For the last 46 years, the countries of the world have tried to reduce the number of chronically hungry people. Despite all the efforts, the numbers have barely budged from the over 850 million people who were chronically hungry in 1974 until the 2007-2009 food price crisis, when the numbers increased to over 1.02 billion. The blame for this situation has variously been put on bad governance, the lack of adequate market reforms, the market reforms that were imposed on developing nations, and globalization. Food, like other products in this globalized world, is allocated using the market system. One likely place to look for the cause of continuing hunger is at the assumptions that underlie the market system, in particular the assumption of non-coerciveness. This assumption asserts that the market transaction—in this case for food—is freely entered into by both the buyer and the seller and that either can refuse to enter into the transaction if it is not to their advantage. After looking at the traditional understanding of coerciveness in economics, this dissertation examines the logic system of economics concluding that the issue of non-coerciveness is a moral issue, and the argument of Frank Knight that the question of non-coerciveness is an issue of ethics. Using the work of Michael Keeley, this paper concludes that broadly accepted human rights is the best possible criterion for determining whether or not the aggregate food market is non-coercive. If the human right to food is abridged then it can be said that the aggregate food market is coercive and the assumption of non-coerciveness for the aggregate food market does not hold. With 1.02 billion people chronically hungry, 1/6 of humanity, it is clear that the right to food has been abridged and the aggregate food market is coercive. To overcome chronic hunger and enforce the right to food, governments, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations are going to have to supplement markets with non-market measures. The dissertation concludes with a number of recommendations for non-market measures that can be taken to ensure that all people enjoy the right to food.

This thesis is a study of the coerciveness of legal systems. I defend two main claims: that typical legal systems are much less coercive than most legal and political philosophers think, and that legal systems are not necessarily coercive. My defence is developed in three parts. The first is dedicated to building the necessary theoretical framework to defend the main claims of this thesis. This is where I offer a rigorous formulation of the questions that this thesis addresses and contextualise them within broader debates about the relationship between law and coercion. A substantial portion of the first part of the thesis is devoted to the development of two accounts: an account of coercion and an account of the conditions legal systems must satisfy in order to be coercive. The second part is where I advance two arguments for the claim that typical legal systems are much less coercive than it is usually thought. The first is an argument that establishes that our legal systems rarely issue conditional threats. Given that issuing conditional threats is a necessary condition for any legal system to be coercive - or so I claim in the first part of the thesis - the fact that our legal systems rarely do so undermines the view that our legal systems are pervasively coercive. The second argument is based on the reasons why citizens comply with legal mandates. I analyse the relevant empirical data and show that compliance is not frequently owed to the threat of unwelcome consequences. This should not have been the case had our legal systems been as coercive as philosophers generally think. The third part deals with the claim that legal systems are necessarily coercive. There I address some methodological concerns that this claim gives rise to and propose two arguments for viewing coerciveness as a contingent feature of our legal systems.

The main objective of this research is to test some of the hypotheses linking economic development, social mobilization, legitimacy, and the coerciveness of the regime with internal political conflict. Each proposed hypothesis is to be tested across sixteen predominantly Islamic Middle Eastern nations for data from two time periods, 1960-66 and 1967-73. To check for the consistency and strength of the hypothesized relationships the test results for each hypothesis for the first period data will be compared with those of the second period.