Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-119).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 129-150).

M.A. dissertation, University of Hong Kong, 1977.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 385-395).

Much of the research on the Palestinian Resistance Movement focuses on the period of its most active international terrorism, roughly between the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war and October 1977. These studies focus largely on the violent acts of the movement’s operatives and the movement’s Marxist political theory during this time. Less has been written, however, about the movement’s development prior to 1967, or the relationship between traditional forms of anti-colonial resistance and tribal violence in Palestinian society and the forms of resistance that manifested within the Palestinian Resistance Movement. This thesis analyzes the development of political critiques and theories on the use of political violence within the organizations of Palestinian Resistance between the nakba in 1948 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, tracing them back to the traditional sociopolitical structures that regulated authority and tribal violence in Palestine prior to the twentieth century. Due to a variety of economic and political forces at work in the region, political authority among Arab Palestinians shifted from rural kinship-based networks to urban patronage-based networks between roughly 1858 and 1922. This resulted in a disconnection between those wielding political and economic influence and the population’s center of mass, which remained in the rural hinterlands. This dual structure, which ultimately contributed to the failure of nationalist Palestinian leaders to effectively harness peasant anticolonial resistance during the British Mandate to strategic ends, was a central element in the critique of mid-century Palestinian Resistance Movement thinkers, and informed the theories they generated during this time. As an illustration of Palestinian resistance thought during this period, I analyze the content and editorial perspective of Filasṭīn, a newspaper published by the Arab Nationalist Movement from 1964 to 1967. Through this newspaper, the ANM clearly articulated a position on Arab government and the use of violence for political ends which remained a major influence in the theories of the movement after 1967. / text

Over the past decades, people have had an increasing chance to receive eco- nomic information, especially news related to the stock market. This is because the fraction of the U.S. population owning stocks has increased rapidly. However, it does not mean that a majority of news sources have started to deal with financial news more. We do not know how traditional media, such as newspapers, have dealt with financial news during the same period, nor do we know the influence of this environmental change on political attitudes. In this report, I analyze the type of contexts in which the stock market has been described in The New York Times from 1981 to 2011 by Wordfish and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. I find that a plunge in the stock market and political events affect the amount of political topics in stock market news. In particular, after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, stock market news consisted of economic, political, and social topics. / text

The international community has invested a significant amount of resources to limit corruption in developing countries and institute sound public finance management systems. This strategic approach has resulted in the emergence of anti-corruption commissions in Africa and elsewhere as a means to institute good governance, limit unconscionable spending and promote economic growth. However, a proactive participation of Parliaments and other key stakeholders, including the Auditor-General and civil society, in achieving this goal, has been very limited. As a result, systemic corruption and mismanagement of financial resources continue to pervade emerging economies in the midst of an unsettled political climate and limited reforms.Notwithstanding this trend, the quest for achieving transparency and participation in the budget process has become part of the general rubric of national developments. By design and purpose, international policy makers and leaderships of emerging economies are pursuing new public financial management strategies to increase the role of oversight institutions such as Parliaments, to enhance economic performance and curb corruption in the public sector. At the heart of the new strategies lie the improvement of budget transparency and participation.

This thesis investigates the inner connection between politics and morality and the analytical challenges it has posed and still poses for political philosophy. In part one, I explore the problematic relationship between politics and morality as it has been conceived and analyzed by Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Weber. This exploration is a historical reconstruction, a ‘genealogy’, of four major philosophical accounts concerning the tension between the moral demands of politics and the moral demands of ‘ordinary’ life. The historical reconstruction aims at revealing the philosophical complexity of the problems that characterize the relationship between politics and morality. It is set to show that those problems have some basic perennial features which remain unresolved until nowadays. In part two, following the conclusions of the historical reconstruction, I make the central contention that the insoluble fragmentation of moral values that characterizes our world is central to the understanding of the inner connection between politics and morality. For this reason I analyze this connection from the perspective of moral pluralism, the philosophical tradition that conceives moral conflicts as the very essence of moral activity. My claim is that politics appears to be structurally opposed to specific types of moral values, because political moral values themselves are part of the fragmentation of morality. I support this claim with a further analysis of the moral divisions between the private, public and political spheres of conduct. My argument is that each of those spheres is permeated by a dominant type of moral values which is in permanent tension with the dominant types of values in the other two spheres of conduct. Finally, I make the case, that the usual aphorisms against the immorality of politicians and the famous concept of ‘dirty hands’ can be better understood when viewed as the inevitable result of the insoluble fragmentation of morality. I conclude, however, that the perennial attempts to achieve some sense of moral unity through politics indicate the special moral status we should attribute to political action.