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Learning to Stand on Shifting Sands: Sonoran Desert Capitalism, Alliance Politics, and Social Change offers a comparative analysis of activisms, labor organizing, and production practices in southern Arizona between 1999 and 2003. Using a combination of political economy, queer/feminist theory, transdisciplinary critical cultural studies, and discourse analysis, the research analyzes the broad social and ideological contexts, the tactics, the contradictions and the attempts and lost opportunities for building broader alliances for radical social change in contemporary Arizona. The case studies reckon with this experience, arguing that: Arizona's migrant workers have been strategically produced via media practices, border militarization, "development" discourse, and global production practices as flexible post-NAFTA commodities that enable formidable nationalist and heteronormative representation and political economic practices within the Sonoran desert border region. That local activism and labor organizing draws upon neoliberal "development" discourse strategies, and also breaks from these strategies in ways that suggests that the terms of production and exchange might be usefully applied towards outcomes that are outside of profit accumulation. That alliance practices that take structures and discourses of domination into account in estimations of value, even in production, can promote broader collaborations between activist organizations, cultural identities and single-issue politics. A politics of alliance that accounts for the interdependence of seemingly disparate practices of production, social oppression and culture might help invigorate contemporary grass roots struggles and promote social transformation.

The Cold War ended in 1991, yet the North Atlantic Treaty Organization still persists. This outcome defies paradoxically two exceedingly important facts: First, NATO’s central and greatest geostrategic rival—the Soviet Union—disappeared a quarter of a century ago. Second, China and Russia are insufficiently capable to individually challenge and counterbalance NATO’s military supremacy and conventional military might. From a theoretical perspective, in the absence of an immediate threat and/or the need to counterbalance relative power, International Relations alliance theory would posit the dissolution of military alliances. Nonetheless, NATO continues to endure. This study seeks to elucidate the strategic factors generating this puzzling historical and theoretical development. This study demonstrated that the political economy of the defense industry has become an important variable that can affect the power of states and the endurance of alliances. The study analyzed three equivalent cases of military alliance dynamics—the aftermath of the Great World War, the Second World War, and the post-Cold-War phase of NATO. The analysis of these three cases served to probe and demonstrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence and endurance of military alliances. According to International Relations alliance theory such conditions should be, first, the presence of external threats and, second, the compatibility of national interests. This study employed the comparative case study method in order to shed light on the nature of threats faced by great powers during different time periods. Further, the study used the focused comparison method in conjunction with the intensive case study approach to explore in depth the states’ strategic military and economic interests and alliance decisions. Having analyzed the external threats and compatibility of great power interests in different time periods, the study concluded that neither of the two abovementioned conditions is sufficient to explain the endurance and deepening of the level of cooperation among the great powers participating in NATO. This study demonstrated that technological features of military production—the size and extent of scale economies, economies of scope, and learning-by-doing—and escalating military costs have been crucial and complementary factors affecting the motivations and intra-alliance politics of NATO member-states after the Cold War.

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This dissertation assesses the historical engagement of Canadian state and society with the Palestine problem. Canada’s contemporary position on the pro-Israel edge of the spectrum of world politics raises questions about long-term patterns of change and continuity in Canadian politics concerning the Middle East. Liberal patriotic historical narration of Canadian foreign policy conventionally invokes what Lester B. Pearson referred to as ‘the broad and active internationalism’ with which Canadian officials approached the world in the years after World War II. Moderate voices within the contemporary Canadian mainstream typically counterpose this history to a narrow support for Israel that pits Canada against a majority of the world community. This dissertation argues that contemporary political opposition in Canada needs to find other historical precedents to build upon. The established liberal internationalist framing obscures the formative influence upon Canadian foreign policy of a racialized politics of empire. The development of Canadian politics within the framework of the British Empire, and the domestic structures of racial power that formally endured into the twentieth century, need to be taken into account if the historical evolution of Canadian external affairs policy on Palestine – as more generally – is to be understood. Historical and political analysis structured around the assertion of national innocence undercuts the kind of understanding of the past that can inform constructive engagement with the problems of the present. As against the pervasive theme of fair-minded Canadian innocence, this dissertation finds that the implication of both the Canadian government and Canadian civil society in the denial of Palestinian rights has deep historical roots. It is critical to look not only at the scope of internationalist tendencies within Canadian political history, but also at their exclusionist boundaries. In so doing, this study positions Canada within wider Western structures of support for Israel against Palestinian and neighbouring Arab societies.

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