<p>The Chronica regni Gothorum is the first Latin national history of Sweden. Completed after 1471 by a canon of Uppsala, Ericus Olai, it testifies to the articulation at the Swedish arch see of the dominant political issues of the day: the status of the Swedish realm in the union with Denmark-Norway, and the relations between the king, aristocracy and ecclesiastical leadership. This thesis analyses the discourse on authority in the Chronica. It investigates the normative basis of Ericus’s treatment of contemporary political issues as a source for the social-political outlooks of Sweden’s ecclesiastical power elite, a group not previously studied in this respect. In particular, it argues for the importance of two prescriptive assumptions on social order, which lie at the heart of the authority discourse in the Chronica: God divided the world into self-governing peoples and realms, and He instituted the lay and clerical orders as parallel hierarchies of societal authority.</p><p>The thesis situates the production of the Chronica within the educational concerns of the Uppsala institution. It scrutinizes the commonplaces – derived from various fields of knowledge – through which Ericus articulated his dualist and nationalist assumptions. The realization of these notions in his historical account is examined in sections of the text where matters of importance for the Uppsala church are evident. Special attention is paid to Ericus’s account of the royal martyr, St Erik, the so-called Engelbrekt rebellion, and the contemporary strife between the Uppsala church and the kings. The thesis ends with a study of the reception of the Chronica in the 1520s, a time when the Reformation and the consolidation of a strong national monarchy in Sweden brought the authority issues addressed by Ericus to conclusion.</p>

The Chronica regni Gothorum is the first Latin national history of Sweden. Completed after 1471 by a canon of Uppsala, Ericus Olai, it testifies to the articulation at the Swedish arch see of the dominant political issues of the day: the status of the Swedish realm in the union with Denmark-Norway, and the relations between the king, aristocracy and ecclesiastical leadership. This thesis analyses the discourse on authority in the Chronica. It investigates the normative basis of Ericus’s treatment of contemporary political issues as a source for the social-political outlooks of Sweden’s ecclesiastical power elite, a group not previously studied in this respect. In particular, it argues for the importance of two prescriptive assumptions on social order, which lie at the heart of the authority discourse in the Chronica: God divided the world into self-governing peoples and realms, and He instituted the lay and clerical orders as parallel hierarchies of societal authority. The thesis situates the production of the Chronica within the educational concerns of the Uppsala institution. It scrutinizes the commonplaces – derived from various fields of knowledge – through which Ericus articulated his dualist and nationalist assumptions. The realization of these notions in his historical account is examined in sections of the text where matters of importance for the Uppsala church are evident. Special attention is paid to Ericus’s account of the royal martyr, St Erik, the so-called Engelbrekt rebellion, and the contemporary strife between the Uppsala church and the kings. The thesis ends with a study of the reception of the Chronica in the 1520s, a time when the Reformation and the consolidation of a strong national monarchy in Sweden brought the authority issues addressed by Ericus to conclusion.

Most contemporary scholarship on Mexican history separates the years 1808-1824 into two distinct processes; Mexican independence and the formation of a new Mexican state. This thesis provides a new synthesis of the two processes of independence and state formation in Mexico. Covering events chronologically from 1808-1824, this thesis argues that the formation of a federal republic in Mexico was no accident, but that it was inevitable. The incessant conflict between insurgent and royalist factions decentralized politics in New Spain from 1810-1820 and weakened the authority of the government in Mexico City. This decentralized arena allowed many political actors of all castes, individuals and groups, to claim political authority on a local level. The only way for Mexico City to forge a new nation after 1820 was to recognize these newly established provincial interests. This thesis uses the failed attempt by Agustin de Iturbide to centralize government following independence as further corroboration that Mexico's War for Independence had established permanent federalist impulses within the country, which would eventually culminate in the creation of a federal republic in 1824.

The Mongol and the Ottoman leadership structures emerged in milieus where identities were changeable, mobility was high and the alliances were shifting. Chinggis Khan arose to degree of Khanate of entire Mongolia from an extremely marginal position in tribal politics and his experiences in this process provided him an anti-tribal political vision. He at the very beginning of his career formed the nucleus of his political power by his relationships and entourages. Later, he reorganized the clans and tribes, which submitted their loyalty to him around those principal participants in his army of conquest. Osman Bey made successful conquests thanks to the advantageous geographical position of his principality, became famous in a short time and managed to attract various elements of complex social structure of the Byzantine frontiers to him. He did not involve in a harsh struggle for leadership. Instead of monopolization of power, he favored sharing of it with his companions in arms. Mongols, after monopolizing power in the steppes devoted their energies to frontier conquests. However, during Chinggis Khan&rsquo / s reign, the Mongols saw the centre of the authority there. Their relation with the societies outside the Mongolia was indirect. Ottomans on the other hand, built up their administrative apparatus in the conquered territories. The Ottomans created a new bureaucratic group which did not have a power base besides the posts in Ottoman state and placed them to the centre of administration. Those posts did not have any hereditary dimension. The Mongols, contrary to the Ottomans, turned the state offices to hereditary posts and in time they began to distribute peoples, armies, lands and resources throughout the empire as appanages to state officers. Therefore, the Chinggisids created a new aristocracy who had the power in their hands to shake the centralist order of Chinggis Khan.

This thesis aims at understanding the citizenship formations in Turkey and Iran by a comparative study of ethnicity, state formation, and nation building in the two lands. The research question is what kind of socio-political and cultural elements caused the two nation states to follow different paths and end up with different citizenship and state formations in the end of the twentieth century. The foci of comparison are the homogenization process of the nation states in ethnic terms, the extent of mass movements, the degree of centrality of the state in shaping the sociopolitical life, and the resistance to the state imposed regulations. In this thesis it is argued that the state tradition inherited from the Ottomans, the ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim minorities, and the intention to assimilate the Kurdish population were the main determinants of Turkish citizenship. The mass movements emanating from the societal groups, the provincial autonomous movements, and the disruption of the state by external invasions were the main determinants of Iranian citizenship. The national identity in Turkey was more strongly based on the Turkish ethnicity / the Iranian national identity functioned as an umbrella identity over all ethnic identities in Iran. The Turkish citizenship, in comparison to Iranian, was closer to the ethnocentric and exclusionary German model / the Iranian citizenship, in comparison to the Turkish, was closer to the soil based and assimilationist French model.

This thesis is a history of the beginnings of nuclear research and education in India, between 1938 and 1959, through the trajectories of particle accelerator building activities at three institutions: the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, the Palit Laboratory of Physics, University Science College, Calcutta, later (Saha) Institute of Nuclear Physics, and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bombay. The two main arguments in this thesis are: First, the beginnings of nuclear research in India were rooted in the "modernist imperative" of the research field. However, post-war organisation of nuclear research came to be inextricably imbricated in processes of state-formation in independent India in a manner such that failure to actively engage with the bureaucratic state implied death of a laboratory project or constraints upon legitimately possible research. Second, state-formation, like the pursuit of nuclear research in India for the period of my study, became about India's participation and claim upon the universal. State-formation was equally a modernist imperative. Powerful sections of the nationalist bourgeoisie in India understood "Science" and the "State" as universals in World History, and India, they were convinced, had to confirm its place in history as an equal among equals. These two arguments combined explain how nuclear research came to be established, transformed, and extended through the gradual assembly of material infrastructure to realistically enable the new country take a capable decision on the nuclear question.

This dissertation examines an important, but understudied period in Mexican-U.S. migration history during the 1940s and early 1950s. The joint introduction and sanctioning, by the U.S. and Mexican governments, of the bracero program also initiated a large illegal migration of agricultural workers to the United States. This was a period characterized by high levels of temporary legal migration and illegal migration, as well as intense levels of immigration enforcement. These simultaneous processes confound a simplistic view of U.S. history as a sequence of alternating periods of immigration expansion and restriction. U.S. immigration law and policy does not resemble a pendulum swinging first one way then the other; rather, both expansion and restriction characterized the 1940s and early 1950s. This study focuses on South Texas and El Paso, both border regions with dominant agricultural economies as well as a significant presence of Border Patrol officers. By focusing on these border regions, this dissertation examines the relationship between immigration laws and policy and the agricultural labor relations between growers and workers on the ground. This dissertation is concerned with state formation on the U.S.-Mexico border, and its relationship with labor mobility. The process of state and border formation did not originate in the central seats of federal authority, Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, to be applied and exerted on the furthest reaches of their territories. Growers and workers created, negotiated, and experienced and challenged the power and meaning of the border in the agricultural fields during daily interactions. Individual Border Patrolman made the border every day in the choices they made about where and where not to patrol, and which friendships to make and maintain. The border was simultaneously a federal and a local space. As the introductory anecdote suggested, the different sites of power were continually at work and intertwined. The Border Patrol did not have to be present to have an effect on the power dynamics in the moment. These interconnecting authorities, each shaping the other, and workers negotiations of such dynamics are what I term the social space of agriculture on the border. Growers often projected themselves in opposition to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and government intervention, arguing that it disrupted their access to Mexican laborers. In truth, the presence of the Border Patrol, and the threat of deportation the police force carried, was crucial in shaping the social space of agricultural production and securing growers’ undocumented labor force. / text

How does a cadastre, one of the modern state's most omnipresent and yet self-effacing instruments of power over territory and people, become national? How are the processes of nation-state formation and the rise of modern scientific expertise connected to the nationalization of a cadastre? This dissertation tackles both questions by studying the nationalization of the French cadastre between 1763 and 1807. This is one of the most influential national cadastres for it became the blueprint followed by many emerging nation-states in Europe and beyond. The literature has explained its nationalization as the outcome of straightforward state centralization. This dissertation, on the contrary, argues that the shift from local cadastres to a national cadastre was the result of a dual uniformization process: political (the spread of a discourse of administrative uniformity) and scientific (the emergence of professional land surveyors). To advance this argument, the dissertation uses historical methods and analyzes unstudied documentation from five archives. Contrary to the available literature, it finds that cadastral nationalization faced royal intendants' resistance (conventionally portrayed as hardcore state centralizers) and benefited from citizens' enthusiastic input (traditionally presented as opponents to projects of territorial nationalization). Furthermore, it finds that cadastral nationalization was implausible without the transformation of land surveying from a local manual art into a national scientific profession: the engineer-geographer. This modern expert produced standardized cadastral facts for the rising nation-state. Hence, the nationalization of the cadastre helped to reconcile the political ideal of revolutionary egalitarianism with the scientific practice of disciplinary impartiality. The approval of the national cadastre in 1807 marked the successful intersection of political and scientific uniformization. Due to the French cadastre' international influence, this dissertation makes three distinct and larger contributions. First, it brings to the forefront administrative uniformization as an understudied process of nation-state building. Second, it provides a new framework to understand how changes in bodily practices and instruments can enable the emergence of a modern scientific profession. And third it emphasizes that nation-state formation relies not only on the production of standardized individuals (citizens), but also the creation of a standardized "national nature," a lesser-studied phenomenon. / Sociology

In the midst of a violent decade where the Mexican government used force to suppress insurgent and student unrest, the Indian population avoided such a response by operating within official government parameters. The 1975 First National Congress of Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, though convened by the federal government, gave Indians an opportunity to claim a role in the complex political process of formulating a new version of national Indian policy while demanding self-determination. Through the congress, indigenous groups attempted to take the lead in shaping national programs to their needs and interests rather than merely responding to government initiatives. The congress marked a fundamental change in post-revolutionary politics, the most important restructuring and recasting of the relationship between local and regional indigenous associations and the federal government since the 1930s. Its history provides an important context for understanding more recent political disputes about indigenous autonomy and citizenship, especially in the aftermath of the Zapatista (EZLN) revolt in 1994. The 1975 Congress marked a watershed as it allowed for the advent of independent Indian organizations and proved to be momentous in the negotiation of political autonomy between indigenous groups and government officials.

This thesis examines approaches taken towards warlords and militias during the current U.S.-led intervention in Afghanistan and that of the Soviet/Najibullah period analysing their impact on key state formation dynamics and state-building efforts. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis, the study finds that while the current intervention has seen its warlord and militia strategies produce generally negative results, the past Soviet intervention can arguably claim some partial successes. Though these partial successes provided an “exit strategy”, they did not aid in the state-building efforts or regime stabilization goals that had been Moscow’s initial and primary goals. The study also point to the problematic omission of actors and social groupings, such as warlords and militias, in state-building theory, and shows how security goals as typically addressed in state-building need not be synonymous or conducive to the primitive accumulation of force that spurred dependency relationships in past state formation.