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Seven long years of conflict in Syria with humanitarian catastrophe as consequence.The UN and the blocked Security Council, with the inability to address the deteriorating political andhumanitarian situation in Syria, actualizes the former Secretary-General Kofi Annan's words beforethe General Assembly in 2000:"... if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should werespond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica - to gross and systematic violations of human rights thataffect every prescription of our common humanity?"From the Cold War until today, the UN system has failed to live up to the high expectations basedon the fundamental principles of the Charter and international law, which can be attributed to theimbalance between the General Assembly and the Security Council, as well as within the Councilbetween the five permanent members with individual veto and the chosen six.The question is not new. The tension in power balance and decision-making in the UN has existedsince the organization's formation. Interestingly in this context, the resolution Uniting for Peace,which was adopted in 1950, has as its starting point the unrestricted power of veto in relation to theGeneral Assembly's responsibility for peace and security.The resolutions Responsibility to Protect and Uniting for Peace become important and necessaryfor the understanding of the conflict in Syria, but also for a reform work motivated by humanitarianlaw. The meaning of the concepts of sovereignty, veto and erga omnes is therefore decisive in thebalance between de lege lata and de lege ferenda, with can be clarified by de lege interpretata.This essay will try to make the connection between these concepts more intelligible.

First Nations communities in northern Ontario continue to grapple with food insecurity despite community leaders, social justice activists, reporters, and scholars drawing attention to this multi-faceted issue for decades. Improving food security has been approached by many different actors and directions, such as neo-liberal initiatives to make market food more financially accessible, alternative food procurement programs such as incorporating greenhouses and gardening, and food system resurgent efforts such as increasing funding and training for land-based harvesting practices. Compared to food security, which focuses on access to affordable and nutritious food, food sovereignty offers a more compelling framework to understand food shortages in the settler-colonial context of northern Ontario as it emphasizes the roots of that insecurity, specifically at the way that colonial impositions disrupted Indigenous food systems. Using a community-based participatory methodology within a decolonial feminist theoretical lens and a community of practice of political ecology, this thesis will explore the ways that First Nations communities in northern Ontario are working against and within colonial impositions to improve access to traditional foods in their communities. I will examine some of the tensions and opportunities community members experience and the various approaches they are using or imagining for the future. Lastly, I will explore the ways that the concept of food sovereignty risks becoming symbolic in northern Ontario unless it is accompanied by movements towards land restitution. At the same time, I will argue that food and land sovereignty are inextricably linked, and that practicing Indigenous food systems can lead to food sovereignty with or without government approved land restitution. Finally, I will suggest that sovereignty of and through food may be a more appropriate voicing or inversion of the term to more explicitly acknowledge that food sovereignty and land restitution are inherently and intimately tied.

This dissertation argues that the Anglo-Egyptian colonial encounter of 1805-1954 colonized Ottoman Egypt through the introduction of Western calculative technologies such as the census, accounting and auditing. These calculative technologies reorganized the community by usurping its powers and endowing it in the state. They replaced prior negotiated forms of enumeration in which the community organized itself and its information gathering apparatuses such as collective taxation, cadastral surveys and pious philanthropic endowments. The first chapter tracks the birth of the census in Egypt and the introduction of a new modality of power. The second chapter shows that pious Muslim endowments were once the predecessor to the joint-stock corporation, but without its surplus extracting mechanism and accumulation ethic. For the state to be born, these endowments had to be seized – usurping the community’s enumerative powers. The third chapter argues that Egypt was granted sovereignty in 1840 based on its ability to pay its colonial financial obligations and financial reform. The fourth chapter explores a court case filed in 1924 by Nathan Rothschild, who sued to guarantee that Egypt continued to pay its debt obligations, making Egypt subservient to a colonial form of sovereignty even after independence in 1922. Chapter five closes by reflecting on postcolonial sovereignty after British evacuation of Egypt in 1954. It argues that Britain set the terms of decolonization by using Egyptian financial obligations and sterling balances deposited in London as bargaining chips.

Between 1845 and 1848, the United States doubled the size of its land holdings in North America, as Texas, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and other western regions were placed under the umbrella of U.S. sovereignty. Echoing John L. O’Sullivan’s famous phrase, historians have deemed these acquisitions “Manifest Destiny,” and have assumed that U.S. expansion – whether for good or ill – was foreordained. Yet this understanding fundamentally fails to take into account the history of the decade prior to 1846, when Americans throughout the continent believed that it was more likely that the United States would not expand beyond its borders. Examining five groups of Americans operating at the nations geographic and/or social margins, this dissertation argues that these groups hoped to achieve sovereignty outside of the United States. Nurtured by Jacksonian rhetoric that celebrated local government and personal ambition, and wary of – and at times running from – a United States mired in depression and uncertainty, these Americans were, in effect, forming their own “breakaway republics.” To validate their goal of self-sovereignty, breakaway republicans looked to the independent Republic of Texas, often referring to Texas to explain their objectives, or looking to Texas as an ally in achieving them. Between 1836 and 1845 – what this dissertation defines as “the Texas Moment” – Texas’ independent existence presupposed a different map of North America, where peoples of the northern, southern, and western borderlands carved out polities for themselves. With Texas in mind, even Americans who did not share the goals of breakaway republicans believed that independent American-led polities on the continent were likely, acceptable, and perhaps even desired. However, to a cabal of Democratic expansionists and James K. Polk in particular, this future was unacceptable. After winning the presidency after an unlikely series of contingencies in 1844, Polk and his allies laid the groundwork for a dramatic expansion of the U.S. state – and thereby a dramatic expansion of U.S. territory. Their actions ended the Texas Moment, thereby subsuming the actions of breakaway republicans and hiding their collective existence from later historians. Ultimately, the events of the mid-1840s were hardly the logical culmination of America’s expansionist destiny, but a profound rupture of the status quo. / History

This thesis investigates the historical relationship between understandings of human emotion, and how they manifest in our understanding of the political. Specifically, this thesis returns to the presentation of individual political psychology in ancient Greece (Thucydides, Aristotle), the 17th and 18th centuries (Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant), and the 20th century (Schmitt, Fukuyama, Lebow) to illuminate how these understandings have shaped our idea of Sovereignty as an idea, institution, and practice. By turning to the rich history in political thought on emotion and affect, this thesis demonstrates a consistent and prolonged constitutive relationship between presentations of individual political psychology and international political order. This thesis also rehabilitates the full scope of affective insights into political phenomena— by turning to literature on rhetoric and aesthetics—in order to open up new space to critique common understandings of Sovereignty. Moreover, given that the institution and concept of Sovereignty is central to research in the disciplines of International Relations and Political Theory, this thesis also argues for a much-needed closure of intellectual space between these two branches of Political Science. In short, this thesis demonstrates the centrality of the politics of affect and the divergent and disparate pictures of individual political psychology that are taken for granted in defenses and critiques of the concept of Sovereignty. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation examines a series of catalogues for Inuit art exhibitions held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), spanning from 1967 to 2017. I argue that the discursive conventions of settler-Canadian art appreciation, especially those geared towards Inuit creative production, have resonances with the political strategies that Canada uses to prove effective occupation—a term from international law—of the Arctic. My work intervenes in this context by showing how art appreciation encourages modes of effective occupation that are not obviously political, insofar as these modes operate in the realm of affect. I first develop a critical framework inspired by Glen Coulthard’s concept of colonial recognition politics, to demonstrate that there is an affirmative recognition politics at work in the WAG catalogues. I then theorize that catalogues’ tendency to oscillate between an ethnographic (contextualist) analysis and an aesthetic (non-contextualist) analysis produces a tension that orients patrons towards the North accordance with Canada’s position on Arctic geopolitics. Building on the work of Eva Mackey, I argue that a mixed ethnographic-aesthetic view of Inuit art activates a particularly expedient form of belonging from afar in settler patron-readers, whereby they are encouraged to feel as if they are of the North, while never having to be there. My third chapter attends to how the WAG narrates the dramatic social transformations that Inuit experienced in the mid-20th century. The catalogues implicitly invalidate many Inuit’s experience of settler-colonial intervention by suggesting that the move to sedentary communities, often at the hands of the settler state, was inevitable and even desirable. This work provides strategies for critiquing instances of settler benevolence that are unique to the art world, and offers a template for how to approach exhibition catalogues as a genre—both of which are areas of scholarship that have been hitherto neglected. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In this dissertation, I look at a series of catalogues for Inuit art exhibitions held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), spanning from 1967 to 2017. I argue that the discursive conventions of settler-Canadian art appreciation, especially those geared towards Inuit creative production, have resonances with the political strategies that Canada uses to prove effective occupation—a term from international law—of the Arctic. My research intervenes in this context by showing how art appreciation encourages modes of effective occupation that are not obviously political, insofar as these modes operate in the realm of affect. The resulting work models some strategies for critiquing forms of settler benevolence that are unique to the art world, and offers a template for how to approach exhibition catalogues as a genre—both of which are underdeveloped areas of scholarship.

Though it is often taken for granted with an assumed naturalness, settler colonial sovereignty relies on the settler state’s realization of Indigenous territorial dispossession, and the erasure of indigeneity. More than singular or historical events, dispossession and erasure are ongoing, and are best understood as contemporary, and structural, features of settler governance because of the continued existence of Indigenous nations. As a result, seemingly stable settler states (such as Canada) are in a constant state of insecurity, due to Indigenous nations’ competing claims of authority. As such, settler states are continually working to (re)produce their own sovereign authority, and legitimacy. This text argues that knowledge is central to the (re)production of settler sovereignty, and hence, settler colonialism. Understood this way, knowledge is both produced and also productive. What we ‘know’ is not only framed by the cosmologies and ontologies through which we make meaning of the world, but it also serves as an organizing tool, structuring what interventions we imagine to be possible. Focusing on government policymaking, this text documents the erasure of Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and imaginaries from settler colonial governance practices. It does so through an analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Survey, the settlement of, and territorial allotment in, British Columbia and provincial land management policies such as the Forest and Range Evaluation Program. Using this empirical work, it argues that this erasure enables the reification of settler imaginaries over Indigenous territory, which in turn creates the conditions within which settler colonial authority is legitimized and sovereignty continually remade through policy interventions. While the text largely centres on territory in what is today Canada, it also offers a view into the way in which (settler) coloniality more broadly is continually upheld and remade. Indeed, when viewed through the lens of a global colonial order, the continual remaking of settler sovereignty enables the constitution of international and global politics. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / For many, Canada as a multicultural and inclusive country stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic Oceans, and north to the Arctic circle is taken for granted. However, what we recognize as Canada in 2020 has only existed since the 1999 formation of the Territory of Nunavut, and even the territory that comprises Canada only came into formation with Newfoundland and Labrador’s 1949 entry into Confederation. This is to say that Canada in its current form is not natural. Rather, it was constructed over time through the incorporation and colonization of Indigenous lands and territories. This dissertation argues that despite an official discourse of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, and the need to renew settler Canada’s ‘most important’ relationship, colonization remains ongoing. Looking to federal demographic statistics and provincial land use and management policy, it argues that settler authority being continually re-made through the government knowing Indigenous peoples and their territories in ways that legitimize colonization as the normal pursuit of “peace, order and good government.”

This thesis examines the relationship between China and Zambia through an in-depth study of Chinese investments and loans, focusing specifically on Special Economic Zones (SEZs). The central research question investigates whether China’s economic involvement in Zambia fosters mutual development through interdependence or contributes to neocolonialism. Chinese loans to Zambia have been substantial, enabling significant infrastructure projects. However, these loans have also led to increased debt dependency, limiting Zambia's economic sovereignty. The frequent need for loan forgiveness highlights the sustainability issues of this financial model. Chinese investments in Zambia, particularly in SEZs, aim to stimulate economic growth. While these investments have led to job creation and infrastructure development, there is criticism that they primarily benefit Chinese interests and perpetuate an extractive economic model. China's involvement in Zambia raises concerns about political influence. The dependence on Chinese loans and investments can potentially undermine Zambia's political sovereignty, as seen in instances where Chinese financial support has continued despite Zambia’s debt crisis. The influx of Chinese companies and workers has had mixed social effects. While creating employment, it has also sparked debates about labor conditions and environmental practices. The balance between economic benefits and social costs remains a contentious issue. This thesis employs both neocolonialism and interdependence as theoretical frameworks to analyze these dynamics. Neocolonialism helps in understanding the power imbalances and economic dependency that may arise from China's strategic investments. In contrast, the interdependence perspective highlights the potential for mutual benefits and collaborative economic growth. Overall, the relationship between China and Zambia is complex, characterized by both opportunities for development and risks of dependency. The results show that China shows slightly more neocolonialistic tendencies, rather than working towards interdependence.