Nepal occupies a unique global position as a peripheral social formation subject to decades of relative isolation from capitalism. Although the agrarian sector has long been understood to be dominated by pre-capitalist economic formations, it is important to examine whether contemporary changes underway in the country are transforming the rural economy. There has been an expansion of capitalist markets following economic liberalization and improvements in the transport infrastructure. Furthermore, neo-liberal commercialisation initiatives such as the Agriculture Perspective Plan provide the ideological justification and pre-conditions for the broader process of capitalist expansion, despite the pro-poor rhetoric. However, just as neo-liberal poverty alleviation strategy is flawed, there are also shortcomings in many Marxian understandings of the transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist agriculture in peripheral social formations. There is a tendency for political-economic theorists to assume the inevitable ‘dominance’ of capitalism, contradicting considerable evidence to the contrary from throughout the world. The central objective of this thesis is to understand how pre-capitalist economic formations have been able to ‘resist’ capitalist expansion in rural Nepal. There is a necessity to understand the mechanisms through which older ‘modes of production’ are reproduced, their articulations with other economic formations – including capitalism – and how they are situated globally. As a case study, one year’s fieldwork was completed on Nepal’s eastern Terai using both qualitative and quantitative methods. The research suggested that surplus appropriation through rent in a mode of production which can only be described as ‘semi-feudal’, has for a majority of farming households impeded accumulation and profitable commercialisation, a precondition for the emergence of capitalist relations. Semi-feudalism has been reproduced for decades internally by the political control over land and externally by Nepal’s subordinate position in the global economy. The latter process has constrained industrialization and rendered much of the peasantry dependent upon landlords who have no incentive to lower rents. The economic insecurity which has arisen in the context of semi-feudal production relations has allowed further forms of surplus appropriation in the sphere of circulation to flourish, through for example, interest on loans and price manipulation on commodity sales. This further hinders profitable commercialisation amongst both semi-feudal tenants and also owner cultivators who farm under what can be termed an ‘independent peasant’ mode of production. Even wealthier independent peasant producers who could potentially become capitalist farmers are constrained both by high cultural capital expenses, oligoposnistic activity by industry in the capitalist grain markets, and Indian rice imports which depress local prices. Furthermore, development initiatives which could potentially facilitate capitalist transition through the introduction of productivity boosting techniques have had limited success under the prevailing relations of production and the associated ideological relations of caste and gender. The above findings are of crucial significance if one is to develop policies and political strategies for equitable change in peripheral social formations such as Nepal.

This dissertation examines the history of gold mining among the Wanyamongo people of Tarime District from the 1930s to 2009. It argues that the establishment of gold mines in Nyamongo in the early 1930s created intra-community conflicts among the Wanyamongo people. These conflicts divided the community, turning young men against elders and wives against their husbands. This tension rarely reached overt levels during the colonial period, although violent confrontations were not totally absent. However, the conflicts are discernible in the narratives about gold mining. The dissertation argues that these conflictual discourses about gold mining continued into the post-colonial era, although their content changed over time. From the turn of this century these conflicts increasingly became violent. Often characterized as evidence of local communities' opposition to the intrusion of foreign companies I draw on oral sources and Tanzanian archives to argue that such turbulence is best understood by examining the social and economic relations of the residents of such communities. In Nyamongo this violence often pitted unemployed young men against fellow Kuria-speaking men who were employed by the mine as guards and in the Community Relations Department. I also argue that the young men who invaded the mine did not want the mine to close because their very survival was dependent upon the presence of a large company that can bring deeper ore to the surface. The dissertation also argues that, contrary to common wisdom that recognizes the Second World War as the beginning of the decline of the gold mining sector, in the Lake Province gold production actually continued to increase until the late 1950s. I also argue that when these mines closed in the 1960s and early 1970s it was not because of Julius Nyerere's economic policy, as is commonly believed. When Nyerere's government nationalized the industry in 1973, all of Tanzania's big gold mines had already closed. In the 1970s and 1980s Tanzania experienced an economic crisis marked by high inflation and a shortage of basic commodities. I argue that the miners of Nyamongo escaped this crisis because gold allowed them to engage in a lucrative trade that revolved around the smuggling of gold to Kenya. The dissertation also shows that when the Tanzanian government adopted neo-liberal economic reforms in the mid-1980s, the residents of Nyamongo embraced large-scale foreign investment in the form of an Australian-owned mining company. This embrace challenges the conventional view that depicts foreign mining companies as unwanted intruders in Tanzania's mining communities and the local small-scale miners as victims of neo-liberal economic policies.

Since the opening of economic reform in 1978, mainland China's national power as a whole has been greatly enhanced with more than two decades of economic development. Under the impact of such events as the First Persian Gulf War, the Kosovo War, global anti-terrorist attacks following the 9/11/01 Attacks on America, and the Second Persian Gulf War, mainland China has thus reconstructed its viewpoint of international as well as regional security. This thesis aims to inspect, from the perspective of international regime, China's policy towards UN peacekeeping operations and apply the rationale of Neo-liberal Institutionalism ( which is based on international regime theory ) to explaining and analyzing the evolution of China's peacekeeping policy. China's policy has made a drastic impact on current international relations, involving peace and stability not just of Asian-Pacific but of cross-Strait relations. Due to the two-handed strategy adopted in dealing with ongoing cross-Strait issues, China has always shown reluctance to renounce the use of military force on Taiwan up to the present. As a result, cross-Strait security is now being threatened from enormous military stress. Hopefully, both sides of the Taiwan Strait can resolve existing political conflicts by taking peaceful means. However, in the face of such threats from China's abrupt rise as well as having its veto exercised by force in the UN Security Council and then proceeding to play a zero-sum game in which pure competitions in foreign affairs are doomed to become intensified, I'm deeply convinced that, through peacekeeping operations as well as coordination and cooperation between regional/international organizations ( as they are probed into in the thesis ), possible cross-Strait conflicts can be reduced to a great extent.

The research reports on an ethnographic study undertaken at Kingswood, a secondary school in the North West of England, during a period of rapid reform within educational policy-making in England. The research project sets out to offer an empirical account of localised policy-making and a conceptual analysis as to how and why different social actors within and connected to the school are positioned and position-take in response to the schools’ localised development trajectory. In order to do this, the study operationalises Bourdieu’s thinking tools of field, capital and habitus as a means of theorising the complex relationship between structure and agency in the processes of localised policy-making. In order to present a detailed analysis of the positioning and position-taking I develop and deploy the conceptualisation of the neoliberal policy complex. I use this to describe and understand how the political and economic fields of production penetrate localised decision-making in which the connected agendas of performativity and accountability frame much of the localised policy processes at the research site. The neoliberal policy complex is defined by an on-going and increased commitment to legislative interventions, not least through an approach to the modernisation of public service in which autonomy and diversification are hailed as hallmarks for success. Drawing on data collected in a year long embedded study, from interviews and, observations with 18 students, five parents, 21 teachers, and seven school leaders, and documentary analysis, it is argued that within this neoliberal policy complex, the field of power is located as a centralising force in structuring the policy-making development and enactments at the local level. In order to achieve distinction within the schooling field and thus be acknowledged as legitimate within the neoliberal policy complex, Kingswood’s localised development trajectory reveals how the discourses of neoliberalism have been internalised by the social actors within the study, to produce subjective positioning which reveals a commitment to the neoliberal doxa. Within this theorisation certain knowledges, capitals and ways of doing and thinking are privileged and presented as common sense. At Kingswood, the conversion to an academy in April 2012 and the attendant re-organisation of the school provision into a Multi-Academy Trust, which has on site a ‘professional’ and a ‘studio’ school, are presented as a necessary construction for the school’s future, and the employability skills that will be subsequently embedded within the curriculum are framed as a common sense development of the purposes of education. The study concludes that such position-taking ultimately reveals how the centralising and hierarchical notions of power work to produce a narrative of misrecognition with regards to how the school must develop localised policy-making in order to remain a viable and legitimate entity in the schooling field. The research makes a contribution to the field of policy scholarship by applying Bourdieu’s thinking tools to the empirical findings from a range of social actors in and connected to the school in order to construct an understanding of the relationships between power and positionality in localised policy-making in neoliberal times.

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Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-04T20:04:55Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 15 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A presente dissertação apresenta um estudo sobre os modos de constituição de sujeitos universitários na contemporaneidade, tendo por objetivo problematizar os modos como as condutas desses sujeitos são conduzidas por uma multiplicidade de estratégias e de táticas que potencializam uma governamentalidade neoliberal. Para realizar tal trabalho, tomou-se como material de pesquisa um conjunto de 20 capas do caderno Vestibular/ZH, suplemento publicado semanalmente pelo jornal Zero Hora (jornal de maior circulação no Estado do Rio Grande do Sul) e dirigido aos estudantes em processo preparatório para o ingresso na universidade. A dissertação toma como ferramentas analíticas os conceitos de discurso e de governamentalidade, produzidos a partir das teorizações do filósofo Michel Foucault. Aponta-se que as modificações nas configurações culturais da contemporaneidade têm produzido sujeitos universitários com características específicas. As modificações no mundo do trabalho, as novas racionalidades governamentais, com / This dissertation presents a study on the modes of constitution of university subjects in contemporaneity, aiming at problematizing the ways through which conducts of those subjects have been conducted by multiple strategies and tactics that leverage neo-liberal governmentality. The research material consisted of 20 front covers of Vestibular/ZH, a weekly supplement of Zero Hora (the newspaper with the largest circulation in Rio Grande do Sul) directed towards students preparing to start a university course. The concepts of discourse and governmentality have been taken as analysis tools, both stemming from theorizations of Michel Foucault. Changes in cultural configurations in contemporaneity have produced university subjects with specific characteristics. Changes occurred in the work world, new governmental rationalities, with the emergence of neo-liberalism, and the centrality of media in the production of subjectivities, have been some of the possibility conditions for the emergence of those subjects. Ana

This thesis engages peace studies in a liberalist approach in International Relations. The three main schools of liberalism have their shortage. Democratic peace theory suggests the correlation between democracy and peace, but cannot proof there be a necessary causality between them. Neo-liberal institutionalism claims that international institutions help to assure peace. However, institutions cannot be fair to every country. Interdependent theory claims that closer interdependence could bring peace. Nevertheless, the more interdependent countries are, the more conflicts there are. This thesis applies spontaneous order theory in international peace studies , which stresses the importance of freedom and law-making for keeping the best and free status of human being.

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This thesis attempts to provide a critical perspective on international efforts to prevent the financing of terrorism. The thesis argues that the fight against the financing of terrorism is a vital component of counter terrorism strategies and underlines the significance of international organizations in combating terrorist financing. The thesis examines the fund raising and movement activities of terrorist groups. Moreover, it analyzes the efforts of international organizations to combat terrorist financing and discusses the adequacy of these efforts. By arguing that international community&rsquo / s efforts are not adequate, the thesis makes some recommendations. Finally, the thesis tests to what extent neo-liberal institutionalist approach, which mainly concentrates on cooperation and regime formation regarding the global problems faced by the states, can explain the international fight against the financing of terrorism.