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Using personal narratives, this thesis theorizes the lived experiences of attempting to align one’s consumption choices with the principles of food sovereignty in a place like Victoria, BC. First, to provide a detailed summary of the problem, a thematic analysis is used to identify and describe the tensions that arise throughout this journey. Second, drawing on institutional ethnography (IE), this thesis explores the various ruling relations that coordinate the (mis)understanding of the political potential of food sovereignty. By critically and reflexively analyzing my personal experience of engaging with food sovereignty I will suggest how others who are entering the study of alternative food initiatives can be more effective in their engagement with such movements. Furthermore, I suggest potential ways for those who have a relatively good understanding of alternative food movements to engage more effectively with others who share an interest in these initiatives, but who perhaps lack the accessibility to academic literature and/or the knowledge of how to participate politically in such initiatives. When we are able to see our shared interests and political connections, we are able to build political alliances. This then creates the potential for transformational change in the current industrial food system to one that is socially just and environmentally sustainable. / Graduate / 2018

Afghan constitutions have had a tendency to marginalize Afghan society. As a result, the continued ethnic fragmentation of Afghanistan has minimized the capacity of constitutions of the past to achieve societal stability. Instead, past Afghan constitutions have explicitly supported regimes rather than address the problems of the fragmentation of Afghanistan into small ethnic, linguistic, familial, and in some cases religious elements. While Afghanistan's current constitution accommodates the multi-ethnic pattern of Afghan society, it provides only a partial solution to the challenges of state building created by multi-ethnic societies. The central purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to determine the sustainability of Afghanistan's current constitution by analyzing the legacy and impact of past constitutions on the current document and its relationship with Afghan society and polity. Each of Afghanistan's constitutions of the past is missing important elements that prevented its impact on even the nearest reach of the rural tribal society. The realities of the 2003 Constitutional Loyal Jirga, the manner in which it represented the population, and the language that it codified in Afghanistan's 2004 constitution will therefore have a lasting impact on Afghanistan's future as well as reveal critical policy implications regarding state building.

This research project will examine the concept of sovereignty in Vermont for the years 1750-1791. As with most conceptual studies, it is necessary to first examine the history of the concept. I begin with René Descartes (1596-1650), and his re-conceptualization of Man in a natural state. It is my contention that his metaphysical and ontological findings in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) were then adopted by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in Leviathan (1651), and John Locke (1632-1704) in Two Treatises of Government (1689). Basing their philosophies on Descartes's "revised" depiction of Man in nature, both Hobbes and Locke envisioned a Man who naturally made both rational and passionate decisions, as communities transitioned, via the process of government formation, from the state of nature into the state of "civil society," as they termed it. Contemporaneous with this theoretical evolution was the inclusion of "the people" in British governance through the rise of Parliament at the turn of the seventeenth century. Juxtaposed with real events, the philosophers' reconceptualization demonstrates an evolving concept of sovereignty in the British state. By the time of the American Revolution, the concept of popular sovereignty was born, and "the people" ascended in both political theory and political reality. Because the eighteenth-century concept of sovereignty was based heavily on the metaphor of the state of nature, I chose the inhabitants of the New Hampshire Grants as a case study. These residents believed they resided in something close to a literal state of nature from 1760-1777, and that they had lived the theoretical philosophies of Hobbes, Locke, and other contemporary theorists. Once the theoretical description of a natural state is juxtaposed with the socio-political history of the Grants region, it is clear that inhabitants believed the Colony of New York, the appendage of the British state which claimed authority in the region, did not provide efficient governance for the residents. After the American Revolution broke out, Grants residents claimed it was their natural right to erect a state and systematically replace New York. Once Vermont's constitution went into effect in 1778, the concept of sovereignty was expressed in response to two simultaneous processes: the first, the geo-political stabilization of the state in the midst of both war and constant challenges to the state's existence; the second, the Vermont people transforming from a blend of "Yorkers" and "Yankees" into Vermonters. Both of these processes were complete by the mid-1780s as surrounding states and former Yorkers grew to accept the legitimacy of Vermont. By the late 1780s, as the United States Constitutional Convention was underway, Vermont was no longer considered a "pretended state," and was able to face the convention on its own terms, representing its own sovereign people.

Did Kosovo have right to secede? What was the cause of conflict in Kosovo? How important is Kosovo for international community? This thesis addresses these issues as it seeks, above all, to answer the question - Is Kosovo a sovereign, unrecognized, or failed state? To do so, the chapter I explores critically the definitions of sovereign, unrecognized, and failed states. The chapter I argues that Kosovo does not have full control over the territory it claims, but with help of the international offices this problem has been overcome. On the other hand, the main obstacle to international recognition and full sovereignty is Serbia (parent state), claiming that Kosovo is part of its territory. Therefore, the theories of secession are analyzed in-depth in order to answer whether Kosovo can obtain the missing part of sovereignty without a parent state. The main argument for Kosovo's secession is extensive violence in 1990's, therefore chapter II scrutinizes the history of political violence in Kosovo, showing that Kosovo's secession has its roots in creation of Greater Albania and alleged violation of human rights can be only the trigger but not the cause of the secession. Chapter III assesses the debate of Serbia's sovereignty/integrity versus Kosovo's right to self-determination. This chapter at first...

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. / National sovereignty is a fundamental principle of national security and the modern international system. The United States asserts its national sovereignty in many ways including inspecting goods and people crossing the border. However, most nations including the United States have not implemented any form of border inspection and control in cyberspace. This thesis builds a case that national sovereignty inherently and logically gives a sovereign state, such as the United States, the right to establish appropriate Internet border inspection stations. Such stations would be used to inspect only legally vetted inbound traffic, and block contraband, in a fashion analogous to the current system for inspection of people and goods that cross US borders in the physical world. Normal traffic crossing the border would have no content inspected and no record would be kept of its passing. This thesis answers key questions about feasibility, proposes a high level structure for implementation, and describes how such a system might be used to protect reasonable and legitimate interests of the United States including both security and individual rights. One chapter will build the logical case for Internet border Internet inspection. And other chapters will discuss technical, legal, and political feasibility. / Captain, United States Air Force

Thesis advisor: David Hollenbach / This dissertation starts by noting a tension in Catholic Social Teaching between the right of certain persons to immigrate, and the right of polities to control their borders, and seeks to find a way to resolve that tension. In a first moment, we ask whether the "right to immigrate" made sense only before the mass international migration movements starting around 1980, and before "globalisation", and whether polities today are morally justified in adopting increasingly harsh immigration restriction measures unilaterally. After rejecting this hypothesis by using an interdisciplinary analysis of the changes in the phenomenon of human mobility in recent decades, we propose another hypothesis to resolve the tension. We claim that the two rights are not "absolute" rights, and must be kept in tension. Which one of them trumps the other in concrete situations is determined partly by a set of (moral) priority rules, and partly through political discernment via fair democratic processes (which are always necessary so as to formulate concrete policies which require the consent of the governed). The rest of this dissertation provides a well-documented argument in favour of this second hypothesis, and in the process, we formulate a number of priority rules which help activists and policy makers, qua citizens and qua Christian disciples, adjudicate between rights claims based on the right to immigrate and the right to political sovereignty. The work also includes a systematic and historical presentation of Catholic Social Teaching on migration, a case study on immigration and emigration in Malta, a diachronic analysis of concepts related to human mobility in the Hebrew Bible, a philosophical reflection on Political Sovereignty in a "globalising" world, and a virtue ethics approach to the notions of solidarity, hospitality and kinship. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Thesis advisor: James E. Cronin / This project asks why changing norms of statehood in the early twentieth century produced extraordinary violence, and locates the answer in the way a variety of actors across the British Empire—colonial and Dominion governments, nationalist movements, and clients or partners of colonial regimes—leveraged the problem of imperial defense to serve their own political goals. It explores how this process increasingly bound ideas about sovereignty to the question of security and provoked militarizing tendencies across the British world in the early twentieth century, especially among liberal governments in Britain and the colonies, which were nominally opposed to militarism and costly military spending. Security provided a framework in which the matters of imperial defense and strategy could be translated into an expedient language of danger and safety, risk and reward, order and disorder. It legitimized colonial state-building projects and helped control populations; it propelled the renegotiation of relationships between those colonial states. Security suffused the British world’s racial identities and hierarchies with yet more hopes and fears, and yoked these to the centralization and growth of states and institutions. The project employs sources and methodologies that link history to debates about sovereignty and state-building in political theory and international relations, about identity and anxiety in the production of literature, and about federalism and subsidiarity in constitutional law. Beginning with the outbreak of the South African War, the first chapters cover the haphazard coordination of imperial forces in that conflict, and how it shaped movements for constitutional federation in Australia and New Zealand. Next, the project explores how the Government of India under George Curzon attempted to manage its military clients in the Indian Princely States, and how Indian princes understood and performed their sovereignty by providing troops to serve in the Indian Army. It then compares these arguments about sovereignty in India to highly similar ones about military subsidies from British Dominions to the Royal Navy, and the irony of self-governing Dominions converging with Indian modes of rule. The third chapter discusses colonial reactions to the Anglo-German naval crisis in 1909 and how colonial governments leveraged the Empire’s security crisis to argue that, through their contributions to imperial defense, they had transcended colonial status and become “Dominions.” Next, the project discusses the breakdown of systematic schemes for defense and political cooperation in the British Empire in the years leading up to World War I, and how they reflected the tensions inherent in the empire’s emerging norms of sovereignty. Central to this chapter is the struggles of Wilfrid Laurier’s government in Canada and between nationalist and unionist factions in Ireland to manage the militarization unleashed by the securitizing logic that had taken hold in the British Empire and, increasingly, the British metropole. The final chapter explores the issue of conscription during World War I, and how it personalized the problems of security and sovereignty for millions of British subjects by forcing them to apprehend the reality that states could take possession of their physical selves for service in war. This chapter draws extensively on personal recollections of the war years by Irish men and women who gave “witness statements” to the Republic of Ireland’s Bureau of Military History during the 1940s and 50s about their experience of the years 1912-1922, including World War I, conscription, the Anglo-Irish War, and the creation of the Irish Free State. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Les relations syro-libanaises peuvent être considérées comme l'une des questions contemporaines les plus sensibles et les plus délicates. La raison doit être recherchée dans la particularité de l'union historique qui s'est nouée entre les deux pays, qui ne furent séparés par aucune frontière avant l'indépendance du Liban en 1943, formant ainsi un seul peuple dans un seul Etat. Compte tenu des relations historiques entre ces deux pays, la Syrie a toujours laissé planer un doute sur l'indépendance du Liban. Ainsi ce petit pays se présenta, pour la Syrie, comme son ventre mou, ce qui obligea la Syrie à le protéger contre toute agression extérieure, afin de garantir sa sécurité. Cette attitude s'est traduite par l'intervention militaire syrienne au Liban durant la guerre civile de 1975, dans le cadre des Forces arabes de dissuasion, qui constituaient la seule force pacificatrice au Liban. L'accord du Taëf de 1989, qui mit fin à la guerre civile libanaise, consolida et légalisa les relations sécuritaires et économiques syro-libanaises, à travers la signature de traités entre les deux pays. Mais la question de la présence syrienne au Liban et de son influence sur sa souveraineté fut mise à l'ordre du jour principalement après le retrait israélien du Liban en 2000.Le facteur déclencheur qui rompit ces relations syro–libanaises privilégiées se produisit suite à l'assassinat du Premier ministre Rafiq Hariri en 2005, qui se traduisit par le retrait définitif syrien du Liban. En adoptant un plan chronologique des événements, cette thèse présente les principales étapes des relations politiques et économiques entre la Syrie et le Liban, les facteurs régionaux et internationaux qui ont pesé sur elles, et leurs répercussions sur les relations syro-libanaises ; elle fournit par ailleurs des éléments nouveaux sur ces relations, qui prennent racine sur le passé et dégagent une vision de l'avenir. / Syro-Lebanese relations: Past crises and political changes.Syro-Lebanese relations may be considered as one of today's most sensitive and thorny issues. The reason for this should be sought in the special nature of the historical union built between two countries which had never been divided by a frontier until the independence of Lebanon in 1943, so were a single people within a single State.Given the historical relationship between the two countries, Syria has always been somewhat ambivalent over Lebanese independence. This little country developed into Syria's soft underbelly, so Syria was forced to protect it from outside aggression in order to ensure its own safety. This stance resulted in the Syrian military intervention in the Lebanese civil war of 1975, under cover of the Arab Deterrent Force which was the only peacemaking force in Lebanon. The Ta'if Agreement of 1989, which ended the Lebanese civil war, consolidated and legalised Syro-Lebanese relations regarding security and economics by means of treaties signed by both countries. But the issue of Syria's presence in Lebanon and its influence on sovereignty was accelerated, especially after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000.The essential event which disturbs the special Syro-Lebanese relationship was the assassination of the Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005, after which Syrian troops withdrew from Lebanon.This thesis takes these events in chronological order to discuss the major stages in the political and economic relationship between Syria and Lebanon, the regional and international factors brought to bear on it and their repercussions on Syro-Lebanese relations. It sheds a new light on these relations which are rooted in the past and moot a vision for the future.