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This thesis attempts to answer the question ‘What e-democracy strategy, if any, is most suitable for Bahrain?’. Based on a qualitative case study for the country, an e-Democracy strategy is synthesised and presented in this thesis. The literature review includes the forms, ideals and values of democracy. The researcher supports and argues for the assertion that any attempt to implement e-Democracy must not undermine the basic values and ideals of democracy. In the review on Islam and democracy, the author argues that Islam is not against democracy. However it is asserted that e-Democracy implementation must consider the cultural and religious context of Bahrain. The process of democratisation and how it is taking place in Bahrain and Gulf countries are also discussed. A strategy formulation framework is adopted after reviewing literature on how to formulate a strategy. E-Government strategies of reading players in the e-Government are reviewed with an objective of learning lessons prior to formulating e-Democracy strategy. The literature review on e-democracy helped to understand the theory and practice of e-Democracy elsewhere in the world and identify issues that required further investigation. The issues identified from the literature were investigated using empirical data. Data from multiple sources were collected and analysed. The methods included interviews, focus groups and analysis of documents. The results confirm that most of the issues identified as part of the literature review are relevant to the case under investigation. However, there were issues that were not present in the literature. This includes the need to consider democracy’s human, social and cultural aspects as well as factors pertaining to the political divide in Bahrain. This, if not tackled properly, may pose some challenges to the implementation of e-Democracy. The results also disprove the assumption held by the government of Bahrain, as well as by the researcher at the beginning of the study, that e-voting is a more plausible type of e-democracy than other forms. The author adapts and presents an e-Democracy model for Bahrain based on Chadwick and May (2003) along with the e-Democracy strategy for Bahrain. The author also argues that the model and the strategy can be tailored to use in other GCC countries. The study fills a gap in the literature, namely the lack of e-democracy studies pertaining to the Middle East. It also provides a framework and lessons for other countries in the region for the creation of an e-democracy strategy.

The objective of this study is to describe and analyze the management of communal conflict in the Middle East, focusing on the Kurds. To this end, an effort is made to examine (1) the means that have been used to manage the Kurdish conflict by Middle Eastern countries; (2) the degree of success or failure of applied measures and (3) possible explanations for the first two questions.

This study is essentially a critique of how the three dominant paradigms of explanatory international relations theory - (neo-)realism, liberalism, and systemic constructivism - conceive of, analytically deal with, and explain ethnic conflict and sovereignty. By deconstructing their approaches to ethnic identity formation in general and ethnic conflict in particular it argues that all three paradigms, in their epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies through reification and by analytically equating ethnic groups with states, tend to essentialise and substantialise the ethnic lines of division and strategic essentialisms of ethnic and ethno-nationalist elites they set out to describe, and, all too often, even write them into existence. Particular attention, both at the theoretical and empirical level, will be given to the three explanatory frameworks explanatory IR has contributed to the study of ethnic conflict: the 'ethnic security dilemma', the 'ethnic alliance model', and, drawing on other disciplines, instrumentalist approaches. The deconstruction of these three frameworks will form the bulk of the theoretical section, and will subsequently be shown in the case study to be ontologically untenable or at least to fail to adequately explain the complex dynamics of ethnic identity formation in ethnic conflict. By making these essentialist presumptions, motives, and practices explicit this study makes a unique contribution not only to the immediate issues it addresses but also to the wider debate on the nature of IR as a discipline. As a final point, drawing on constitutive theory and by conceiving of the behaviour and motives of protagonists of ethnic conflict as expressions of a fluid, open-ended, and situational matrix of identities and interests without sequential hierarchies of dependent and independent variables, the study attempts to offer an alternative, constitutive reading of ethnic and nationalist identity to the discourses of explanatory IR. These themes that are further developed in the empirical section where, explanatory IRA's narratives of ethnic group solidarity, ethno-nationalism, and national self-determination are examined and deconstructed by way of the case study of the relations between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Iraqi Kurdish ethno-nationalist parties in the wider context of the political status of the autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq. With this ambition this study makes an original empirical contribution by scrutinising these relations in a depth unique to the literature.

By all conventional measurements of modernization and development, from communication and education to bureaucracy and urbanization, Arab societies have been undergoing an impressive transformation. There is, however, a wide gap in the Arab Middle East between such a transformation and the political consequences of modernization. In other words, the Arab Middle East exhibits a sharp contrast between its societal and political progress. In the case of Yemen, such a gap looks different from the one that exists in the rest of the region. In addition to being a country with the weakest and most limited bureaucracy in the Arab world, Yemen has, also, the lowest level of urbanization and education in the region. According to United Nations Human Development Report for the year 2004, 73.7 % of Yemen’s population are living in rural areas, and the country has a combined gross enrolment rate for primary, secondary and tertiary schools of 43%. In 2008, Yemen was rated near the bottom of the Human Development Index (HDI) by the UNDP; as number 153rd out of the 177 countries with HDI data, and it ranked as number 82 out of 108 countries in the Human Poverty Index. The United Nations Human Development Report 2006, for instance, indicates that the percentage of Yemeni population who live below National Poverty Line is 41.8%. Yet, Yemen is more democratic than most countries in the Arab Middle East. In light of this paradox, the following central question guides this research: which contextual factors are central in explaining the unique process of political modernization in tribal Yemen?