En mai 2010, l'Etat du Sénégal se dotait d'une loi instituant la parité entre hommes et femmes. L'objet de ce travail a été d'interroger la manière et les raisons pour lesquelles la question de l'introduction en droit du principe de la parité a constitué un enjeu politique pour le mouvement d'émancipation de la question féminine. Comme nombre de politiques intéressant la problématique des femmes, la loi sur la parité est formellement justifiée par la nécessité de mettre en œuvre une dynamique de genre. Nous avons alors interrogé la capacité du genre, tel qu'il a été élaboré en Occident, à refléter l'organisation des rapports sociaux de sexe au Sénégal. En effet, la catégorie du genre a émergé en Occident au milieu du siècle dernier comme reflet des bouleversements à la fois des relations entre hommes et femmes et des représentations sociales liées à la différenciation des sexes. Le questionnement intellectuel, culturel et sociohistorique de la thèse a alors conduit à déconstruire le concept de genre dans l'objectif de faire émerger les ressorts sociaux, politiques et culturels qui l'appuyaient. Il s'est ensuite agi d'analyser la manière dont le genre, en tant que construction des relations de pouvoir entre hommes et femmes, s'exprimait au Sénégal. Quel y était le lien entre relations de pouvoir entre les sexes et rapport au pouvoir. Comment le genre, tel qu'il s'exprime dans la société sénégalaise, rencontre le genre, tel que l'élite intellectuelle et politique, l'a construit comme catégorie ? Ce questionnement a pu être élaboré à l'appui de la mobilisation qui s'est exprimée en faveur de l'inscription de la parité en droit afin de faire émerger les enjeux qui s'y manifestaient

Cette thèse propose un modèle théorique capable de rendre compte du passage d'un système international à un système interne. Elle s'appuie sur des études empiriques empruntées à l'histoire de l'intégration européenne. Son modèle est fondé sur deux facteurs principaux: la balance entre offensive et défensive et le degré d'interdépendance entre acteurs. Lorsque l'offensive a l'avantage, les acteurs sont incités à résoudre leurs problèmes d'interdépendance via l'usage de la violence, qui s'avère efficace. Ce n'es que lorsque la défense a l'avantage que l'interdépendance peut conduire à l'intégration. Cependant, cette condition n'est pas suffisante. Lorsque l'interdépendance est faible, les acteurs cherchent à la limiter en vue de préserver leur indépendance. Ce n'est que lorsque la défense a l'avantage et que l'interdépendance est prépondérante et incontournable que l'intégration peut être une solution viable. Ce modèle est utilisé pour expliquer le passage d'une stratégie traditionnelle d'indépendance à une politique de délégation à des institutions supranationales, à travers trois catégories d'acteurs: les gouvernements, les parlementaires et le juges. L'intégration gouvernementale est étudiée à travers les origines de la Communauté européenne du charbon et de l'acier (1951) et l'échec de la Communauté européenne de défense (1954). L'intégration parlementaire est étudiée à travers les premiers renforcements du Parlement européen en matière budgétaire (1970) et législative (1986). Enfin, l'intégration juridique est étudiée à travers l'évolution des juridictions allemandes et françaises quant à la reconnaissance de la primauté du droit communautaire.

Cette thèse interroge l'existence d'une utopie environnementale de coopération entre Nature et Technique dans le secteur de l'énergie, qu'il s'agisse d'énergie renouvelable au Royaume-Uni ou d'énergie nucléaire en France. Dans la première partie de ce travail, nous avons établi que les systèmes énergétiques, par le biais de projets de coopération entre Nature et Technique, offraient un tableau pertinent des concurrences, et de plus en plus des coopérations entre Nature et Technique dans les discours et les pratiques étudiés, et ce en France. La deuxième partie de ce travail a consisté à démontrer dans quelle mesure les résistances à ces vision~ de la Nature et de la Technique en coopération sont plus fortes en France qu'au Royaume-Uni, car ces visions en coopération, comme nous l'avons montré en première partie, sont plus explicitement présentes en France qu'au Royaume-Uni. Dans la dernière partie de cette recherche, l'objectif a été enfin de démontrer dans quelle mesure ces représentations de la Nature et de la Technique en coopération traduisaient la rencontre d'idéologies technologiques propres au champ énergétique et de visions utopiques de l'environnement. Nous avons donc réussi à démontrer qu'au Royaume-Uni, cette vision utopique de l'environnement était davantage saisie comme une opportunité pour les acteurs du projet de centrale houlomotrice, tandis qu'en France, cette vision utopique de l'environnement menaçait l'idéologie technologique incarnée par l'énergie nucléaire.

Within the dominant culture, culture tends to be given more weight to explain the behaviour of members of cultural minorities than members of the dominant culture. Drawing on the work of Sherene Razack, Leti Volpp and Anne Phillips, I examine two possibilities as to why this may occur: racism and multicultural overreach. I then determine that there needs to be an approach which public authorities can employ to unpack the relationship between culture and autonomy in an individual’s decision making process. Drawing on the work of Will Kymlicka, Natalie Stoljar and Susan Meyers, and utilizing resources from liberal multiculturalism and relational autonomy, I develop a method to assess the relationship between culture and autonomy which I term critical distance. I analyze four cases involving the decision making process of culture minorities and use critical distance to assess how culture and autonomy inform an individual’s decision making process.

This study of public service reform examined how the Liberal BC government attempted to convince public servants to adopt private sector-type work values (referred to in this study as contemporary values). To accomplish this goal, government top advisers designed a change management program for senior managers known as Public Service Renewal. The research problem was framed as a special case of change management to investigate what until now have been unanswered questions on the adoption of new, contemporary work values in the public service. The study asked questions about the government’s reform strategies, change management processes, rhetorical tactics, and the extent to which values currently held by public servants reflected new public service work values promoted by the BC government. The main findings of this study are that BC’s senior public servants hold strong traditional Westminster-based values concerning public servants’ commitment to serve the public good, be respectful of the government of the day, behave responsibly and be willing to be held accountable and above all, take pride in public service integrity. The value profile of senior public service managers presented in this study shows these traditional values to be relatively robust as there was only minimal adoption of contemporary values. The study also highlights the important role played by socio-demographic variables in determining public servants’ orientation towards their work values. There were significant value differences between men and women, between managers who worked in social and land ministries and between managers older and younger than 45 years of age. Other value differences were found between managers engaged at the (senior) strategic levels in the organization and those who ranked lower in the hierarchy, and between managers who have been with the government for more than 15.5 years and those who have lesser seniority. The research further established empirical support for the construct of contemporary values and suggests that traditional values may be weakening, presumably as the result of the latest wave of public sector reform known as the New Public Management. Based on these key findings this study concludes that the BC government’s effort to encourage the public service to adopt contemporary work values did not succeed. Several factors contributed to this lack of success including the normative perspective of the New Public Management which holds the unproven view that private sector management principles create a more effective and efficient public service. Other contributing factors included incoming politicians wary of the public service, inconsistencies between rhetoric and reality, fragmentation and ultimate demise of the original vision of Public Service Renewal, shortcomings of the implementation process, and the persistence of traditional public sector work values.

In this thesis I explore the practices of ethnic tourism on three island communities of Lake Titicaca, Peru. I employ ethnic tourism to mean the process whereby communities, peoples, or bodies are produced as sites of tourist attraction (objects of touristic gaze). Through various temporal and spatial processes of othering, these formed objects are produced as performers of a ‘tourable’ difference, primarily defined by a removal from the present space of politics through their representations as objects of the past. Thus the privilege of the mobile tourist is (re)inscribed in the practice of touring the stable difference of the ‘toured’ and appropriating this into the formation of a more cosmopolitan self. This story, which reflects a common concern for touring as a (neo)-imperial/colonial encounter (particularly in the ‘developing’ world) is, however, insufficient for accessing the intensely contested politics of local experiences of the tour. This is particularly the case when we attempt to discuss the meaning of ‘being toured’, how this identity is experienced, and its political implications. Through an exploration of the practices of local tour guides and toured communities on Lake Titicaca, coupled with theoretical concerns for critical approaches to identity, subjectivity, and agency, I begin to explore ways of talking about the toured as constitutive and active negotiators within touristic space. Specifically, I highlight how ‘difference’ is governed and contested through practices of performing and guiding. I also reflect on how these practices (re)articulate or challenge the authorization of particular ‘differences’ as objects of the tour.

This thesis is on the transformation of Turco-Georgian relations since the early 1990s. In recent years, these relations have been taken to a next level in light of the trans-national cooperation that resulted in the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. With a narrow focus on the Turco-Georgian border, this study attempts to understand the trajectory of the improving relations between the two countries through a reconceptualised understanding of the border. By emphasising both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of borders, this thesis tries to steer away from the zero-sum approaches and understand the nature of Turco-Georgian as a complex multiplicity.

This report is an investigation of the strategic mentality of the Chinese government during the current U.S.-led unipolar world. It aims to determine whether this mentality is prone to challenge American predominance and reject the dominant rules, values, and structure of the interstate system or is willing to cooperate and accept the U.S. hegemony and the current status-quo of the global community. To understand the Chinese strategic mindset, this report examines China’s strategic culture, political reliance on nationalism, and unique perceptions of the threats and opportunities in the international environment. These three factors each possess contrastive motivations that encourage the Chinese leadership to adopt policies that both accept and reject the current unipolar world. Such dualistic factors mould a contrastive strategic mentality amongst the Chinese leadership that, while overly antagonistic towards the structure and certain values of the current interstate system, is willing to adopt both revisionist and status-quo foreign policies.

The modern state system has a specific answer to the question of where and how political action can occur: in the state and through citizenship. State sovereignty underpins the basic discourse of who belongs and who speaks in political communities, which is said to have important implications for those without claim to citizenship, namely the refugee. Giorgio Agamben‘s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is an important discussion of how the logic of sovereignty produces the refugee in the contemporary international state system. However, I will argue in this paper that this narrative, like many others, eclipses moments of refugee agency and reproduces the refugee in apolitical terms by binging a particular conception of the political to bear. This paper critically engages with the writings of Immanuel Kant and Giorgio Agamben to explore how this discourse of political community (state) and political identity (citizenship) has emerged historically and is continually reinforced. I argue that these narratives fail to see the politicality of so called spaces of abjection which are continually reshaping and reforming perceived understandings of the political.

This thesis is an attempt to articulate a ‘Relational’ ontology, and in turn relate this type of cultural worldview to Foucault’s philosophy and methodology. The major thesis being offered here is that Foucault can be read as a ‘Relational’ ontologist. The hope is that when he is understood from this standpoint, the unique methodology he operates with, one which allows us to view our social worlds as cultural, historical, and political products, will be seen as a coherent, authoritative, and legitimate challenge to the normalized way we envision our existence.