This paper examines a series of emerging utopian discourses that call for the creation of autonomous libertarian enclaves on land ceded by or claimed against existing states. These discourses have emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and can be seen as a response to the crisis on the part of freemarket advocates who critique previous waves of neoliberal reform for failing to radically transform the existing structures of the state. Enclave libertarianism seeks to overcome neoliberal capitalism's contradictory relationship to the liberal democratic state by rethinking the state as a "private government service provider" and rethinking citizens as mobile consumers of government services. Citizens are thus called to "vote with their feet" by opting-in to the jurisdiction that best fits their needs and beliefs. The paper argues that these utopian imaginaries are key to understanding specific new manifestations of post-crisis neoliberalism, and calls for more research into the diversity of discourses and imaginaries that circulate through networks of neoliberal actors beyond specific policy initiatives.

Magister Artium - MA / Between the 1917 Russian Revolution and demise of the Soviet Union, the communist Other, as godless deviant and arch enemy of the capitalist state, inhabited a specific space in the minds and imaginations of much of the Western world. S/he was one to be feared, one to be guarded against, and if possible, one to be suppressed by political, ideological, or military means. Such conditions contributed to the widespread suppression and banning of communist and communist aligned organisations. In South Africa this coincided with the rise of Afrikaner nationalism, and the consolidation and reconfiguration of 'white' supremacy in the form of apartheid. After a marginal National Party (NP) victory in 1948, the Suppression of Communism Act (1950) and the 'Rooi Gevaar' became synonymous with dissent and revolution within and beyond the apartheid state. For example, it was on these grounds that a series of high profile political trials – the Treason, Rivonia, and Fischer Trials – would be fought and lost on the first occasion. Each trial was based upon the assertion that the accused were communists or involved in a Soviet conspiracy that intended to depose the apartheid government through violent revolution. Conversely, communism is now popularly invoked in relation to narratives of struggle and the ‘triumph of the human spirit over adversity', in which new and now old allies defeated the evil of apartheid, and ushered in an era of freedom, democracy, and reconciliation. As a result, communism and the SACP (the dominant political organisation associated with communism) have been incorporated into national histories that narrate the African National Congress' (ANC's) struggle and victory over apartheid, which culminated in Nelson Mandela and other political leaders returning to supposedly fulfil their destiny by ‘freeing the people’ from totalitarian rule.Having said this, I argue that the suppression of communism goes far beyond the limiting horizons of popularised political and ideological discourse, or indeed, violent acts of torture and murder directed towards those deemed to be a threat to the ‘nation’. In other words, debates surrounding communism are not merely representative of the state’s oppressive policies towards anti-apartheid activists, the global conflict between capitalism and communism, or popular narratives of suffering and struggle against apartheid. Alternatively, they were (and are) intimately linked with a nation-building project which, unlike violence sanctioned by the state or reconciled – at least on the surface – through symbolic acts like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), has been difficult to exorcise, come to terms with, and diminish in the contemporary. Put another way, although communism is intrinsically associated with the class struggle and class politics in South Africa, it was in fact driven by and interwoven with racist ideologies upon which apartheid and British colonialism before that were founded. With these debates in mind, this mini-thesis will attempt to remove communism from conventional discourses and re-place it within debates surrounding nation-building, and the formation of different subjectivities. This will be carried out not only as an attempt to "overcome the limitations of ideology" and further deconstruct legacies of oppression and violence, but also to think with the ways in which different groups perceive, mobilise and appropriate ideology as a means to foreclose resistance and reaffirm and maintain nationalist hierarchies of power within society. This mini-thesis will begin by exploring the ways in which communism has been perceived in South Africa. More specifically, it will consider how the idea of communism was mobilised and appropriated in relation to apartheid's nation-building project. It will also thematically engage with the ways in which mythologies surrounding communism traversed the supposedly rational and irrational worlds, and, in the latter stages of this mini-thesis, will attempt to develop an argument – using Bram Fischer as subject – based upon Jacques Derrida’s notion of the communist spectre, and the importance of the messianic or, more importantly, the prophet in history. / Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), University of the Western Cape

Magister Legum - LLM / The principal objective of this research was a critical examination of the Generalised System of Preference schemes as a form of special and differential treatment under the Enabling Clause with specific reference to the complaint brought against the European Union (EU) by India regarding the EU's granting of tariff preferences to developing countries with illegal drug trafficking problem. / South Africa

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a surge in post-war stabilisation, reconstruction and development operations around the world. Externally driven efforts have been shaped by the liberal peace framework, which assumes that a rapid transmission or imposition of neo-liberal norms and values, combined with Western-style governance institutions, would create conditions for lasting peace and prosperity. Only in a few instances countries have attempted internally driven post-war reconstruction and development; in most cases, these efforts were either ignored or suppressed by international analysts, experts, academics and organisations. Despite all the expertise and funding spent since the early 1990s, externally driven operations have not led to lasting peace and stability, establishment of functioning institutions, eradication of poverty, livelihood improvements and economic reconstruction and development in war-torn countries. All too often, programmes, policies and „solutions‟ were designed and imposed by external actors either because they worked elsewhere or because they were influenced by geopolitical, economic and/or security interests of powerful countries. Furthermore, external actors have tended to assume that generic approaches based on the liberal peace framework can work in all places, while ignoring local actors, contexts and knowledge. Focusing on Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Sudan and Somaliland, this exploratory qualitative study critically explores and assesses both externally and internally driven post-war reconstruction and development practices and operations in order to understand the strengths and shortcomings of both approaches and offer recommendations for future improvements. This is important since socio-economic recovery and economic development are crucial for lasting stability and peace in post-war countries.

The nation-state has for a long time appeared to have eluded the attempts of scholars to encapsulate its essence in theory. Rather than propose another attempt at encapsulation, this dissertation represents a form of geographical supplementation to these efforts. As a work of geography it focuses on the negotiation of nation-states, and, in doing so, traces a double displacement of encapsulation. Primarily, the four major studies comprising the dissertation represent geographical research which, using a wide range of archival and contemporary media material, makes manifest the irreducible complexity of the negotiations in, over and between nation-states at the end of the twentieth century. Focused on Canada and the USA, these studies trace how a diversity of cultural as well as political-economic processes come together in the inherently geographical negotiations of First Nations struggles, Canadian constitutional politics, continental free trade developments, and American patriotism. These are negotiations where no one process fully encapsulates an explanation of the events and where their collective but contested territorialization calls out for an open-ended and anti-essentialist analysis. Secondarily, while the dissertation's first and more central work of displacement is enabled by poststructuralist critiques of essentialist explanation, its other displacing effect comes in the form of a geographical deconstruction of so-called poststructuralist theory itself. This represents an attempt to turn the elusive nature of the nation-state vis-a-vis theory into a living and politicized site for investigating the limits of poststructuralist theorizing. Overall, the geographical investigations of the dissertation illustrate the value of anti-essentialist arguments for furthering geographical research into the nation-state while simultaneously calling these epistemological innovations into geographical question. Using such questioning to critique the limited geographical representation of the nationstate, it is concluded that geographers cannot not persistently examine such limits. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

The decade of the 2000s witnessed a series of events that challenged traditional notions of America as an "exceptional" nation, one that had withstood or escaped the crises that toppled other global forces until the United States remained the final superpower. These ten years opened with a presidential election decided not by the Electoral College but by the Supreme Court, advanced through terrorist attacks on home soil and the devastating ramifications of military, policy, and moral reevaluation in their wake, to reach a close in the worst failure of capitalism since the Great Depression. Newly identified terror networks "hated" the American way. While the world had momentarily agreed with the headline on the front page of Le Monde, "Nous sommes tous Américains," within a year most of them refused to join the "Coalition of the Willing." Uncertainty about who "we the people" were when under duress provoked the collective to search for reinforcement of the value of their union in this Union. At this conjuncture, as it had during such cycles in the past, the nation sought both to find reassurance and to reassert a sense of control through exercises of both government and governmentality with that element of the other and the outside that was the closest to within: immigrants and the processes of immigration. This project considers not the figural "person" of the citizen or immigrant, but rather a number of exemplary "thresholds" across which immigrants (real and imagined) cross on their way to becoming citizens (real or imagined). It is my contention that the transition between immigrancy and citizenship powers this dialectic, and thus that the form of these transitions is where rhetoric accomplishes its work. That work fashions a "national fantasy," or an imaginary reserve in which the body politic stores up the affective energy necessary to gather political force toward materializing boundaries of belonging through the (at least tacit) approval of public policy. Rhetoric names the modus operendi at work cathecting the citizen to the nation, attaching individuated emotional investment to the assumed relation that fabricates "America." Ultimately, I make an intervention in that relation by suggesting that national fantasy is frail in the best possible way, such that it may be rhetorically realigned to new purpose. I have chosen to consider a diversity of thresholds across which this transition is symbolically enacted: in the institutional context of law and bureaucracy of the Naturalization Exam, in the historical matrix of materiality and memory of documentary films about Ellis Island, and in the cinematic spectacle of popular culture through the movie Gangs of New York. By reading across and within these case studies in rhetorical form, I engage questions about how American identity is coalesced through enduring expectations of national selves and foreign others. Most broadly, I focus on these mythic transitions as a way to recuperate two terms long-embattled and considered discredited by many in the critical humanities: "nation" and "patriotism." How is a love of nation constituted, perpetuated, and deployed in and by these processes? How do narratives enable both predictable outcomes and creative resistance? How do political actors make use of these rhetorical possibilities in accomplishing their material goals? And most importantly, in what way does a reconsideration of the rhetorical transitions from immigrancy to citizenship as well as from citizenship to immigrancy allow us to re-theorize, re-imagine, re-present, and most important re-practice how nation and patriotism might be-other-wise?

Essän gör anspråk på att separera språk och idén om nationalstaten genom min konstnärliga praktik. Texten öppnar genom att betraktaren/läsaren befinner sig i en hiss på väg till en bostadslägenhet vars brevinkast det står Vad vore språk om det uppstod här? på. Genom text, ljud och rumsliga installationer i lägenheten hamnar betraktaren mitt i frågan och gestaltningen av språk som en specifik erfarenhet. Ett antal nedslag görs för att ringa in den specifika erfarenheten med hänvisningar till modersmålsundervisning, skam för utebliven språkkunskap och kroppsliga erfarenheter av att störa nationalstaters narrativ. Sedan kopplar och begripliggör texten den specifika erfarenheten genom nedslag i strukturella företeelser som har varit med och skapat förutsättningarna för det specifika språket. De är t.ex. hur nationalstater använt sig av arkeologi för att skapa en linjär berättelse som något befästande av en slags sann gemensam nationell historia. En problembild beskrivs där nationalstaten har ägandeskap av språk trotts att språkets uppkomst är mer komplext än så. Problembilden bemöts av andra fält som arbetat på liknande sätt, t.ex. inom språkforskning och pedagogik. Den egna konstnärliga praktiken presenteras därefter som redskap för att fånga komplexiteten i språkets tillblivelse med verktyg som bl.a. poesin, översättning och gemensamt kunskapande. Essän avslutas med följande resonemang: När vi talar om språk som egendom tillhörande en nationalstat försvinner nyanser som lägger sig i tiden och i kroppen. Det här är en diskurs som förs på det konstnärliga fältet, men den kommer ifrån barnet, från kampen om gränser förd av människor som känner gränser våldsamt varje dag. Den kommer ifrån konstaterandet att vi lever i en kolonial samtid, så vad gör vi nu? / The essay intends to describe the separation between language and the idea of ​​the nation state through my artistic practice. The opening of the text situates the viewer/reader in an elevator. They are on their way to a residential apartment. On the letterbox, it reads; what would language be if it arose here? Through text, sound and spatial installations in the apartment, the viewer ends up in the middle of the question and portrayal of language ​​as a specific experience. A number of events are explored to address the specific experiences of language by looking closer to mother tongue education, shame for lacking knowledge in a language and interfering and disturbing the nation state’s narratives through bodily and linguistic attributes.  The text connects and makes the specific experience comprehendible through looking into the impacts to large political initiatives that have contributed to and created the conditions of the specific language. Examples are nation-states usage of archaeology to create a linear narrative to point at origin as affirmation and upholding of a true common national history. The similarities of how this is done to language is explored in the text.  The nation state claims ownership of languages ​​and this is problematised by talking of language origin as something far more complex.  This problem is addressed by other fields as well. The essay mentions some, e.g. linguistics and pedagogy. My own artistic practice is then presented as a way to capture the complexity in the becoming of language by using tools such as poetry, translation and creating ways to practice common knowledge. The essay concludes by reasoning in the following way: When we talk about languages ​​as property belonging to a nation state, nuances that settles in time and body disappear. The discourse and this essay is carried out in the artistic field, but it comes from the child, from the struggle of people who experience borders violently every day. It comes from the ascertainment that the contemporary is colonial, so what do we do?

Objective : to explore wheeled mobility use by First Nation Elders who live on reserves in Canada. Purpose: to gain an understanding of the importance of Elder cultural participation, the perceptions of the effects of participation on health, how cultural participation has changed since becoming a wheeled mobility user, the barriers to participation, and thoughts on how participation can be improved. Method: A database search of the literature was conducted in an iterative manner from September 2015-June 2017 to locate research related to wheeled mobility. The population of interest was First Nation Elders who live on reserve in Canada. All types of study designs and methods were considered. An interpretive phenomenological study was also conducted in order learn about the lived experiences of First Nation Elder wheeled mobility users in accessing the cultural elements of their communities. Data were collected using a demographic form and a semi-structured interview. Findings: The author did not find any studies on wheeled mobility use by Elders on reserve, or their impacts on cultural participation during the literature review. Several barriers to cultural participation were brought forward during the phenomenological study which included: lack of access to outdoors; lack of transportation; inaccessible paths of travel; lack of access at the events; and feelings of sigma and burden.

This thesis includes two stand-alone articles with the overall purpose of critically exploring experiences related to sport-for-development from the program participants’ perspective on the one hand, and from the practitioners’ perspective on the other. After outlining the research objectives and present a review of literature, theoretical framework, epistemology, methodology, methods, and analysis, the first article focuses on the YLP participants’ experiences with a particular interest on empowerment processes. Specifically, I employed a Critical Youth Empowerment (CYE) framework in relation to youth experiences and larger community involvement with youth programming (Jennings et al., 2006). Photovoice was conducted and supplemented with eleven semi-structured interviews, one focus group and a month-long participant observation. The above-mentioned research was juxtaposed with a second article presenting an autoethnographic account of my own experiences as a practitioner and researcher. My autoethnography mixes theory, methodology, and methods throughout the narrative. My hope was to produce a theoretically rich and reflexive account of the experiences that led me to conceptualize sport-for-development differently. This self-critical piece aims at providing an opportunity for readers to reflect upon and hopefully challenge their own practices, knowledge production, and research orthodoxy.

The topic of this thesis is the discursive construction of an image of women in the Czech nation during the 70th-90th of the 19th century. In this period the process of nation-formation s culminated. There were also extensions of national ideology across all social strata of the Czech population in this time. The subject of research is defined to the sphere of liberal discourse. The subjects of analysis are articles in contemporary national-liberal press, namely newspaper Národní listy. As the analysis method for this survey was chosen the critical discourse analysis. Main questions, this thesis answers, is the way how is the image of women as a member of the Czech nation constructed, the subsequent development of this image and the construction of the differences between the Czech and German women.