This thesis examines the operation of morally asymmetrical distinctions in the discourse produced in advance of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. It does not set out to explain the invasion's occurrence, but, based upon the analysis of media texts, parliamentary debates, and political speeches, focuses upon aspects of the processes of justification and criticism preceding invasion. It blends together aspects of the work of Michel Foucault and Niklas Luhmann, with insights drawn from various approaches to the analysis of discourse and communication, in pursuit of an understanding of how the discursive space available to contributors to debate is restricted. It pays close attention to the closely related processes of 'disclaiming' and 'ontological gerrymandering' - interventions which are concerned with controlling what is, and is not, the case - particularly in terms of the way that they are orientated towards controlling how the person making them is to be observed. It is argued that the circulation of the illegitimacy of various positions puts some contributors at risk of being observed according to the more negative side of a morally asymmetrical distinction. It is argued that this creates 'difficulty' for them, and incites their engagement in particular forms of discursive work in the attempt to avoid illegitimacy themselves. Close attention is paid to any observable regularities in the ways in which contributors attempted to avoid having their position associated with, amongst other things, 'anti-Americanism', 'appeasement', 'pacifism', 'warmongering', or a 'pro-Saddam' stance, all of which would threaten their legitimacy. A variety of techniques are identified, including the invocation of a contributor's history of positions (their 'communicative career'), as well as their use of their allegedly less legitimate context-specific allies as a contrastive foil, at the expense of whom they claim their own legitimacy.

The thesis is an attempt to examine the Labour Party's involvement with the question of Palestine from the time of the party's first declaration on the subject in 1917 to the de facto recognition by a Labour Government of the State of Israel in January 1949. It considers the development of attitudes within the Labour Party, primarily those of the party leaders and policy makers, but also of the wider party membership, on the questions of Zionism, the Palestinian Arabs, the role of the British Mandatory Government, and the future of Palestine. It also discusses the formulation and content of official party policy throughout the period, and the part played by groups representing Zionists and Arab interests, in particular the Jewish Socialist Labour Party, Poale Zion. The thesis also assesses the extent to which the Labour Party was able to influence the Palestine policies of successive British Governments. During two crucial periods, between 1929 and 1931, and from 1945 to 1949, Labour Governments held office. Both periods are considered exclusively with the aim of examining reactions within sections of the Labour Party to the policies pursued, and the influence such attitudes had on Government policy.

Focusing upon American veterans' depictions of the US intervention in Vietnam and its aftermath, this thesis argues that bodies and issues concerning embodiment form the epicentre of these representations. Chapter One uses narratives by Ron Kovic, John Ketwig, Philip Caputo and others to illustrate that military training is a transformative process wherein the recruit's body serves both as index of, and vehicle for, his metamorphosis into a soldier. As these authors suggest, training inculcates a utilitarian attitude towards embodiment: the soldier's body is, primarily, a disciplined body whose value- and masculinity- resides in 'its' power to inflict injury upon the 'enemy'. As Chapter Two demonstrates, however, such machine-bodies (and the conceptualisation of embodiment which engendered them) were 'out of place' in-country. Veterans like W.O. Ehrhart, Nathaniel Tripp, Robert Mason, and Tim O'Brien portray the Vietnam environment as inherently threatening to the US soldier's corporeal integrity. Viet Cong and NVA strategies also disempowered the American soldier, challenging his faith in the innate superiority of the machine-body. Confronting injury further undermined the soldier's sense of corporeal invulnerability. Chapter Three considers the wounding, and treatment, of American casualties of Vietnam, arguing that narratives by Caputo, Kovic, and (ex-Navy surgeon) John Parrish 'recover' aspects of injury excluded from officially-sanctioned discourse. Chapter Four extends this scrutiny of wounding, exploring its interpretation both in-country and 'back home', and highlighting Kovic's depiction of injury and its consequences in Born on the Fourth of July (1976). Chapter Five demonstrates that encounters with irreparable corporeal damage are imbued with a sense of crisis: such wounding simultaneously demands and resists representation. Texts by O'Brien, Kovic and others are considered as 'trauma narratives' here, and a connection is made between writing-as-retrieval, and the potential of narrativisation to promote psychical recuperation, both for veterans themselves and also, perhaps, for US society generally.

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This thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach, combining the findings of anthropology with historical and archival research, to evaluate Bugis diaries to provide historical information relating to the kingdom of Boné in the late eighteenth century. The diary of Sultan Ahmad as-Salleh, which covers the period 1775 to 1795, forms the primary material for the study, and is examined alongside other, selected Bugis diaries. The first three chapters form the conceptual framework against which the Bugis diary must be understood. The methodology is set out in Chapter One. The second chapter provides historical, geographical and ethnological information about South Sulawesi; it introduces the Bugis and the regency of Boné, and discusses Bugis written tradition and the knowledge it reflects. Chapter Three is concerned with the Bugis language, its origin and the development of the written script. The specificity of the Bugis diaries as a distinct category of indigenous written works is discussed. Chapters Four, Five and Six apply the methodology to the diary of Sultan Ahmad as-Salleh, cross-referencing its entries to other contemporary primary sources. Throughout, the function of the court diary is considered, and its limitations, most notably concerning the objectivity, are identified and discussed. Chapter Four examines the political life of Boné, the most powerful and important of the Bugis kingdoms of South Sulawesi in the eighteenth century. Centering on particular episodes that occurred during his reign, the reliability of the king's diary is tested. In Chapter Five, information from the diary is used to produce an account of the economy of Boné and to describe a number of traditional economic practices of the inner circle at court. Chapter Six analyses what can be learned from his diary of the diverse social, cultural and religious practices in which the king was involved. Chapter Seven, in conclusion, reflects on the character of Sultan Ahmad as-Salleh, who ruled Boné from 1775 until his death in 1812. No physical memory of him has survived in South Sulawesi. His memorial is his diary and the light that it sheds on Boné's past.

This thesis examines the extent to which regulation theory provides an appropriate theoretical framework for analysing the development of capitalist economic relations and activities in transitional economies. The investigation uses secondary sources and information gained from interviews conducted with tourism business owners and managers in three Vietnamese cities: Hanoi, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City. I find that through its recognition of firstly, the path dependent nature of regulatory processes and secondly, national and local scales as key sites in the regulation of global economic processes, regulation theory can be utilised in analysing the development of capitalist economic relations and activities in transitional economies. Nevertheless, the findings in this thesis also challenge and offer new perspectives on a number of the key concepts contained within regulation theory. Firstly, my findings illustrate how political imperatives play a much more significant role in the regulation of economic activity than acknowledged in regulation theory. In Vietnam, as a way of maintaining the state as the leading institution in the Vietnamese socioeconomy, the central Vietnamese state has historically ceded a significant degree of regulatory control over economic space to the local state. As a consequence, the local state has traditionally constituted the key institution regulating economic activity in local space. In the transitional Vietnamese economy, I illustrate that political imperatives are continuing to inform the practices of the central state in regulating nascent capitalist economic processes. I find that this is chiefly being articulated through the informal regulatory practices and capacity of the central state as it seeks to mediate capitalist economic relations between supra and sub-national actors and institutions. This runs counter to assertions within regulation theory where the regulatory power of the central state is chiefly derived from its capacity to enact a formal framework of regulatory forms to guide global economic processes throughout national space. Secondly, I highlight the importance of the social regulation of economic activity and how in Vietnam the cultivation of social ties with local state officials has historically constituted an important institutional mechanism regulating economic activity in local spaces. In the transitional Vietnamese economy, I find that among private tourism business owners interviewed in Hanoi, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City, the cultivation of social ties with local state officials has continued to play an important role in the establishment and running of their businesses. Out of these findings, I adapt the conceptual framework provided in regulation theory and build a more appropriate analytical framework that can be utilised in examining how regulatory processes and relations are evolving in regulating capitalist economic activity in transitional economies.

There are two contrasting scenes in the history of Banten: a history of a prosperous port sultanate in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and a history of a dark and oppressed nineteenth-century society. The eighteenth century represents a gap between the two scenes. Historians have understood that during this period the Dutch East India Company (VOC) turned Banten a backwater of Java. Only a limited numbers of historians, however, have paid their attention on the study of Banten history during the second half of the eighteenth century. It is the aim of this thesis to study Banten society in this period to demonstrate its dynamics in both upper and lower strata. The thesis focuses only on the social and cultural aspects of the late-eighteenth-century Banten society. Indigenous sources, the law-book and the records of the Kadi Court, are mainly examined to draw up the picture of a living Southeast Asian society. The study begins with the examination of the two authorities holding the sovereignty over the sultanate, the Sultan and the VOC. Although the two authorities did not fight against each other in their rule over the state, it is worth studying the art of expressing the supremacy employed by both camps. Traditional Javanese kingship, Islam and the prosperity of the royal court were concentrated in the hands of the Sultan to secure his authority and to retain the recognition of his subjects. The VOC, on the other hand, applied a traditional overlord-vassal relationship to transform itself into a 'hybrid creature' - at once a merchant and a prince. The components of the VOC settlement in Banten are examined to prove its success. The study of the indigenous sources improves our understanding of the system of law and justice in the Sultanate of Banten. The Shari 'a law officially still played its role in people's way of life, while the state law and royal decree were created to secure the state administration and the ritual order at the centre of the kingdom. The examples of offences given in the law-book and the records of the matters brought before the Kadi Court are invaluable sources to help reconstruct the conditions in Banten society during the late eighteenth century. The life-style of people, material culture and prevailing social values can be drawn from these sources. The result shows Banten society as part of dynamic Southeast Asian world rather than an example of an ideal Muslim community.

This thesis is a social history of Bombay city in the first quarter of the twentieth century. It explores material changes in urban life consequent upon the impact of modernity and the varied range of contestations of the colonial order which they provoke. The first chapter outlines the specific nature of colonial modernism and shows its impact on the city's spatial forms and on its social relations. Representing a highly selective, power-driven, and essentially technological manipulation of modernity, it ensures distorted and differential outcomes within urban society. These conditions are considerably aggravated by the sudden impact of the First World War, the subject of the second chapter. The War increases material scarcities, worsens conditions of urban life, widens disparities between rich and poor, and intensifies colonial repression. At the same time, the crisis of war brings to the city the full potential of the revolution in communications which carries a modem discourse of civic rights. In the city, Homiman and sections of the bilingual urban intelligentsia rapidly vernacularize this discourse and diffuse it into new social contexts. This is perceived by the local colonial state as seriously threatening and subversive. The third chapter shows how Gandhi's anti-modernist rejection of the city leads to his attempts to control, and in some aspects reverse, this gathering urban momentum for an expansion in citizenship rights. The final chapter considers the new visions of urban citizenship expressed in the agitation for an expansion of civil and democratic rights, and in labour protest movements. This critical modernism looks to the future, rather than to the past, and acts as a force to humanise the city, presenting an alternative and potentially more radical challenge to the colonial state than the Gandhian movement.

While the general idea is to demonstrate how non-Western culture has been represented by a Western one, the particular aim of the thesis is to offer an analysis of twentieth century images of Turkey in the West mainly through the texts of thrillers and travel accounts. Since Turkey has generally been treated as a Middle Eastern country in terms of geography, culture and religion in those texts I have randomly selected, the negative images of Turkey and the Turks have been examined from a non-European point of view taking into account Michel Foucault's analysis interpreted by Edward Said. In order to provide a better understanding of the texts studied in the thesis, there is a brief presentation of the history and development of travel writing and popular fiction as distinct literary genres in the Introduction. Moreover, as the thesis demonstrates that there are a great number of direct or indirect references to historical representations of the Turks identified with the Ottomans, a chronological account of early images is made in the first chapter. These images can be summed up under such general headings as 'Lustful' and 'Terrible' Turks or a combination of both. The analysis of contemporary images of Turkey has been undertaken separately in ensuing chapters. While the images of violence are discussed in the second chapter, the images of the exotic which appear in the third, and the fourth chapter deals with first impressions of Turkey and the Turks. The thesis, which concludes with a discussion of the evolving process of Turkish stereotypes from verbal to visual towards the end of the twentieth century, suggesting that there are also other discourses in the media, particularly in the cinema worth examining as they also construct and perpetuate the negative image discerned in the selection of the texts.