to change, drawing on the concepts of immanence, rupture and conflict. The thesis consists of: analysis of the broad philosophical system of which fidelity and change are an integral element, so as to highlight the key philosophical stakes; analysis of how Maoism and the Cultural Revolution connect to Tiananmen, which highlights problems relating to periodisation and nomination in Badiou’s understanding of fidelity; examination of how broader interpretive grids in the contemporary era can maintain the ‘state of the situation’ or a dominant ‘worlding’ – demonstrated through analysis of framings of the Tiananmen protests in English-language news media and academia; and a discussion of grass-roots worker activism in 1989 and subsequent years, through which it is argued that Badiou’s increased emphasis on the evental ‘encounter’ and immanent change in his later texts provides the best recourse in locating the emergence of novelty – the central lesson being the ability of the Chinese workers to maintain a mode of anti-state politics within the state on account of its localised and ad-hoc nature. The thesis finds that the success of fidelity as a concept for locating novel change hinges upon investigation of evental encounters within the state, and that tying investigation of fidelity to ahistorical and universal referents hinders such an endeavour.

This thesis examines the role of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the rule-making of 21st century global governance. If offers a critique of existing accounts on the transnational capitalist class (TCC) and the WEF, as a site of this class, that are based on an artificial differentiation between state and market actors. Such artificiality assumes a power relationship that allows market actors to discipline state managers and shape the state’s policy-making along their accepted principles and norms. Thus, the involvement of the state in the WEF’s activities is viewed as a manifestation of this disciplinary power. The thesis argues that the state participates in such activities in response to the imperative of managing capital-labour relations at a global level necessary to reproduce the capitalist social relations of production within its jurisdictions. From an Open Marxist perspective, it argues that the state is a political manifestation of class struggle and an inherent feature of the social relations of capital accumulation. Whilst this indicates that state managers pursue policies that favour the reproduction of the social relations of production, this imperative is not deterministic or a reflection of the disciplinary power of the market. This thesis shows that the argument that the WEF has an influence over the state’s social and economic policy-making is not supported by evidence. It presents a substantial, archive-based, re-assessment of the influence of the WEF’s discourse of international competitiveness over the state. It shows through studying the institutionalisation of competitiveness in the UK how the country has responded selectively to the imperative of state competitiveness. It demonstrates that the engagement of state managers with the discourse of competitiveness is an attempt to secure the circulation of global capital within the economy in order to help reproducing capital accumulation that drives economic growth, employment and living standards.

The key objective of this project is to determine to what degree Pakistan has cooperated with the United States and what factors are responsible for the variance in Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States in the war against Al-Qaeda, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. To determine the responses of the Pakistani government especially of its army, which is the core decision making body on issues of national importance, this thesis disaggregates the Unite States’ demands against Al-Qaeda, the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban. The main purpose of identifying the demands against the three different terrorist organisations of various importance to the national security of the United States was to determine its effect on the Pakistani cooperation with the United States. This thesis provides an alternative explanation of the Pakistani cooperation with the United States against Al-Qaeda, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, which is different from the traditional one focused on the Indian factor. It argues that the Pakistani cooperation with the United States against Al-Qaeda, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban is dependent on three variables; the perception of the Pakistani army of the United States’ commitment, the military capability of the Pakistani army and the domestic opposition in Pakistan to cooperation with the United States. These factors don’t only provide explanation to the variance in Pakistani cooperation against different groups but also across different times.

The aim of my thesis is to reconceptualise the English School of International Relations according to what I describe as the history/theory dialectic. The origins of this dialectic are sought in the thought of E. H. Carr, Herbert Butterfield, and Martin Wight, who drew attention to the interpenetration of history and theory. In their capacity as historians, the writers examined in my thesis struggled with problems normally associated with theoretical work in International Relations and elsewhere and tried to combine personal and impersonal accounts of history. They also emphasised the role of the historian which is no different from that of the theorist in attributing meaning to a series of apparently unrelated events. As international theorists, Butterfield, Wight and Carr underlined the historicity of international theory, and offered a historicist conceptualisation of international change that assigned priority to European interests and values. Their belief in the co-constitution of history and theory, has important consequences for contemporary English School debates concerning the proper definition of the relationship between order and justice, international society and world society, pluralism and solidarism. What lies at the end of the history/theory dialectic is not an unproblematic combination of opposites but the recognition of the need to be cautious towards the categories we use in order to capture and analyse a multidimensional reality which is subject to change.

For decades, International Relations scholars have debated the role and efficacy of international institutions in advancing international cooperation. However, scholarship that takes institutions seriously often adopts the functionalist assumption that international organizations are created as technocratic bodies to facilitate the division of economic goods. My dissertation examines the first international organizations created in the 19th century to manage international rivers (specifically the Rhine, the Danube and the Congo Rivers) and puts forward two strands of argumentation that challenges this functionalist, rationalist and technocratic view of institutional creation. First, I examine the broad social construction of the international river as an untamed space to be disciplined and redefined as a useful economic entity. In the mid-18th century, Frederick the Great wrote in a letter to Voltaire, “whoever improves the soil, cultivates land lying waste and drains swamps is making conquests from barbarism”. Here, Fredrick declared war against the barbarism and chaos of untamed nature; his battles were fought by cartographers, surveyors, engineers and statisticians to establish control over the wild world of reeds and marshes. Following from this conception of nature, 19th century international cooperation along transboundary rivers also aimed to maximize the economic utility of the river—to straighten and deepen the river to create a more efficient economic highway—which also tamed the anarchic dangers of unregulated river politics. Second, I investigate the construction the international river’s meaning at three 19th century critical junctures in European politics—the 1815 Congress of Vienna, the 1856 Peace of Paris, and the 1885 Berlin Conference. I trace how competing meanings of the transboundary river coexisted at each juncture to complicate cooperation and shape the institutional beginnings of each river commission. In doing so, I contend that these international river commissions should be seen as contingent political formations born of specific European configurations of power, rather than as a straightforward progression towards a generalizable model institution that would eventually banish international conflict.

This research enquiry is concerned with how racial and ethnic identity is both managed and experienced by individuals within the workplace. This thesis is comprised of three separate and distinct empirical studies conducted with the purpose of uncovering the lived experiences of minority racial and ethnic individuals. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used in order to study individual experiences of race and ethnicity from multiple complementary perspectives. Study 1 is a quantitative empirical study that uses biculturalism as a lens to conceptualise the experience of minority racial and ethnic individuals. The key contribution of this study is the establishment of a reliable and valid instrument to measure bicultural identity integration in the workplace. Study 2 is a qualitative empirical study that investigates how minority racial and ethnic individuals experience their ethnic identity in the workplace. The key contribution of this study is the development of a typology that identifies three distinct pathways through which an individual’s heritage culture can intersect with race, class and professional identity to influence their work-based behaviours. Study 3 is a qualitative empirical study that examines how minority racial and ethnic individuals experience their racial identity through the use of employee resource groups. The key contributions of this study are the development of a theoretical framework to conceptualise employee resource groups in general and a typology that identifies five roles that employee resource groups play to enhance the careers of minority racial and ethnic individuals as part of their social identity management processes.

This thesis analyses cooperation between France, Germany and the United Kingdom (the ‘EU-3’) throughout different episodes of the 2011 uprisings in Libya. Focusing on (i) the provision humanitarian assistance and consular support, (ii) measures taken in the realm of border protection and migration management, (iii) the use of restrictive measures, (iv) the diplomatic recognition of the Libyan opposition, and (v) the decision to intervene (or not) militarily, the study provides the first overview of the activities of the three most influential member states at the time. Drawing on a large set of original empirical material from primary and secondary sources, including 77 semi-structured interviews with foreign policy elites and experts in Berlin, Paris, London and Brussels, the thesis applies a novel two-step explanatory framework to account for decision-makers’ actions. This approach first identifies those normative factors which influenced the way in which decision-makers constructed their respective state’s interests, and subsequently demonstrates how these interests helped to form their interpretations of a given situation in light of the costs and benefits of the various options available to them. The study thus contributes to the growing body of literature that underlines the added value of ideabased research in foreign and security policies, and to crisis response in particular.

This thesis asks why some ethnic insurgencies in Myanmar have de-escalated since 2011, while others re-escalated concurrently. It investigates this puzzle by zooming into the country’s most important ethnic armies: the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO). Findings from nine months of ethnographically-informed field research in the Kachin and Karen borderlands reveal that internal contestations within both movements have driven their respective conflict and negotiation strategies with the state. These intramural conflicts were sparked in the context of changing political economies in the country’s borderlands that enabled the enrichment of individual rebel leaders but eroded their authority within their movements. The original contribution of this thesis is two-fold: Theoretically, the thesis contributes to the emerging literature on the internal dimensions of rebel groups by moving away from the prevalent focus on rebel elites and rationaldecision making. Instead, it conceptualises insurgency as a social process between differently situated elite and non-elite actors, grounding itself within relational sociology. This appreciates how social dynamics - including figurational interdependencies, reciprocal power relations, and embodied practices - develop a momentum of their own in driving political violence. In doing so, it is suggested that the emergence and erosion of leadership authority in rebel groups depends on whether elites address their grassroots’ claim to recognition, enabling the latter to develop and maintain self-perceived positive social identities through affiliation to the insurgent collective. Empirically, the thesis contributes to a better understanding of one of the world’s longest ongoing but least researched civil wars by presenting original findings on its most important rebel groups, particularly with regards to the often uneasy relations between rebel elites and their grassroots and the ways in which internal contestation drives their strategies. Its findings also have implications for policy in so far as they highlight the pitfalls of counterinsurgency and peacebuilding approaches that aim at fragmenting rebel movements and/or privilege the material interests of elites over issues surrounding recognition and identity that – as this thesis shows – are underpinning ethnonational insurgencies.

In order to understand whether US training of military forces from the South has resulted in the use of repression or improvements in human rights, we need to situate the training within the broader context of US foreign policy objectives and strategies. The main aims of US foreign policy are to maintain its dominant global position and to ensure control of resources and markets in the South. These objectives are being pursued through an emerging, US-led transnational state, using the instruments of legitimation at least as much as repression. This contrasts with the Cold War, during which US foreign policy strategy towards the South emphasised repression. US training of military forces from the South during the Cold War played a key role in a US-led network, through which many states in the South were connected to the US and each other by cooperation between their militaries, police and intelligence services. The training was dominated by a particular form of counterinsurgency instruction which advocated repression of groups that might potentially threaten US control of Southern economies and assets. This contributed to widespread human rights violations, particularly in Latin America. Following the end of the Cold War, reliance on coercion diminished, and it was subsumed within the emergent transnational state. In line with this shift in US foreign policy strategy in the South, some aspects of the training began to be characterised by the promotion of legitimation. In the wake of 9/11, the US has intensified both its legitimation efforts and its use of repression, and the training continues to play a significant role in the service of US foreign policy objectives.