The thesis addresses the question of whether the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) can be considered a consolidated norm in international society today. A consolidated norm in international society is defined here as a regularised pattern of behaviour that is widely accepted as appropriate within a given social context. The analysis is premised on the assumption that R2P could be regarded as a consolidated norm if it was applied consistently when genocide and other mass atrocities occur; and if international responses would routinely conform to core principles inherent in R2P: seeking government consent; multilateralism; prevention; and regionalism. Finnemore and Sikkink’s norm lifecycle model is used to determine the putative norm’s degree of consolidation. The analysis shows that R2P had fully emerged as a prospective norm by 2005. In-depth case studies of the international responses to crises in Darfur and Kenya serve to illuminate the findings. The author concludes that the Responsibility to Protect has not, as yet, fully consolidated as an international norm. The Responsibility to Protect has been remarkably successful at pervading the international discourse but has, as yet, been somewhat less successful at consistency in implementation in terms of adherence to its core principles as outlined above (the qualitative dimension of R2P); and it has been least successful, to date, in terms of consistency across cases in terms of resolve and tenacity. The consistency-gap may, however, gradually close – which is possible, if not likely, if R2P continues on its current trajectory.

This thesis seeks to analyse and explain Libya’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability and the factors that ultimately influenced Qaddafi’s regime to dismantle the nuclear weapons programme. Driven by the core motive to deter external threats to its security and the desire to become a regional power, Libya for over three decades sought to acquire nuclear weapons, but failed to obtain them ‘off the shelf’. From the 1970s until 2003, Libya sought to acquire key elements of nuclear components. After many years Qaddafi transformed his foreign and security policies, which for several decades had resulted in rogue behaviour on the part of the state machine. This transformation applied to the ideological motivations that had generated the regime’s aggressive approach in the realm of international relations. Focusing on the Libyan case study, in three different periods has allowed the key factors influencing Libya’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capability and simultaneously its decision to denuclearise, to be unravelled. The empirical findings demonstrate that external and internal pressure provides a satisfactory explanation for the reorientation of Libya’s policies. This thesis confirms that Qaddafi’s regime dismantlement of its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 was influenced by the domestic factors such as public pressure, and external factors such as stringent economic sanctions, international isolation and the very genuine threat of military action. This in turn reflected the fact that the Libyan case can be better explained from a realistic point of view. Indeed, the study found that the reaction of the Libyan government was not a response to the regional and international norms, but it was rather a consequence of domestic and external pressure. By arguing this, denuclearisation occurs when regimes comes under internal and external pressure, particularly from powerful actors by using coercion tools such as international isolation, economic sanctions and threat of military action. This thesis contributes to broader theoretical debates surrounding non-proliferation and denuclearisation. This study concludes that states can give up their nuclear weapons programmes under certain internal and external factors.

This study analyses in full the history of the Kuwait oil concession, which has proved to be one of the most valuable in the world. Interest in Kuwait's oil deposits first arose more than twenty years before the oil concession was finally secured by an Anglo-American combine. Many parties were actively involved in the quest for oil in Kuwait during the long negotiations which spanned the years 1912-1934. Companies backed by the British and United States Governments were all bargaining tor the concession while the Shaikh was determined to secure the best financial terms possible. Moreover, events in Kuwait were inter-related with and parallel to negotiations in Bahrein and Saudi Arabia, where American interests succeeded in securing exclusive oil concessions. This commercial success, which eventually drew the United States Government deeper into the Persian Gulf, was achieved despite a relatively early British recognition of the political and strategic importance of the region's oil concessions. This thesis discusses the formulation and application ot the policies of the various participants. It also provides an account of the way in which the American oil companies competing against British companies established themselves firmly in a region which was under British influence.

The thesis examines the effects of interventions by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on peace, justice and conflict processes in northern Uganda and Libya. The 'peace versus justice' debate, wherein it is argued that the ICC has either positive or negative effects on 'peace’, has spawned in response to the Court's interventions into active and ongoing conflicts. The thesis is a response to and engagement with this debate. Despite often seeming persuasive, claims within the 'peace versus justice' debate have failed to set out a coherent research agenda on how to study the effects of the ICC's interventions on 'peace'. Drawing on theoretical and analytical insights from the fields of conflict and peace studies, conflict resolution and negotiation theory, the thesis develops a novel and nuanced analytical framework to study the Court's effects on peace, justice and conflict processes. This framework is applied to two specific cases: the ICC's interventions in Libya and in northern Uganda. The core of the thesis examines the empirical effects of the ICC on each case. Approximately 80 interviews were conducted with key figures in Libya, Uganda and at the ICC. In its comparative analysis, the thesis examines why the ICC has the effects that it does, delineating the relationship between the interests of states that refer situations to the ICC and the ICC's self-interests and arguing the negotiation of these interests determines who / which side of a conflict the ICC targets and thus its effects on peace, justice and conflict processes. While the effects of the ICC's interventions are ultimately mixed, the thesis aims to contribute to a more refined way to study the effects of the ICC and to further our understanding of why the ICC has the effects that it does.

This study sets out to analyse the dynamics and complexities of Moroccan-Spanish relations “from above and from below” over a period of 22 years (1990 to 2012) by exploring the impact of the supra-state (EU) and the sub-state (Catalan) entities on the bilateral relationship. While the Rabat-Madrid nexus is the main focus, the thesis also surveys Moroccan-EU and Moroccan-Catalan relations, focusing on economic, migration and cooperation policy areas where Spain, the EU and Catalonia have shared but varying degrees of competence. The investigation seeks to examine whether the complexity of relations and actors turn out to be beneficial or detrimental to the Rabat-Madrid bilateral ties, and strives to produce a theoretically informed investigation by framing the dynamics of this complex relationship in theoretical terms. Multi-level governance, Europeanization, Complex Interdependence and Omnibalancing are the main theoretical frameworks discussed. With regard to the central relationship (Moroccan-Spanish relations), the research highlights its complex, multifaceted and cyclical nature. It underlines some of the structural problems plaguing the bilateral ties such as the dissimilar political systems, the territorial squabbles, economic interests and disparities, migration and security challenges, and the negative public opinion; and it also points to the flourishing web of interdependencies forcing the two neighbours to cooperate such as the intensifying economic, political, and social issues. As to Morocco-EU relations, it transpires that Madrid looms relatively large in most EUMoroccan ties, especially in economic (fisheries and agricultural) and migration issues. Brussels also plays an on-going structural role allowing Madrid to de-problematize some of its dealings with Rabat, by providing resources and a platform allowing Rabat and Madrid to focus on more constructive issues. Importance of Moroccan-Catalan relations is illustrated by the large proportion of Moroccan immigrants living in the autonomous region and the sustained economic and official relations between Barcelona and Rabat. Although Catalonia has its own priorities linked to its economic interests, identity, security, international prestige, and influence in Spanish politics, Barcelona’s impact on Rabat-Madrid relations has mainly been positive, if not complementary. The research also highlights the lingering and potential structural problems in the inter-state bilateral relationship including territorial issues, economic interests and disparities, security challenges, negative perceptions, etc. However, it concludes that the proliferation of actors and the diversification of interests has largely generated a shield of common interdependencies that mitigate tensions and prevent potential conflicts. The thesis argues, therefore, for Complex Interdependence as a fairly satisfactory theoretical base, albeit with limitations. The theory has the potential to frame the dynamics of this complex relationship where increased interdependencies seems to create a buffer of common interests withstanding conflict. Within this framework, the EU and Catalonia can be perceived as external actors and contact channels, largely facilitating relations and alleviating tensions.

The problematique driving this research stems from the different approaches concerning Turkish foreign policy (TFP) under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) since 2002. Moreover, the controversy about TFP, also expands to a theoretical debate within the International Relations, and Foreign Policy Analysis, literature. However, although more balanced approaches have emerged in recent years to explain TFP, a comprehensive and systematically integrated approach that deals with TFP drivers, causal chains and foreign policy behaviour is yet to be seen; and this is a gap that this thesis seeks to fill. In this light, this thesis’ objective is to explain TFP towards the Middle East under the AKP. Thus, the central and overarching question to be answered is: what are the foreign policy-making dynamics under the AKP? The goal is to trace the causal relationship between the (independent and intervening) variables (system and domestic level) vis-à-vis the dependent variable (foreign policy behaviour) in terms of the foreign policy outcomes of “revisionism” and “status quo.” In answering the overarching question, the thesis also addresses a set of sub-questions: how are domestic developments linked to external developments? Is there evidence of revisionism or ideological incentives in TFP? Answering such questions also allows for inferences on long-standing questions about TFP to be made. For example: is Turkey turning away from its traditional Western allies? Has Turkey been promoting peace and cooperation, or have its policies created polarisation between international actors? The main argument is twofold. First it is argued that TFP under the AKP towards the Middle East has been revisionist. This stems from the fact that AKP elite ideology is revisionist and the domestic driver that has the primary role in filtering systemic dynamics and leading to the foreign policy outcome. Thus, whenever the circumstances – namely, little to no external or domestic effective opposition – allow AKP policy-makers to act according to their ideologically-charged rhetoric, TFP behaviour is revisionist. When AKP is constrained by other external or domestic drivers, TFP is more prone to maintaining the status quo. As such, system-level drivers (international power relations, external threat perceptions and international economic interdependencies), and most importantly international power relations, play the primary role in shaping and causing shifts in TFP but always in conjunction with unit-level variables. Lastly, it is suggested that the region’s volatility will keep forcing Turkey to switch back and forth in its alliance with the West not least because of the gap between its revisionist aspirations and its limited capabilities. The same aspirations will unavoidably be challenged as they face the reaction of other regional and international players.

Among the most enduring diplomatic projects in the postcolonial Third World, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or ASEAN has for long inspired antipodal reviews ranging from the celebratory to the derisive. These judgments notwithstanding, the varied practices of ASEAN’s diplomacy have impressively grown in scope, ritual, and ambition in the years following the Cold War and well into the contemporary post-unipolar conjuncture where ASEAN has emerged as a default manager of a geopolitical landscape bookended by the material and symbolic power struggles of China and the United States in Asia. Despite the abundance of writings on ASEAN and Asian security, much about its routine production and performance remain enigmatic. Little is known about the everyday practices that constitute this diplomacy; the varied kinds of labour nourishing its production; the sociological biographies of its practitioners and the endowments of class, language, and social capital shaping their shared dispositions; and the vernacular idiom in which this diplomacy is performed. This thesis interrogates ASEAN’s diplomatic practice with an eye on these concerns by pursuing ethnographic fieldwork for 13 months in a site of ASEAN diplomacy par excellence. This site is the ASEAN Secretariat in South Jakarta and a field of multilateral diplomacy of Great and Middle Powers clustered around it in a city that has laid claim to becoming “ASEAN’s diplomatic capital” (Ibukota diplomatik ASEAN). The thesis constructs two arguments. First, it argues against pervasive understandings of the ASEAN Secretariat’s inconsequentiality. As the only bureaucratic ‘organ’ to physically attend and memorialise every ‘ASEAN meeting’, the Secretariat is a key institution coordinating the burgeoning apparatus of activity in and through which a lexically and ritually coherent ‘ASEAN’ is produced. More importantly, as ‘servants’ of states, Secretariat staff render their ‘emotional labour’ to level the tortured inequalities of the ASEAN diplomatic field. Through practices of face-work, staff deploy an exacting solicitousness to ensure that ASEAN’s state representatives – with varying endowments of linguistic, cultural, and social capital– are not threatened with embarrassment by which they may ‘lose face’, be ‘out of face’ or ‘shamefaced,’ as they gather among each other and their vaunted foreign partners as equals. Second, by analysing the everyday practices of Secretariat staff, ASEAN diplomats, and foreign diplomats based in Jakarta, this thesis draws on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and Erving Goffman to construct a wider argument about ASEAN’s diplomatic practice. It argues that ASEAN’s diplomacy is produced in everyday life not by prevailing representations of the ‘ASEAN Way’ but instead through a stock of historically structured, sociologically patterned, and embodied, dispositions and tacit know-how – a diplomatic habitus. This diplomatic habitus is organised around a perennial concern among ASEAN’s practitioners to save the physical and figurative ‘face’ of the state – instantiated by its representatives – to enable their performances of a mythic sovereign equality among each other and satisfy their demands for recognition from Great and Major powers, especially as they strive for ‘centrality’ in the performative games of Asian security.

The aim of this thesis is to explore a specific feature of post-Cold War Italian foreign policy, throwing light from a perspective blending Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and other International Relations (IR) insights, on the interactions occurred in the 1990s between the Italian state institutions and the Community of Sant’Egidio (CSE), a Catholic lay organisation, one of the most influential non-governmental organisations (NGOs) based in Italy, with a remarkable level of international activity. Firstly, this work offers a detailed account of the Italian “Foreign Policy Community” (Santoro 1991; Hilsman 1967 and 1993) and of the Community of Sant’Egidio, taking into consideration the international and domestic changes occurred after the demise of the Cold War, in order to understand where foreign policy governmental actors and a non state actor (NSA) such as Sant’Egidio fit within the bigger picture of the foreign policy process in Italy. This mapping exercise demonstrates that the country’s foreign policy setting is rather fragmented, featuring a) centres of power and influence scattered along different “rings”, according to the different issues and subpolicies at stake, on a case-by-case basis; and b) an institutional “inner ring” with a relatively high number of “access points” for external actors, i.e. a proactive NGO such as Sant'Egidio, which is located in the “second ring”. Secondly, after identifying slowly emerging “policy subsystems” (Verbeek and van Ufford 2001) in the specific foreign policy subfields of a) preventive diplomacy/crisis management and b) peace-making, in which the Italian governmental foreign policy machinery and the Community are among the extremely small number of actors playing a role and enjoying a certain degree of policy autonomy, this thesis focuses on these two foreign policy areas, in order to try to understand how relations unfolded between the two actors in the cases of the Algerian crisis of 1994-1998 and of the Mozambican peace process of 1990-1992. The examination of these events has showed both competitive (even conflicting) and cooperative relations, respectively on the Algerian dossier and in the Mozambican case. This thesis argues therefore that “coopetition”, a concept borrowed from literature on regulatory theory, and defined as “a flexible mix of competition and cooperation between governmental and non-governmental actors” (Esty and Geradin 2000), is – with some modifications – possibly the most accurate definition to capture the nature of interactions analysed.

The six German political foundations, backed by substantial public funds, have several hundreds of foreign offices around the globe and more than 2000 staff members. As specific manifestations of the German political landscape, the Stiftungen are affiliated to the German political parties at the German Bundestag. This thesis researches the international activity of the German political foundations and their position within international relations theory. It juxtaposes the rationalists and constructivists approaches on the state and non-state relationship and the possible impact of transnational actors. After having identified the German political foundations as transnational actors, a model of public diplomacy is used to systematically study the foundations’ transnational interaction processes. The model integrates different public diplomacy approaches and is based on the assumption of public diplomacy as a diplomatic process in a network environment, where transnational actors and states are equally important and where values and ideas are emphasised. At the same time, it considers propaganda activity, a criticism sometimes voiced by foreign governments with regard to the foundations’ undertakings. The foundations’ democracy assistance as well as their conflict management ambitions are explored, as collaborative or catalytic public diplomacy forms. In two case studies, one on the Rule of law program of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Southeast Europe and another on the activities of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Southern Thailand, the strategies of ideational diffusion processes and networking, the soft power resources and social relationship building of the political foundations are investigated. This theoretically informed empirical study aims at first contributing to the object of the German political foundations’ international undertakings which has been subject to little research so far. Second, it connects IR theory on transnational actors as well as the literature on public diplomacy to these activities. Finally, the thesis identifies the Stiftungen as reproducers of the German civilian power identity by implementing abroad major parts of German policy.

This thesis analyses the factors that determine the provision of stability in peacekeeping operations and the peacekeeping operations of the African Union (AU). It makes theoretical and empirical contributions, and supports the claim that the AU has been effective in peacekeeping. Theoretically, this study offers a comprehensive list of factors drawn from extant peace literature which influence peace operations meeting the basic objective of protecting lives and keeping areas stable. Beyond the majorly discussed factors of contingent size, funding, international collaboration, local participation, mandate and peacekeeper training, this study also examines issues of domestic political elite, field leadership, force integrity, impartiality, international political will, lead state, local women participation, size and resources of territory and timing. In bringing these factors together, this study expands the peacekeeping debate on what matters for stability in conflict areas. Empirically, using the peace support operations (PSO) of the AU, this study identifies those factors most and least significant for the provision of stability in conflict areas and ranks them based on their impact. Contrary to extant peace literature where mandate, funding, international collaboration, local initiative and size of the contingent are at the heart of creating stability in conflict areas, this study advocates the indispensability of domestic elite cooperation, local initiative and international political will. These were the only factors consistent in all successful AU PSO’s. Conversely, where any of these three factors were lacking, the AU missions failed. This study therefore argues that these three factors are central to the provision of stability in peace operations in the short term. The short term method of evaluation which revolves around the cessation of violence and provision of security is adopted as the standard for peacekeeping’s effectiveness. This is because the AU often leaves peacebuilding which is evaluated over the long term to the United Nations (UN). So, having achieved stability in four of its six peace operations, this study concludes that the AU has been fairly effective as Africa’s chief peacekeeper. Other findings exhumed by this study include the necessity of force integrity to large contingents, and the need for a lead state if missions are to succeed in complex theatres demanding prolonged operations.