This study is an analysis and critique of the epistemological foundations of the emerging political economy approach in urban studies. The focus on epistemology locates this project squarely within the realm of philosophy. Broadly speaking an epistemological discussion is a philosophical discourse on the conditions of the production of knowledge. It centers on the origins, methods and limits of knowledge and is concerned with how we come to know rather than what we know. An epistemological critique is a theoretical exercise whose aim it is to engage a theory in systematic dialogue. That dialogue takes place at the level of the author’s conscious discussion, but it also engages the messages embedded in the shadows. Hence, a critique involves an attempt to identify contradictions, strains, or dissonances to be found in a theory. Urban political economy is here seen as a response to the shortcomings of discipline bounded urban studies and the crisis generated for urban studies by real world events. Those events generated conceptual and theoretical problems and ultimately led to efforts at transcendence. The works of Manuel Castells and David Harvey were selected to represent that transcendence because they more than any others attempt to provide urban political economy with philosophical substance. This dissertation shows that Castells’ is a structuralist epistemology that flows from the works of Louis Althusser. Althusser’s epistemology provides Castells with a critical theory of reading but his structuralism is distainful towards historical analytical concerns and is problematical to the extent to which it eliminates the human factor and downplays the role of consciousness is social dynamics. Castells first embraces and then rejects this emphasis. Thus, his is in many critical respects a revision of the basic principles of structuralism. Hervey, on the other hand, comes to urban political economy through liberal geography. His is an attempt to transcend his earlier liberal roots while appropriating key dimensions of structuralist Marxism. The result is an eclectic epistemology which is still bounded by liberal formulations. In both cases the conclusion is that without certain revisions these authors do not provide us with a epistemology that is philosophically sound and facilitative of unambiguous research.

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This dissertation is a study in literature and politics and proceeds by tracing out the major political themes of McCarthys body of fiction and analyzing them toward their logical conclusions. The critical approach in this narrative-based anthropology looks at man first in profound isolation and then progresses through his novels in sequence, in an increasingly social context. McCarthys later fiction displays an increasingly affirmative view of the sacredness of human life and of the basic impulse toward community in even the most unreflective of characters; an essential characteristic of humans. To call any of McCarthys works a political novel would be absurd. Apocalyptic fiction has rarely, if ever, been overtly or consistently political in terms of its subject matter or intended audience. Rather, I find in McCarthys novels an artistic or poetic utterance that speaks to discomforting realities of experience while simultaneously sublimating the particularities of experience, however immediate, into a mythic plane. In this textual world, with its apocalyptic backdrop and mythical sublime, I construct an analytical framework for exploring the political ideas that appear and reappear throughout all of McCarthys work. Though interrelated, narrative, nature, history, witnessing, agency, and order are broad conceptual categories within which I discuss essential political questions. McCarthys political vision demonstrates the general failure of politics to do what politics is supposed to do. The political or sovereign power in McCarthys world may be said to attempt to provide for an ordered environment for human existence, even with nominal liberty. But it fails in any meaningful way to protect men from each other and from themselves or to advance any notion of the good life. Indeed, his reader is frequently left to ponder exactly what might even be said to constitute the good life in McCarthys fiction. Is this failure of the political the result of some deficiency in our laws or political institutions? No. The failure results from our gross misunderstanding of our place in the order of the world. It results from our inability to accept our fundamental loneliness in the world.

Discussion of rhetoric surrounding the role of women in Iran.

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Contrary to the doctrine of sovereign immunity, a long standing principle of international law and international relations that protects states from being hauled before the courts of other states, civil lawsuits against state-sponsors of terrorism allow for just that. They permit U.S. citizens to sue certain states in U.S. courts for acts of terrorism committed outside the United States. These lawsuits do not take the form of traditional lawsuits as they are not designed to function within a litigation model that aims to compensate victims for injury, deter future bad acts, and provide forums for the establishment of truth. Instead, they are about politics. These lawsuits are a relatively new tool in the foreign policy toolbox, their framework having been meted out over the last 35 years as congress and several presidents have battled for control over it. The primary factor that continues to drive the lawsuits, and thus determines which branch wins the battle over their framework at any particular point in time, is the influence of terrorism victims advocacy groups. The power of this influence is best evidenced in three ways: (1) the battle over a right to sue states; (2) the battle over control of foreign state assets to execute terrorism judgments against states; and (3) the battle over control of diplomatic negotiations to recover unpaid judgments. The primary result of advocacy groups influence is a framework that places severe constraints on the foreign policy bureaucracy. It places foreign policy outside normal foreign policy-making channels and in the hands of the courts. The long-term implication of these lawsuits is that they unintentionally affect foreign policy through the court system, the very issue that for centuries, the doctrine of sovereign immunity has tried to avoid.

Across the Latin American region, invalid votes regularly âwinâ over candidates from smaller political parties. This dissertation assesses how individual and contextual factors affect individuals' decision to assume the costs of turning out to vote but then choose not to select a candidate, and to what political effect. First, I find that most invalid votes in Latin American presidential elections are cast as a protest signal that reflects disappointment with specific policy outcomes or with a particular slate of candidate offerings rather than with democracy itself. Second, I argue and show that elite polarization, the number of candidates competing, and flux in the partisan options shape invalid voting by changing the ease with which citizens navigate politics, as well as their perceptions of the representativeness of the political space. Third, I find that efforts to mobilize the invalid vote have occurred in more than twenty Latin American presidential elections since 1980, mostly as an expression of discontent with candidate options, or with corruption in politics, although evidence of accompanying increases in government corruption is limited. Finally, I show that small ideological and radical parties respond to historical rates of invalid voting in making strategic decisions about where to enter competition in Peru.

This dissertation draws upon research in political science, psychology, and sociology to explore how inter-and intra-group social status influences political attitudes across divergent groups and issue areas, such as religion and gender. Using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze both existing and original data, I find that concern about group status is an important force behind support for group-based policies. In other words, group members desire social esteem and adjust their policy preferences in an effort bolster both their groupâs social position and their position within the group.