In order to bridge the knowledge gap noted between Western and Chinese approaches to analysis of China’s TV media, this thesis sets out to propose an alternative methodological framework for investigation of the emergence, development and significance of a distinctive television genre categorised as ‘political history TV drama’ (PHTD), produced in Mainland China since the 1980s. Situating the genre in its historical and political contexts of production, I make particular reference to the orchestrating role of the Chinese state, the political re-articulation of Confucian values, and the reinventing of Chinese national identity. The thesis is composed of three parts. Part one includes the literature review of both Chinese and Western genre theory, followed by a discussion of further useful constructs to put in place the theoretical scaffolding for the study. In part two, the historical review concerns the production and political contexts of Chinese TV and TV drama in general. The third part applies this methodological framework to PHTD when contextualised in its Chinese setting, analysing its definitions, conventions, generic and cultural verisimilitudes, and hybridity. The third part is the core of the research, which investigates its rise to maturity, utilising a cultural and discursive account that encompasses: textual analysis; the study of its political and historical contexts; Chinese moral ideology and linguistics. A number of examples and case studies are examined as evidence for my perspective on questions of nationalism and Confucianism embedded in PHTD. The significance of this genre is in its reconstructed portrayal of the revived concept of a ‘patriarchal Confucian society’. Therefore, the thesis sets out the political, social and cultural landscape in which the genre is embedded in recognition of its representation of much more than just repackaged traditional narratives. In turn, this investigation helps to achieve a fuller understanding of the relation between political and intellectual forces, and the key role of nationalism combined with Confucianism in the media strategy of the Chinese authorities up until the first ten years of the 21st century.

State capitalism, which refers to an economic system wherein the state maintains a guiding role in the economy based on the functioning of a market mechanism that is instrumental to the state, has experienced a rapid proliferation during recent decades. As a typical example of a state capitalist country, China has developed a highly institutionalised economic system characterised by a deep integration between the state and the market. This thesis aims to answer the questions as to how and why the rise of Chinese state capitalism has challenged the existing international economic order. It begins with an exploration of the ways in which Chinese state capitalism functions, submitting that the state simultaneously fulfils a triple role when intervening in the market, namely that of a planner, competitor, and a regulator. This research then doctrinally analyses the legal instruments adopted by China to advance its state capitalist practice, through which it argues that, compared to public law, private law has assumed greater importance in underpinning Chinese state capitalism. Next, by exploring both the world trading system and the international investment regime, the thesis contends that the international economic order has a limited ability to properly respond to the development of China’s state capitalism. The reason behind the limitation results from a failure to understand China’s contemporary state capitalism as an economic model that transcends the traditional market-state paradigm long-held by orthodox capitalism.

‘Security’ has been undergoing a process of re-conceptualisation since the Cold War. Realism’s dominance meant that security concerned the survival of the nation-state in the face of military aggression. This clear-cut ‘traditional security’ has been contested since the 1970s, when ‘non-traditional security’ (NTS) covering non-military threats began to be discussed. Security Studies now encompasses varying approaches and interpretations. The concept of security is evolving substantially, but the debate is mostly limited to Western voices. Yet NTS has sparked a lively discourse in the PRC. The thesis establishes Chinese International Relations (IR) scholars’ understanding of NTS, based on the close textual analysis of academic publications and on interviews conducted with authors and other IR-specialists in China. It enquires into what these scholars mean when discussing NTS, and whether their conceptions differ from the mainstream, mainly Western, IR discourse. It then investigates the ten issues generally deemed NTS in the Chinese debate: culture and information security; terrorism and transnational crime; economic security and migration; energy and environmental security; and health and food security, analysing their conceptualisations, assigned importance, causes for variance within the debate, emerging political meanings and implications, and possible normative implications. The study shows that the scholarly NTS debate in China is diverse, ranging from a more statist expansion of national security to non-military threats to a theoretically deeper discourse which embraces individual security. Although the debate encompasses political purposes of vindicating state securitisation and advocating state management, some scholars’ arguments have normative implications of moving towards a people-centric view of security encouraging a change in global politics. The debate in China is still in flux, without universally accepted definitions, but a normative turn is evident which means that Chinese IR theory overall moves beyond descriptive theory. The study contributes to the wider research by adding to our understanding of how China ‘sees’ the world, and to the debate on NTS by critically examining the Chinese thought vis-à-vis the mainstream literature.

This thesis explores the US mediation strategies applied during the management of the Egyptian-Israeli dispute in the period of 1973-1975. More specifically, it focuses on the crucial US role in bringing Egypt and Israel towards a settlement from the 1973 October War to the brink of the Camp David settlement, realised under President Jimmy Carter. The centrepiece of the thesis is the mediation efforts during the Republican Presidencies of Richard Nixon (1969-74) and Gerald Ford (1974-77). This thesis examines how diverse contextual variables change and interact with the mediator’s methods of sequencing and packaging of the issues in conflict management. The key analysis emerges from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s mediation, especially by looking at his ‘concession-hunting’ procedure and its accompanying ‘hard bargaining’ tactics after the 1973 October War. The analysis incorporates specific case studies of Kissinger’s mediation efforts, which led to the signature of the Sinai I and Sinai II disengagement agreements, but also resulted in the reassessment of the US foreign policy towards Israel in March 1975. In this thesis it will be seen that concession-hunting processes differed in their processes and outcomes This thesis concludes that in a protracted conflict, the concession-hunting is a method preferable for bridging the gap between the disputants, as compared to the holistic approach. If performed by a mediator with concrete ‘powers’, it extracts concessions in a gradual manner and allows for third party implementation of various methods to ‘soften up’ the hard negotiating positions of the disputants.

Nationalism has been an important issue for China in both domestic politics and international relations. In the Post-Tiananmen Era, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) turned to nationalism as an ideological instrument to bolster the faith of the Chinese people and legitimise the Party’s rule. Meanwhile, the early 1990s also witnessed rapid developments in information and communications technologies (ICTs) in China, which have catalysed the emergence of online nationalism. Much of the existing literature focuses on either the external impact of Chinese nationalism on foreign policy or highlights the rise of popular nationalism as an independent force that makes the state fragile. There is, however, insufficient attention paid to the internal construct of Chinese nationalism. In the digital age, it also becomes increasingly evident that contemporary Chinese nationalism cannot be properly understood without reference to the role of digital communication. This thesis analyses the politics of Chinese nationalism through the lens of digital communicative practices. This offers an original and nuanced understanding of the political and social dynamics in contemporary China. The thesis focuses on two dimensions. First, it highlights the link between official nationalism and popular nationalism, revealing the changing dynamics within the construction of Chinese nationalism. Second, it focuses on Chinese online nationalism, illuminating the relationship between nationalism and technology. The thesis presents the first major work in examining both top-down construction and popular reception in Chinese nationalism studies from an ethnosymbolic approach. It highlights that the theoretical framework of ethno-symbolism is helpful in providing a more situated, nuanced understanding from a historical and cultural dimension. This thesis considers the (re)construction of China’s national myths of the Second Sino-Japanese War and examines the construction of national humiliation and national pride in the changing state-society dynamics. The study primarily focuses on discourse, in both textual and visual modes, relating to national humiliation and national pride that constitute the two key ingredients of Chinese nationalism. Accordingly, two cases are chosen for empirical investigation: the commemoration events for the Nanjing Massacre and the 2015 Victory Day Parade event. The study uses discourse analytical tools from Discourse Historical Approach and multimodal approach and highlights the importance of having a situated understanding of Chinese nationalism from historical and cultural perspective. It argues that Chinese online nationalism is (re)constructed by a multiplicity of discourses via digital practices, characterised by the evolving dynamics between state and society and situated in the wider political and cultural contexts. The thesis shows that digital communication has changed the means by which the landscape of Chinese nationalism is shaped, which is manifest in two ways. Firstly, national symbols and rituals, as an important means of patriotic education for the CCP, have been “relocated” from physical space, such as Nanjing and Tiananmen, to virtual cyberspace. By incorporating technology into its patriotic education framework, the CCP increasingly extends its discursive power in propagating patriotism, thereby making the Internet an institutionalised patriotic education venue. Secondly, online nationalist expressions and communication provide fertile ground for Chinese Internet users to explore their discursive space in political communication, allowing them to reshape the mythscape of the national past and reconstruct national identity.

With or without global consent, China and India are the rising powers in Asia. After 1962, these two states have experienced enduring rivalries with historical and intricate hostility over the issues of territory, the sanctuary of Tibetan refugees on Indian territory, polarized relations with Pakistan, and geopolitical and resources competition. However, these disagreements have evolved from confrontation to the mixed elements of competition and cooperation to date. Sino-Indian relations have undergone a transformation with momentum toward cooperation on a number of regional and global issues over the last two decades. This thesis aims at exploring why Sino-Indian relations have been transformed from enmity to amity. To do so, I apply the peace and war theory of an international relations theorist, Benjamin Miller, as a main theoretical framework to analyse the transformations of Sino-Indian relations between 1950s and 2013. Thus, this thesis finds alternative explanations of the regional orders to account for why rivals states tend to peacefully coexist, contributing to peace studies. This thesis argues that the transformations of Sino-Indian relations from hot war to cold war, then to cold peace can be contributed to two factors: firstly, the end of superpower competition and the presence of the great powers – Russia, between 1990 and 1999, and the US, after 2000 –imposing regional stability. Secondly, China and India suffered from the problems of a “state-to-nation imbalance”, causing the 1962 war. Moreover, the Sino-Indian relations were characterized by the challenges to the unresolved border disputes associated with China’s Tibet issue, making peace reversible and a high level of warm peace more difficult.

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Allen Featherstone / For the past 25 years, Free Trade Agreements (FTA) in Asia have been increasing. This allows for a potential expansion of exports into Asia for a variety of goods. However usually these agreements have not covered agricultural products. The most recent multilateral agreement currently includes agricultural products and agricultural trade. U.S. pork exports have been on the rise with Asian countries. Trade openness with Asian countries allows U.S. pork companies to gain a market in the region. This thesis estimates the economic impact that FTA’s and multilateral agreements have on pork exports, through the level of open markets measured by Freedom House. Using regression analysis, this research examines the determinants to U.S. pork exports, where trade openness is a major independent variable. Pork is a popular meat preference in East Asia. A regression analysis was estimated to determine the shift along the demand curve of U.S. pork exports to three East Asian countries, China, Japan, and South Korea. Overall all three countries showed their trade openness being weakly associated with the U.S. pork export demand to that particular country during the years of 1995–2013.

This thesis examines the challenges that the Federal and Amhara National Regional State (ANRS)1 Courts of Ethiopia face in the realisation of legal and social justice. The Ethiopia Constitution (1995) under Article 43 declares that Ethiopian people have the right to improved living standards and sustainable development where the basic aim of development activity is to enhance, through their full participation, citizens’ capacity for development and the meeting of their basic needs. The Constitution underlined this as the ‘North Star’ of social justice which would be meaningless unless dispute resolution mechanisms empower litigants and the people in gaining social justice and thus the attainment of the Constitutional objective. The attainment of the social justice is however problematic as the legal justice the formal court is administering does not meet the people’s Constitutional expectations. The mismatch between legal and social justice, coupled with the legal history and the prevalence of justice pluralism, tends to force the People of Ethiopia to use non-formal systems of dispute resolution. Thus, there is a need to refine the formal and non-formal systems and to align them with the Constitutional imperative of social justice. Judicial reform is being implemented, with the help of international institutions like the World Bank, but the underlining concern is whether the World Bank proposals on judicial and legal reform will meet these needs or whether they are too located in Western values, the suggestion being that they may suffer from the same problems as other modernisation projects. There also lies a tension between the Constitutional expectation, the conceptualisation of justice by professionals and clients, and the overall purpose of securing justice and preventing injustice. Litigants’ preference for justice is itself in conflict with other litigants and the diverse institutional understanding of justice that made the attainment of social justice a difficult exercise. The area is found to be so problematic that there is a need to re-connect the practical conceptualisation of justice with the Constitutional conceptualisation of social justice which the Federal and ANRS courts require the redoing of justice so that the conceptualisation of justice would not cause irreversible damage to people’s societal, economic, and ecological demands and to the sustainability of justice and development.

This thesis provides a critical account of state transformation on one of the last ‘frontiers’ of mineral exploration and extraction. Mongolia’s struggle to consolidate its extractive development strategy lies in a fundamental tension between the nature of global capital investment and the responsiveness of national democratic institutions to their political electorate. In this sense, Mongolia is part of a broader pattern of state formation in a global era. This pattern has been recognised in established Western democracies, but, as this thesis argues, vulnerable states in the periphery of the global economy are also being affected with potentially more immediate and alarming consequences. In the context of a transition to a development strategy reliant on the extraction and export of raw minerals (primary commodities) since 1997, the Mongolian state has entered the world of competitive international finance (as opposed to development loans) and investment, in which courting and preserving the interest and ‘confidence’ of the investor is paramount for the government. In the early years of the millennium (2003-2012), Mongolian citizens became increasingly engaged in democratic political processes and particularly vocal regarding the lack of perceived public benefit from mining investment and the damaging socio-environmental consequences of extraction in rural areas. Thus, I argue that a constitutional struggle played itself out between the contradictory impulses of the state towards investors and citizens as evidenced in the see-saw cycles of legal and policy reform between 1997 and 2013. Consequently, by the end of 2013, the general downturn in global commodity prices and the particular “vote of no confidence” in Mongolia’s investment environment from the majority of investors led to the consolidation of a cross-party ‘stability consensus’ within the state. The process of ‘stabilising’ the investment environment has occurred at the expense of the democratic constitution of the state, demonstrated in the curtailment of Parliamentary powers over policy-making processes, the limitation of self-government for sub-national administrations and the restriction of civil society organisations’ participation in political processes. As a post-socialist state adjusting to the constraints of the global economy and the cycles of commodity markets, Mongolia provides concrete evidence of the antagonistic relationship between national democracy and global economic integration, and the reality of the latter’s constitutional impacts.

Recent problematic military interventions, as part of the Global War on Terror, have led to widespread criticism that British policy-makers have failed to learn lessons from history. At the same time as the accusations of not learning, the British government has repeatedly claimed that lessons have been learned, particularly from the disastrous war in Iraq. This thesis investigates these contradicting claims by analysing learning from the past in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence and the Intelligence Community across four case studies of British military intervention in the Middle East; 1958 in Jordan, 1961 in Kuwait, the 1990-1991 Gulf War and 2003-2009 Iraq War. It provides a fresh analysis of these highly significant events, using previously undisclosed documents, offers an assessment of learning processes and concludes by recommending practical suggestions for the improvement of learning from history in the future.