This doctoral thesis is about the study of the social capital, its effects on the local development and on the socio-economic resilience of the Palestinians trapped in the East Jerusalem's al-'Eizariyah area. The transformation of al-'Eizariyah since 2002 through the Israeli encroachment on Palestinian land by instrumental use of the Separation Wall policies was analysed and re-state through the lenses of the sociological theory and concepts. Based on the accounts of life stories and interviews with various members of the al-'Eizariyah's former and present community and through the visual data of the changes in al-'Eizariyah and the areas adjacent to the Separation Wall a study of the Palestinian coping and survival strategies was undertaken. The thesis demonstrates how the reality of al-'Eizariyah was changed dramatically in the last two decades despite and in the opposite direction of the Oslo Accords of 1993. To be sure, al-‘Eizariyah, which is located two miles east of Jerusalem, had expanded to adjust to the economic boom of the early post-Oslo years coupled with the political expectations of it being part of the future Palestinian capital. This was disrupted by the failure of the Oslo Accords, and the construction of the Israeli Separation Wall in 2002, which served as an instrument of intimidation and harassment to make Palestinians leave Jerusalem, as this thesis demonstrates. The Wall did not only cut off al-'Eizariyah from the main road that used to connect East Jerusalem to Jericho. The Wall's more sinister and long-term damage has been in the physical and psychological isolation of al-‘Eizariyah and in preventing its residents from being fully integrated in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of the East Jerusalem and of the West Bank. This two-sided effect of the Separation Wall started when most of the people who used to work in East Jerusalem and Israel lost their Jobs, students could no longer study in Jerusalem and had to change schools; the sick no longer could use the healthcare facilities, etc. Former residents of al-'Eizariyah could no longer do any of these basic necessities neither their shopping and entertainment in Jerusalem freely without being humiliated with denial of access to Jerusalem based on the persons' ability to present a Blue ID at the checkpoint, the only ID that is recognized by the Israeli regime. While some social capital forms helped in coping with the difficulties caused by this new reality it was the difference in the pre- and post-Wall situations that were examined in order to understand the impact of the adversity represented by the Wall on the social capital of the Palestinians. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the implications of the construction of the Wall on the socio-economic life of al-‘Eizariyah residents and to study the Israel-Palestine conflict from sociological lens using a case study setting and qualitative analysis approach. This thesis demonstrates positive impact of the Wall on social capital types by where the bonding social capital became stronger yet the trend got reversed. At the community level, the challenges were too large to be handled only by bonding social capital. Therefore, there is a combined effort between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the local civil society associations and the private sector to overcome problems related to education, health care services, trade and labour in addition to social security caused by the Wall. It was found that bridging social capital and linking social capital were strongly present after the Wall was completed. Although civil society associations are strongly present in al-‘Eizariyah but because the Palestinian society is structured along patrimonial, familial, clannish, tribal and contradictory geographical cleavages, most of these associations work in a way that transformed the intended outcome of bridging social capital to some kind of bonding social capital as the beneficiaries and the participants are mostly from their family, clan members, or those who belong to the same political party, and not the community as a whole. However, observations and the empirical evidence show that bonding is stronger than bridging social capital. The social fragmentation caused by several social forces such as the local-stranger relationship, between the locals of al-‘Eizariyah and the displaced residents, prevented efficient cooperation in solving community problems. Lack of the sense of belonging is not only because the locals always express superiority over the displaced, but also because the displaced themselves do not want to lose their rooted original identity, especially the refugees who settled in the town after the 1948 war. This had a great overall impact on the unity of the Palestinian society especially that ‘the refugees’ communities constitute approximately 42 percent of the total population of the West Bank. The future challenge of the Palestinians in areas such as al-‘Eizariyah is to find ways of detecting de-fragmentation and manipulation policies and develop strategies that would prevent de-fragmentation of the Palestinians being orchestrated by the Israeli Wall policies and that only become apparent with a time lapse when it can be too late.

La ricerca si è occupata dei legami di solidarietà spontanea che si creano a partire dalle azioni volontarie messe in atto in una comunità territoriale. L’insieme di questi legami è stato considerato una risorsa sociale che ha la natura di bene pubblico ed che è in grado di favorire il benessere sociale di una società locale. Questa risorsa è stata concettualizzata attraverso la nozione di “capitale sociale solidale” e di essa si è tentato di comprenderne: 1) le specificità; 2) il suo processo di microfondazione; e infine 3) le sue implicazioni teoriche per una teoria dell’integrazione sociale. Il primo obiettivo è stato raggiunto mappando le azioni volontarie messe in atto nelle provincie di Trento e di Treviso. La mappa ha mostrato un quadro eterogeneo e diffuso di 119 azioni realizzate dalle principali categorie di attori della società locale. Per analizzare il processo di generazione di questa risorsa, le ragioni dei promotori sono state identificate grazie a 23 interviste biografiche. I risultati di queste interviste mostrano una pluralità di motivazioni che sostengono queste azioni e i limiti esplicativi della teoria della scelta razionale. Per quanto riguarda il terzo obiettivo, la riflessione ha cercato di chiarire la natura di bene pubblico del capitale sociale e l'utilità della nozione di capitale sociale solidale per i dibattiti sulla società civile e sulla coesione sociale. Da questo punto di vista, la ricerca ha messo in luce da una parte il contributo del capitale sociale solidale nella valorizzazione del legame sociale e, dall'altra, l'utilità della nozione nelle analisi della tradizione associativa interna al dibattito sulla società civile e nei modelli individualisti di tipo comunitario della coesione sociale. Infine, a partire dai risultati conseguiti vengono indicati tre percorsi di ricerca futuri da realizzarsi sia nel Nordest e sia nella regione francese Pays de la Loire.

La ricerca analizza una vicenda in cui si ipotizza in atto un fenomeno di erosione delle politiche del welfare state nel settore penale al fine di comprendere come reagiscono gli assistenti sociali e come definiscono la propria posizione professionale.

The EU enlargement policy aims to transform applicant countries into fully-fledged member states, committed to abiding by the EU acquis and able to take part in the EU decisionmaking and policy implementation processes. However, the contestation of the state, or contested statehood, has been identified as the key variable hindering Europeanisation in the Western Balkans. This has led the European Union (EU) to fall into cycles of mismanaged conditionality, such as in the police reform process and the constitutional reform process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet, the EU has learned to adapt, enacting practices of state building to cope with contested statehood. By bridging the literature on European integration, state building, and Europeanisation, this study traces the transformations of sovereignty and of the state throughout European integration, and identifies the polity ideas that underpin EU practices of ‘member state building’ in the notion of sovereignty as participation. Member state building is interested in reinforcing administrative capacities with the aim of participation in EU processes, while also enhancing the legitimacy of institutions via the export of consensus-generating mechanisms. Two case studies, exemplifying the two statehood dimensions of legitimacy and capacity, allow examining how the EU interacts with Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the framework of the Structured Dialogue on Justice and of the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance, the EU introduced in Bosnia and Herzegovina consensus-generating mechanisms, aimed at restoring both administrative capacities and domestic legitimacy of institutions. The role of the EU as an interested mediator and the emancipatory potential of the accession perspective set member state building apart from ‘liberal peace’ international state building. Member state building thus emerges as an enlargement-specific form of EU-led state building, allowing the EU to cope with contested statehood in its candidate countries and potential candidates and to build member states while integrating them.

This study investigates what’s known as the world’s largest human migration from rural to urban areas. It examines both the destinations and the origins of the mobility trajectories of Chinese internal migrant workers which is somewhat neglected by current literature. Based on a multi-sited ethnography of the daily life of migrant workers in arrays of social setting (sheds in construction sites, urban villages, factories, restaurants) in their urban stay as well as the well-known left behind population in a rural village, the thesis explores the social and economic changes that this mass regional mobility brought to both rural and urban China. The implication of this work lies in a comprehensive and thorough examination on the regional rural-urban migration. It contributes to a dynamic assess, which deserves to study further, by providing an analysis on all the agents involved in the context of Chinese rural-urban migration: the left behind population in villages, the migrant workers and the urban citizens in cities.

Over the last fifteen years, the energy policy of the European Union (EU) has changed significantly. It has become more cooperative and integrated across the borders of EU Member States and less preoccupied with the state-centred discourse of energy-supply security. The European Commission, in particular, has policised EU energy policy by re-framing it as a complex patchwork of many energy-related policy interventions. This shift took place in the aftermath of several critical events that affected Europe’s energy supply and jeopardised its energy security. Energy policisation occurred, in other words, when it was reasonable for EU Member States to securitise rather than integrate their energy policies. The core research question of this thesis addresses this apparent paradox: to what extent has EU energy policy become more integrated, and why has this change occurred when it was least expected? This study argues that the shift towards energy policisation has been discursive. The European Commission has been able to harness unprecedented windows of opportunity created by recent crises to re-frame energy policy according to its overarching understanding of EU integration and public policy-making. The Commission has promoted—for over forty years—a vision of energy policy that spans energy security, market competitiveness, environmental sustainability, and energy efficiency. Based on a bibliometric test, this thesis identifies the type of discursive ‘vehicles’ used by the Commission to diffuse its policy ideas and create consensus about its policy agenda. This thesis also argues that the Commission has been able to use diverse discursive tactics to challenge the prevailing energy policy narrative of the Member States and drive the policy-making process towards more integration. The two case studies analyse two instances of instrumental energy policisation. The case of the wind-power offshore grid projects developed in the North Sea during the last decade shows how the Commission managed to socialise other energy policy stakeholders into its own policy agenda and urge national governments to adopt a more integrated perspective on the issue at stake. The case of the Energy Efficiency Directive negotiations, ended successfully in late 2012, shows that the Commission has also been able to challenge the governments’ state-centred discourse more ‘frontally’. The Commission re-told the story of EU-wide energy cooperation as being so necessary as to force Member States to back away from their resolve, approve the Directive, and accept the binding constraints it contains. Ultimately, this thesis tells a story of continuity and change in EU energy policy. There has been continuity in the decades-long Commission’s advocacy for a more complex and integrated EU energy policy and in its guiding belief that public policy in Europe is, under all circumstances, best made at the EU rather than at the national level. There has been change in the sudden and unpredictable effect that crisis and shocks have had on the preferences of policy actors. By telling a story of variation in EU energy policy and successful discursive re-framing by the Commission, this thesis contributes to the on-going debate on the impact of non-material factors such as ideas, meaning, goals, and visions on the outcomes of policy-making. By combining bibliometric, process-tracing, and discourse analysis techniques, this thesis has sought to provide a more reliable and replicable operationalisation of ideational elements and has expanded the prospective agenda for more cross-policy research in EU studies and public policy analysis.

This study explains the causes of war outcomes from the perspective of the decision-making process. It challenges the “democratic victory theory,†which contends that democracies are more likely to win wars because they make better decisions about initiating wars and have wider public support. Existing criticisms of this theory contest its assertion that voluntary public support and caution about initiating wars are unique to democracies and its reliance on statistical correlations. This study shows that these criticisms have not been adequate, and identifies significant flaws in the democratic victory theory in scope, application, and method and offers an alternative explanation of the quality of the decision-making process and war outcomes. I use the groupthink and organizational theories to establish criteria for assessing the quality of the decision-making process independently from regime type. I propose an alternative explanation of the quality of the decision-making process drawing on the balance-of-power theory and group dynamics. The main argument is that when external environment poses a serious threat to a state’s security and a state’s leadership is cohesive, its leaders are more likely to engage in a high-quality decision-making process, which offers a greater chance of victory. This argument not only offers a more persuasive account of why democracies win wars, but also explains why non-democracies can win wars or achieve standoffs. These propositions are tested in a case study analysis of four Arab-Israeli wars – June 1967, Attrition 1969-70, October 1973, and July 2006 – using process-tracing and counterfactual methods. The analysis reveals that democratic and non-democratic regimes do not operate in the way hypothesized by the democratic victory theory. Instead, the quality of the decision-making process is influenced by the extent to which a state is facing a serious security threat and its leadership is cohesive. The case studies also show that war outcomes vary – victory, draw, or defeat – according to the leadership’s performance of the decision-making criteria, which plays an important role as relative to other factors affecting war outcomes, such as material power, weapons technology, military strategy, civil-military relations, and national culture.

This research focuses on civic participation and its role in an emerging democracy context, and examines the forms, patterns, trends, obstacles to and opportunities for civic participation, as well as the impact of civic participation on democratization and development processes in Armenia, a post-soviet country in the South Caucasus, that has embarked on simultaneous transition toward democracy and free market economy since its independence in 1991. The dissertation suggests that civic participation is a key ingredient for successful transformations and effective reforms in both political and economic sectors in the post-soviet context of Armenia, and, therefore, more attention, as well as more vigorous efforts and resources should be directed to building civic capacity of the people and organizations in this setting. It is argued, that while, obviously, not a panacea for all development and democratization related challenges, civic engagement has a strong potential to foster those processes and contribute to the achievement of more effective, inclusive and sustainable solutions in the areas of democracy promotion and development in the transition countries. The original contribution of the thesis is an empirical study of civic participation in Armenia and assessment of its determinants and the impact on democracy and development related outcomes in the country. The primary research includes a study of civic participation in 10 rural and small urban communities across the country, and provides comprehensive information and insights into civic participation forms, pattern, determinants, obstacles and opportunities at the community level. Civic participation is further studied by examining the major civic initiatives and campaigns that took place in the country over the recent five years (2010-2015) and assessment of their outcomes and impact. The study looks closely at the determinants of civic participation, both the individual level factors and the obstacles and opportunities provided by the institutional context, and, in particular, examines the relationship of civic participation with social capital, civic education, and use of internet and communication technology (ICT). Civic participation habits and trends among the youth are explored by means of surveys conducted in 2013 and 2014. An innovative measure – a Civic Participation Score (CP Score) is introduced and computed, based on a pre-defined and operationalized set of indicators, and a Civic Participation Index (CP Index) is calculated for monitoring the changes, in separate indicator categories and overall, and analysing civic participation trends over time. The research sheds light on civic participation practice and trends in Armenia and builds a framework for analysis of civic engagement in an emerging democracy context, by identifying the participants, their motives, forms of civic engagement, its impact, as well as challenges and opportunities for participation. The study highlights the specific needs and opportunities for further civic capacity building and lays down a roadmap for further research and action in this direction.

The new wave of global immigration to Europe has increased the urgency to discern which aspects of school context and of social interactions within the educational system need to be strengthened in order to create an environment where both immigrant and native students can perform at their best. Looking at educational ambitions allows studying educational performance, in order to estimate the gap between students of migrant backgrounds and natives, and to measure the social integration of immigrants’ children. My presentation aims to identify which resources and interactions within the school environment need to be strengthened with the purpose of improving educational expectations and aspirations of immigrants’ children and natives. First, I explore to what extent school resources, parental involvement in school and family environment shape educational expectations of migrants and natives in two European countries: Belgium and Italy. After delineating this international perspective, I deepen the analysis of the Italian case. I investigate to what extent the expectations and aspirations of the children of immigrants are influenced by the educational expectations of their native schoolmates using data on children of immigrants living in Italy and attending their final year of middle school (8th grade). In the final part of my presentation, I tackle the challenging issue of the impact of the presence of immigrants’ children on the educational aspirations of natives.

This thesis is about state and society relations in Central Asia. It examines statehood comparatively in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Despite having made different political, economic, and institutional choices at independence in 1991, these countries arrived at the same outcome today: an incomplete state. In framing the problem as the incomplete state, this thesis shifts the conventional emphasis away from symptoms of state weakness toward those processes that contribute to it. It highlights the fact that the state can simultaneously be both strong and weak, omnipresent and absent. It is the blurring of the line between state and non-state, public and private, legal and illegal, formal and informal which matters for a better understanding of the state. Drawing from Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, this thesis suggests that these shadow areas generate processes of interstitial emergence that may either undermine or strengthen the state. The outcome generated by such processes is dependent on the balance between state autonomy and state embeddedness. The thesis argues that the incomplete state is a result of three sets of factors—historical, external, and local—that directly or indirectly produce processes that are counter-productive to the current state-building process. Specifically, it focuses on the societal legacy of the Soviet statehood, the strategies of state-building provided by external actors, and the balance of power between rival local elites. It demonstrates how each of these sets of factors contribute to the creation or development of sites of social resistance and the chasm between the state and society in each of the three given cases. Further, it identifies three important processes. Firstly, structural changes taken for granted following the dissolution of the Soviet Union have not necessarily altered cross-border societal interdependence at the grassroots. Secondly, the strategies pursued by external actors have indirectly created isolated pockets of land, empowered community-based civil activism and facilitated informal trade. Finally, while state elites strengthened the institution of the state, they turned it into a tool for legitimizing illicit revenues rather than a means to increase its infrastructural power. States and societies in the region have become isolated from one another. These states, empowered only in the institutional sense, have become empty shells. The societies, empowered without the state, have become captives within a game of survival. It seems that the state cannot be complete without becoming social.