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This study proposes a model for the deconstruction of nationalism. Nationalism is a discursive construct. This construct manifests in ideologies and formalizes order. Individuals should question these institutions in order to achieve legitimate societal participation. This criticism can be accomplished through self-reflection. The model demonstrates that sanctioned individual(s) provide interpretations of events. These interpretations recycle authority. The hermeneutic obscures an individual's understanding of the originating fact. Self-reflection allows an individual, such as Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam, to come closer to discovering the original fact. Critiquing the hermeneutic can reveal the imperfections of the message(s). Revealing the imperfections of an ideology is the first step to the liberation of the individual and society.

Freedom is universally valued and fundamentally affects social life. In this thesis, I examine how freedom affects an important dimension of business: long-term commitment (LTC). The LTC of corporations is vital for economic growth because economic development is reliant on entrepreneurs continuously investing in physical and social capital. Corporate opportunism will never lead to long-term economic growth. Specifically, this study examines the effects of political freedom (PF) and economic freedom (EF) on two LTC-related variables: investment and the commitment to maintaining a loyal shareholder base, both of which are essential topics in the business literature. This study consists of two essays. The first essay investigates the effects of a country's political versus economic freedom on corporate investment based on a sample of 19,605 companies operating in 49 countries for the timespan covering 1995 to 2015. First-differencing (FD) regressions show that PF and EF are positively associated with corporate investment, but PF's effect is larger. I also find that the effect of EF is conditional on the development of PF but not vice versa. Further, the effect of PF does not seem to be due to concurrent changes in uncontrolled factors: major changes in PF have larger effects than minor changes, and I do not observe a reversion in the effect of PF. Lastly, I find that an improvement in PF is associated with a larger growth in investment among firms with state ownership or political connections, suggesting a larger distorting effect of low PF on these firms' investment decisions. Overall, the findings shed new light on the economic reforms designed by policymakers: economic reforms, no matter how easy they seem, may not work well without political reforms. The second essay examines the impacts of a country's political compared with economic freedom on corporations' commitment to maintaining a loyal shareholder base. With a sample of 45 countries spanning 12 years, the FD result shows that PF and EF are positively associated with corporations' commitment to shareholder loyalty (CSL). More importantly, PF has a greater effect than EF. It is also determined that the impact of EF is dependent on the advancement of PF, but the reverse is not true. Furthermore, the impact of PF is not caused by concurrent changes in uncontrolled factors: major changes in PF are more impactful than minor changes, while a reversion in the impact of PF is not observed. Finally, I find that an enhancement to PF is correlated with a more significant increase in CSL among firms with state ownership or political connections than in firms without. This implies that low PF has a greater distorting effect on the CSL of such firms. In general, these results indicate that while it is comparatively easier for policymakers to enact economic reforms, their effectiveness may be reduced in the absence of concurrent political reforms.

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How does history turn into memory? Specifically, how has the Spanish Transition been memorialized in the last ten years? Between the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 and the landslide victory of the Socialist Party in 1982, Spain slowly transitioned to a standardized European democracy. This historical period of seven years, officially labelled as the “Spanish Transition,” has been subjected to archivization—production and record of this process—since the eighties up until the present. My dissertation unveils how the transition has become a discourse, that is to say, an archive, particularly paying attention to the post-recession scenario (2010 onward, when the limits of its mythified success were publicly exposed). Through the study of autobiographies, documentaries, and museum exhibitions, I demonstrate the impossibility of separating the cultural performance of the transition from its archivization. In other words, we cannot separate the history of the transition, as shaped through these cultural objects, from the memory it has become. I have set up a methodology that is rooted in the concepts of performance and archive. I argue that these concepts are inextricable from one another. I use performance as a lens to penetrate the socio-political and cultural transition from dictatorship to democracy. Performance, then, functions as an episteme in which the categories of history and memory converge. Through this approach, history can be perceived as an ongoing process, which connects with the intervention of cultural historians in the public sphere. This vision of history as a continuum, in addition, allows us to focus on the processes of memorialization, which chart the transformation from the specificity in time and space of a cultural performance—a concrete experience—to its archivization as an event and a fact. In this vein, performance (history) shapes the archive (memory) and opens up a dynamic reading of history, a history that is still under construction and is drawing on a contingent memory. Each chapter focuses on a different medium that have in common their hybrid nature: respectively, autobiographies, documentaries, and museum exhibitions. The first chapter is about autobiographies by popular icons in which memory is a stage for the self to re-perform. A case in point is the Fabiografía, Fabio McNamara’s auto-hagiography in which Fabio, aided by the media star Mario Vaquerizo, creates a genre of his own and turns his life and version of the transition into a fetish. The second chapter questions the role of performing bodies in the construction of consensus and dissensus on documentaries about the transition. One specific instance is Mi querida España (2015), where we find performing bodies conveying through their actions dissenting ways of understanding the transition. The third chapter analyzes museum exhibitions as branding spaces for the transition. A case in point is Ocaña’s museum in his hometown, Cantillana del Campo (Seville); despite being empty of objects, this museum legitimizes Ocaña’s presence in the village, making of him an Andalusian standard-bearer of freedom. These three media show history and memory as coterminous and contingent, embodying the cultural performance of the transition and its reconfiguration in the archive.

Education in Senegal has since Independence in 1960 relied on French, the language of the colonizer and a foreign language for most Senegalese learners. In Senegal, national languages refer to African languages, which are not officially enacted as languages of instruction in formal schooling in comparison to French, the former colonial and current official language. However, in 2015, the Ministry of Education adopted a bilingual education policy based on national (Senegalese) languages. This is due in no small part to the advocacy work of Senegalese national language activists or militants (strong advocates in French, drawing on a political connotation). This study looks at these self-proclaimed militants’ lived experiences with national languages and education, the extent of their multi-generational work and network, and their influence in shaping the language-in-education policy landscape at what appears to be a moment of “critical juncture” with the adoption of a bilingual education policy within the Ministry of National Education. A qualitative case study, it draws on in-depth interviews with these militants, historical and policy document analysis, and participant-observations to answer the following question: “How and why have self-proclaimed militants advocated for the use of national languages in the Senegalese educational system since the 1950s, and what are their current contributions at this critical moment in possible language-in-education policy change?” Situated in a sociocultural framework, this study draws on Walter Mignolo’s (1991) decolonial theory of “border thinking” and Senegalese decolonial authors to amplify the voices, innovations, and contributions of Senegalese bi-/multilingual education researchers, practitioners, and advocates. Decolonizing and delinking knowledge is particularly important in the field of bi-/multilingual education and literacy as research and practice are often exported from the Global North to Global South through international development and aid programs, when in fact, contexts of the Global North would gain more in learning from models of the Global South. In the context of Senegal, the militants’ engagement in bilingual education is an act of self-determination and sovereignty, to move away from inherited and internalized patterns of colonial education and at the same time navigate the dynamics of aid and development in education, in particular, international donor agencies agendas and funding mechanisms.

Why do foreign policy decision makers care about the credibility of their own state’s commitments? How does organizational identity shape policymakers’ concern for credibility, and in turn, their willingness to use force during crises? While much previous research examines how decision makers assess others’ credibility, only recently have scholars questioned when and why leaders or their advisers prioritize their own state’s credibility. Building on classic scholarship in bureaucratic politics, I argue that organizational identity affects the dimensions of credibility that national security officials value, and ultimately, their policy advocacy around the use of force. Particular differences arise between military and diplomatic organizations; while military officials equate credibility with hard military capabilities, diplomats view credibility in terms of reputation, or demonstrating reliability and resolve to external parties. During crises, military officials confine their advice on the use of force to what can be achieved given current capabilities, while diplomats exhibit higher willingness to use force as a signal of a strong commitment. I test these propositions using text analysis of archival records from two collections of U.S. national security policy documents, eight case studies of American, British, and French crisis decision making, and an original survey experiment involving more than 400 current or former U.S. national security officials. I demonstrate that credibility concerns affect the balance of hawkishness in advice that diplomats and military officials deliver to leaders as a function of organizational identity.

The ethnic and religious diversity of the population is often associated with worse state building outcomes, including lower levels of taxation. In this dissertation I investigate how diversity hinders state building and how it shapes the patterns of taxation. The dissertation is structured around two main questions. The first question is: What are the mechanisms through which diversity constrains state building? Building on the fact that periods of state building include increases in the amount of taxes levied on the populations follows the second question that concerns the distributional consequences of the increases in the amount of taxes: Which groups bear the increasing fiscal burdens of an expanding state during periods of state building? I argue that diversity impedes state building by increasing the costs of the state’s investment in fiscal capacity. This is because in more diverse places the different ethnic and religious identities of the population make them more illegible to the state’s agents, making it more difficult for the state to acquire knowledge about the population and its economic activities. This illegibility also increases the bargaining power of local intermediaries vis-à-vis the state, which makes investment in fiscal capacity even costlier as these groups often oppose state building. Because it is cheaper to invest in the fiscal capacity of less diverse places, I also argue that the tax burdens of the core/dominant groups in the society, even though they are in power, increase more than the tax burdens of the minorities during periods of state building. I test these arguments in the context of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ottoman Empire. The main empirical evidence relies on statistical analyses of an original dataset based on my archival work in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. In addition to this, I use other original and secondary datasets, as well as a close reading and qualitative analysis of correspondences among Ottoman bureaucrats in the Ottoman archives. Using the local-level fiscal revenue data, I demonstrate that the increases in fiscal revenues during wartime were lower in more diverse areas in the empire, indicating diversity hinders state building. Using another dataset on the local-level expenses of the state, I find that the state had to invest more in more diverse provinces to be able to extract a unit revenue. This suggests that the costs of investment in fiscal capacity were higher under diversity. In order to provide evidence for the mechanisms I suggest in the argument, I show that the Ottoman State was less successful in successfully completing censuses in more diverse areas, which is consistent with the argument that diverse populations are more illegible to the state. I also utilize a dataset on governor assignments to provide evidence that diversity constrained possible government assignments, potentially decreasing bureaucratic capacity. I complement these quantitative analyses with qualitative analyses of archival documents and evidence from secondary sources. With these findings, I make three main contributions to the literatures on state building, the politics of taxation, and identity politics. First, I demonstrate that diversity impedes state building, and it does so by rendering populations illegible and making investment in fiscal capacity more costly. Hence, I propose and test a new theory that explains why diversity constrains state building, by bringing together insights from the state building and identity politics literatures. Second, I show that because the members of the core/dominant groups are more legible to the state and investment in fiscal capacity is cheaper where they live, they undergo higher tax burdens of the state building processes compared to the minorities. This indicates a distributive outcome that goes contrary to conventional wisdom where the ruling identity group taxes itself rather than other groups. Finally, finding that war can result in stronger states only under sufficient homogeneity of the population, I underline ethnic and religious diversity as factors that might condition the relationship where war leads to stronger states. This offers one possible explanation why the argument in the wider literature that warfare leads to stronger states is often challenged outside Early Modern Europe, where the populations were less diverse.

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The central question in this thesis is what are the interrelationships between the news media and those at the center of power and how do these shape the role the media play in democratic processes, particularly since neoliberal reforms in 1991. More specifically, this research attempts to illuminate journalistic practice and the factors that influence it, at the intersection of political and economic interests in what is often described as a crony capitalist polity (Kohli, 2007; Varshney, 2000). This has been done by examining three case studies that represented the interests of those at the center of power and the growing collusion between the state and private capital that has been a mark of the polity's neoliberal turn (Chandrashekhar, 2014). Each of these - the Nira Radia conversations that exposed the nexus between private capital and the state, the news media's coverage of the political elite, mainly the Gandhi family and the leader of the Hindu majoritarian political party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Narendra Modi, and lastly, the media's coverage of India's richest business house Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and its owner Mukesh Ambani - was marked by extensive self-censorship by the national mainstream news media. The theoretical architecture underpinning this project draws on three major approaches - political economy, field theory and new institutional theory provides a framework sufficiently sensitive to the range of pressures and influences journalism is subject to. This research draws on forty semi-structured, in-depth interviews with forty journalists and editors who were directly involved in the editorial processes of each of these news stories. The salient finding of this project is that the field of journalism has been subject to regular incursions from the field of power, particularly when political and economic interests are aligned, such that the field of journalism collapses in the field of power resulting in the need to reassess Bourdieu's claim that fields, however heteronomous, possess a degree of autonomy. This research finds that journalism is not merely embedded in the field of power, it plays a more pernicious role after economic liberalization. It becomes an active participant in negotiating and consolidating the dominant coalition of economic and political interests on which the polity rests. In other words, it is recruited by the field of power in institutionalizing crony capitalism. However, the self-censorship could not be sustained and unraveled, albeit briefly, in each of these cases. Contradictions between the macro forces induced by the consolidation of democracy, dissensus within the elite and constitutional limits circumscribing power are some of the variables that allow for interstices of journalistic autonomy. Thus, new institutionalism's insistence on retaining the political elided by both political economy and field theory, is valuable. Lastly, this research foregrounds the role played by journalistic agency in upholding the democratic mission of journalism.