The fundamental research topic of this thesis is: to determine the extent to which the emergence and evolution of factional groups and their politics have been conditioned by their conception of 'the role of people' in the political arena. It will also explore their perceptions of societal demands and expectations in a different period of the IRI's short history. In other words, it aims to trace and explain the evolution of popularisation of factional politics in the IRI. To answer this question, I also elaborate another related question: the extent to which the emergence and evolution of certain factional groups have been conditioned by the character of personal relationships between key, leading actors in each group. These two interrelated issues represent the most important omissions in the academic literature on factional politics in the IRI. Therefore, by definition, I will show how, with the death of Khomeini in 1989 and the consequent decentralisation of ideological production in the IRI, forcing factional groups to reach out of the institutional context and seek popular electoral support in order to successfully compete in factional struggles within the institutions of the IRI. As a result, societal demands and/or the elite's perception of these demands became an important element in the dynamics of factional politics in the post-Khomeini era. Various factions articulated their conceptions of 'the role of people' in the IRI's politics-rooted in and justified by their respective interpretations of Khomeinism. Theses competing conceptions of the 'role of people' in the IRI engendered the emergence of series of discourses and slogans within the framework of Khomeinism aimed to justify the factions' claims of being the representatives of popular demands and Khomeinism. Furthermore, the members of the elite of the IRI, both those who participated in the revolution and their offspring, have a long personal history with each other. Positive and negative feelings that emerged from any of these experiences, I intend to show, at some key points have played roles of various degrees of importance in the emergence and evolution of certain factional groups and their actions in vital political events, such as the controversial 2009 elections and its aftermath. The thesis will draw its theoretical base and methodology from the literature on hybrid regimes, faction in democratic and party-based systems, and faction in absolutist systems, in addition to the existing literature on factional politics in the IRI dealing with the institutional context.

The study of Graeco-Persian relations is not new to academia, however, as much of our information is found within Greek literary texts, we are largely at the mercy of Greek bias concerning these relations. This thesis will present a detailed re-examination of the relevant sources to gain further understanding of Graeco-Persian relations, with a view to looking beyond Greek literary bias. This thesis proposes that the influence of the Persian Empire upon the Greeks was greater than is initially implied by our sources and I argue that in the majority of the contacts between Greek and Persian, Persia took control. The notable exception to this is the highly debated Peace of Callias, which forced Persia to offer concessions to the Greeks, but it should be noted that we have no record of possible Greek concessions to Persia, and so we must treat this topic with caution. This thesis expands our knowledge of Graeco-Persian relations by taking a view of the entire period of these relations, from initial contacts until the accession of Alexander the Great, allowing us to view more general trends throughout this period, rather than viewing shorter phases within the whole period.

After more than three decades of legal reform under a promotion of the rule of law, it is opportune to assess and conceptualize the relationship between the legal reform and protection of human rights in China. The rule of law in China has been subjected to much controversy and debate. There are views that China at best desires and practices a rule by law under which the protection of human rights is a far-fetch goal. What further complicates the matter is that China’s legal reform is arriving at “crossroads” as it has exhausted most of the easy part of the reform. Legal reform today faces more difficulty in trying to accommodate and prioritize conflicting values and interests. This thesis aims to explore whether China’s legal reform towards the rule of law promote the protection of human rights. Using the distinction of thin and thick versions of rule of law, it is argued that the party-state aims to establish a Chinese rule of law integrating many basic standards of a thin rule of law. After decades of intensive reform many areas of law have incorporated certain principles of the thin rule of law. This process led to the advancement of human rights protection and rise of rights-consciousness. However, as the reform increasingly concerns more complicated issues that goes beyond “thin” solutions, the thesis argues that the conception of human rights come to play an important role in the decision-making.

This thesis examines Japanese postwar foreign policy, specifically regional policy, based on two hypotheses that are closely related: (1) There has been a growing interest among Japanese policymakers in Japan taking greater initiative independent of US policy, not only economically but increasingly in the political and even the security area. (2) Japan has been quietly pursuing definite strategies for enhancing its national interests, and this style of Japanese foreign policy has been effective for achieving its goals, given domestic, regional and international constraints imposed on it. The thesis offers detailed analyses, within the framework of IR and 1PE, on what has changed in Japanese policy, what has caused the changes, what Japan has achieved throughout the postwar period and how and why Japan's policy exhibits such a style. These themes arc examined by looking at Japan's regional policy in the postwar period in the historical context, as well as by studying three case studies, namely: (1) the ideological differences between the Japanese approach and the Washington and Post-Washington Consensus on economic development and systemic transition. (2) Japanese policy towards the East Asian financial crisis in 1997 and 1998 and (3) Japanese policy towards East Asian regionalism. Extensive interviews with Japanese policymakers, such as MOF and MOFA officials, and Japanese intellectuals arc used for investigating these case studies. The thesis makes the following original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it advances the discussions about the nature of Japanese foreign policy, which has been the subject of academic controversy over the last few' decades, by shedding light on two related questions, namely (1) whether Japanese foreign policy can be characterised as reactive or strategic, (2) whether Japan's US priority' in foreign policy has meant that its East Asia policy is decided according to US relations, or whether East Asia has occupied an important position in Japanese foreign policy. Secondly, the thesis also advances the discussions about the style of Japanese foreign policy. This is still an underdeveloped subject theoretically and empirically, but could potentially lead to more extensive arguments including the nature of leadership. Thirdly , detailed narrative analyses of Japan's policies towards important events in the 1990s, which have not yet been subject to sufficient scholarly debate, despite their great potential to offer insight into Japanese foreign policy, make a significant empirical contribution to the study of Japanese foreign policy. Furthermore, these empirical discussions, which arc concerned with significant regional development in East Asia, contribute to the study of regionalism as well, given Japan's great economic influence on the region.

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Israeli foreign policy towards Iran in the period 1948-1979 has been generally explained through the Realist perspective, claiming that Israeli relations with Iran were established and developed due to converging strategic interests and common threats. This thesis argues that the existing literature does not fully appreciate the role that individuals, especially with their perceptions and misperceptions and human agency played in the formation and implementation of Israeli foreign policy. By not fully appreciating the role of human agency, the existing literature on Israeli relations with Iran has not fully explored the methods that made Israel’s foreign policy with Iran a success. For instance, the existing accounts do not examine how the actions of specific Israeli diplomats in Tehran such as Ambassador Meir Ezri prevented attempts from groups in Iran such as the Iranian Foreign Ministry and certain religious clerics to stop Israeli-Iranian relations. For three decades, the relationship between Israel and Iran, though discreet and often kept secret, flourished within the context of the Cold War and the rise of Pan Arabism. Many covert joint operations yielded widespread collaboration in the areas of trade, civilian technology, oil, agriculture, and extensive military intelligence collaboration on areas such as Yemen, Iraq and the Kurds. That changed with a shift in Israeli personnel in 1973, and ended completely after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. If Israeli-Iranian relations did solely stem from converging strategic interests, relations would have been more likely to survive the 1979 Revolution. Rather, the Israelis’ change in personnel in Tehran, their relationships with the Iranians, and their perceptions of world events greatly influenced the 1973 and 1979 shifts. This thesis concludes that any analysis of Israeli foreign policy formation and implementation towards Iran must include the multidimensional role of decision-makers, diplomats, and other foreign policy actors in order to complete the analysis presented by the existing Realist-leaning accounts. The thesis bases its argument on extensive International Relations-based examination of Israeli diplomatic history. Analysis of the role of prime ministers and diplomats such as David Ben Gurion, Tzvi Doriel and Meir Ezri; including their perceptions and misperceptions and human agency—forges a new understanding of Israeli foreign policy towards Iran from 1948 to 1979. Through the use of personal interviews, memoirs in Hebrew, English and Farsi, recently de-classified documents from the Israel State Archives, and unseen documents from private family collections, this thesis presents an argument that addresses the gaps in the existing literature.

The thesis offers a social history of opium in colonial Assam by tracing the evolution of representations, perceptions and ideological positions on opium from local, national and transnational perspectives which enables a new mode of reading the province’s specific encounter with colonialism and nationalism. It studies Assam’s history through the prism of opium, particularly the interplay between state and society during the period 1828–1947, and focusses on three groups—addicts, peddlers and reformers—whose interaction defined the terrain of the opium question in order to challenge the economic and nationalist bias in the historiography. It interprets opium as a cultural commodity and social practice and reorients the framework of opium in India from export trade to domestic consumption, using opium addiction in Assam and the global prohibition campaign as the vantage point to explore the interplay between colonial policy, local dissent, nationalism and transnational factors in order to understand the role that opium played in shaping social, cultural and political discourses. The thesis highlights that the opium discourse epitomised the juncture where local phenomenon, national processes and transnational developments overlapped and produced a complex narrative of the intersection of notions of indolence, improvement and industry with modernities, resistance and localisms. As a social biography of opium in colonial Assam, the thesis addresses deficiencies in our understanding of opium in India as well as the wider historiography of opium and enables modes of interpreting Assam’s unique encounter with colonialism and nationalism while also providing a framework to understand the influence of transnational factors in determining local facts. The thesis signals the centrality of transnational perspectives to drug history and is, therefore, both an attempt at recovery of local perspectives and regional specificities in the context of Assam as well as the insertion of locality into the global history of opium.

Despite the fact that there is considerable literature in the English-language on East Asian history in the nineteenth century, there are very few works that focus on the international politics of the region in the thirty-five years or so between the end of the Arrow War and the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War in July 1894. As a result, the history of East Asia in this period is often understood as a period of brief moratorium for the Qing dynasty of China before it finally fell prey to Western and Japanese imperialism at the turn of the century. In reality, the Qing was neither as passive nor as powerless as is often believed. On the contrary, the Chinese were successful in re-emerging as the most influential regional power in East Asia by the 1880s by making a conscious effort to reassert their influence in East Asia not only through domestic self-strengthening, but also by drawing on the traditional network between the Qing Empire and its neighbouring vassal kingdoms. This point has already been raised by some historians who have focused on Chinese policy towards Korea – a country which became the focus of imperial competition not only between Qing China and Japan but also Britain and Russia from the 1880s. However, little attention has been paid to how other states reacted to China’s revival. Much light can be shed on this process by looking at how two of the most significant players, Japan and Britain, related to the reassertion of Qing power and to each other over the future of Korea in the period from 1876 to 1894. This dissertation will demonstrate that it was difficult for the Anglo-Japanese relationship to become closer when the international environment in the region required them to prioritise their respective ties with the Qing Empire.

The thesis deals with volunteer bodies in India from the end of the Great War to c.1947. It examines the genealogy of these bodies as a projection surface for ideal citizenship, a space to experimentally put those ideas into practice and as site of a mobilisational drive ‘from below’ rendering these bodies contested spheres of national self-definition. The energies of ‘Youth’, both feared and desired by many actors, were sought to be disciplined into volunteer corps and utilised for the building of a disciplined ‘modern’ nation. ‘Youth’ and ‘volunteers’ thereby become mutually related categories, the former needing to be transformed into the latter. Several groupings of ‘volunteers’ appeared at the time, such as the Seva Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Khaksars, and the Muslim National Guards, all of which were provided paramilitary training and were available for use not only for various ‘social service’ activities, but also political intervention and, when necessary, for displays of violence, the latter feature most evident during the Second World War and the communal violence leading up to Partition and Indian Independence. Three levels of analysis are undertaken herein: the first, of event history, which aims not at a comprehensive narrative but to provide illustrations of the operation and dynamics of youth and volunteer movements. The second is an intellectual history (or genealogy) of the movements, outlining a series of engagements with ideas relating to modernity as well as to organicist ideas of the nation as a body with its citizens as component parts. The third is a structural analysis of volunteer groups with their tendency to resemble one another. Such ‘family resemblance’ also reopens the question regarding the greater ideological formations of the first half of the twentieth century.

The existing scholarship has typically explained the emergence of modern Japan as a territorial sovereign in the late-nineteenth century to be a result of its response to Western imperialism, which paved the way for it to build its own empire. Scholars have found Japan’s motivation for drawing territorial boundaries either in the pursuit of the maintenance of independence or its entry into the international society. However their narratives do not fully explain why the process led to the establishment of Japan’s sovereignty over border zones with ambiguous territorial status, such as the Kuril Islands and the Ryukyu Kingdom. Approaching the question by investigating local developments, this thesis presents a twofold explanation for the emergence of territorial boundaries around Japan: that the rise of sovereignty had origins in the long-term decline of the border zones’ political institutions; and that Japan’s expansion into these zones was enabled by a diplomatic equilibrium (which the thesis calls the balance of favour) among the Western powers. The rise of trans-Pacific commercial activities, the decline of tributary trade in East Asia, and Russia’s strategic shift to the Far East prompted fundamental changes in the political landscape for the border zones. The Western imperialists in the 1860s and the 1870s saw it as best that Japan control these areas, because one imperial power’s territorial gain would have unleashed a scramble that none of them saw as worth fighting. The above argument provides an alternative to the conventional Japan-centred narratives of interactions between Western imperialism and the East Asians. It also adds to the historical study of the border zones by providing a comparative analysis and connecting them with a broader context. It thus bridges the historiographical gap between the diplomatic history of bakumatsu and Meiji Japan and the local histories around the archipelago.