The central question of this thesis is what forces and personal dynamics ultimately shape the Kremlin’s responses to foreign policy issues. The legacies of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin are traced from the Soviet democratization during the 1980’s and the constitutional empowerment of the Russian presidency during the 1990’s. These two coexistent forces of empowering the average citizen in a country in which the President is the most powerful authority in decision-making are examined. The forces of the Kremlin affect the current inner circle of Siloviki, Technocrats, and Yeltsin Liberals who are integral members of the policy formulation. Vladimir Putin and his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, were now at the helm of a government with these three groups of bureaucrats from 2008 to 2012. The Medvedev presidency was confronted with challenges in the post-Soviet space, which included Georgian military operations against Russia and an anti-Russian leader in Kyrgyzstan. In addition to this, the Kremlin was faced with the decisions to enforce sanctions against rogue regimes pursuing nuclear capability, specifically Iran and North Korea. The Arab Spring of 2011 brought with it momentous change in the Middle East and the Russian Federation was forced to decide whether to consent to sanctions against the Khadafy regime in Libya and the Assad regime in Syria. The six foreign policy decisions in this thesis illuminate the Kremlin’s internal dynamics as well as the handling of the external political forces enacted by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Graham Allison’s Governmental Politics Model, which analyzes foreign policy from a personal perspective of the chief decision-makers, is used throughout this body of doctoral research.

This research focuses on the institutional development of the National People’s Congress (NPC) in the period 1978-89, which was approximately the initial decade of the Post-Mao period of Chinese politics. For the NPC, this period saw the sharpest institutional development, which thus far remains under-researched. The main research question is how and why the NPC institution has developed. In other words, the research aims to illustrate the mechanism and factors that shape the NPC’s unique institutional characteristics. This study contributes to the existing literature that focuses largely on describing how the NPC institution changes by exploring why the NPC has acquired its many particularities. The main research question is answered from a new perspective external to the institution itself, which is guided by a theoretical framework centred on the ‘reform influencers’ who had a direct linkage to, or participated in, the NPC institutional reform. It is argued that clashes of consciousness (involving Marxist intellectual ideas, liberal democratic ideas, and domestic intellectual ideas such as nationalism) played an important role in the post-Cultural Revolution political reforms. Accordingly, the primary concern of the research is how the diversified consciousness, or the ‘intellectual background’, of the reform participants has influenced the institutional development of the NPC. Empirically, this study pursues the following issues: (1) who are the reform influencers and which social groups they represent; (2) how influencers’ diversified intellectual background shaped their preference in reforming the NPC institutions; (3) how the diversified preference finally shaped the main characteristics of the NPC institution. Based on the study of four major groups of influencers associated with NPC reforms, a series of ‘principles’ are identified in the concluding chapter as being responsible for shaping the NPC’s many unique institutional characteristics from an intellectual perspective. The new perspective analysed in this thesis represents an innovative attempt to study Chinese legislative development by linking the institutional development with its external ‘environment’ – the reform influencers and their conflicting intellectual ideas. Furthermore, the empirical analysis adds new knowledge and understanding of the NPC development to the current literature by a) studying those actors (e.g. intellectual elite and wall-posters), whose linkages to the NPC institutional development have not been subject to systematic analysis; and b) examining new sources of data, including those established through interviews with NPC deputies in the 1980s and surveying the compilation of the wall-posters’ underground publications.

The PhD thesis: Engendering the Nation: Women, state oppression and political violence in post-war Greece (1946-1974), addresses the gendered characteristics of political violence during the 1946-1974 period in Greece. The phenomenon of political violence and state oppression against politically active women is analysed through the prism of nationalist ideology, both as a legitimising mechanism for the continuation of abuse and terrorisation, but also as a vehicle for re-appropriating gender roles, power hierarchies, sexual stereotypes and social norms. Research focuses on (1) the gender-specific ways women were persecuted, incarcerated and abused and the causes of this gender-based violence; (2) the ways in which the nationalist, official discourse made use of gender characteristics in order to enact this type of abuse and oppression. Accordingly, the phenomenon of political violence against women dissidents is examined through the main analytical categories of gender and nationalism. This thesis provides a history and analysis of political violence against women in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949), the period of weak democracy (1950-1967) and the military dictatorship (1967-1974), respectively. The overall aim of the research is to bring forward the downplayed gendered characteristics of state-perpetuated violence and repression, and analyse them within the nationalist ideology and the ascribed traditional gender roles through which the oppressive mechanisms were institutionalised and authorised. In this respect, the experience of women as political detainees is reconstructed through an analysis of the sites and practices of political violence, terror and torture as operated and implemented by the state and its agents. PhD research draws on gender studies and discourse analysis and seeks to situate the Greek case within a feminist critique that emphasises the politics of gender and the dominant discourse of nationalism.

This thesis has as its subject piracy and its relation to Empire. Through a methodological approach, it investigates the ways in which different discourses, throughout modernity, have contributed to the construction of a ‘pirate legend’ that continue to animate our present. The first part of the dissertation is dedicated to a study of the pirate figure as it appears in the context of various global orders from antiquity until the early eighteenth century. In this context, I argue that the suppression of piracy was a constitutive moment in the early history of the world market. The second part follows the ways in which the spectre of eighteenth century piracy has continued to haunt modern international law, well after the dawn of the classic ‘golden age of piracy’. I argue that the evocation of the ‘pirate analogy’ has played an important role in: the history of nineteenth European imperialism, in the escalation to total war in the twentieth century, and today in the context of the war on terror. The aim is to systematically contextualize how and why particular individuals and groups were perceived and described as ‘piratical’ in a certain historical and geographical context. In this way, it becomes possible to consider the significant historical continuities that underlie different discourses that, throughout history, have made use of the concept of ‘the pirate’; but also, it enables to follow the ways in which the meaning of that same concept changed in passing from one global order to another. There is a sense in which pirates have always been with us and yet, beneath the superficial timelessness of the subject, we discover fundamental discontinuities, sudden turnarounds, discursive shifts that transform the meaning of what a pirate is supposed to be.

This study examines practices used by the Malaysian elites in their efforts to solve problems related to ethnic and cultural divisions in the country. The study traces the history of political development of Malaysia, from the very first attempt at inter-ethnic co-operation --- the meetings of the 1949-1950 Communities Liaison Committee --- to the most recent one --- the deliberations of the 1989-1991 National Economic Consultative Council. The focus of the research is on political and economic issues involved. Theories which are relevant to the study of ethnicity and political stability such as 'pluralism', consociationalism and conflict-regulation theory are reviewed in this study. In addition, alternative explanations of contemporary Malaysian politics such as those provided by critical social theory, political economy/development and radical political economy approaches are also included. Empirically, the research is based on personal interviews in Malaysia in 1993, materials on the National Economic Consultative Council, letters, parliamentary debates, government and party literature, newspapers, periodicals, election manifestos, articles and books related to the subject. This study shows that the ideal concepts of consociationalism cannot fully apply to contemporary Malaysia. Because of the dominant role of UMNO in the Barisan Nasional, the system has developed into 'asymmetric accommodation'. However, there is still an adherence to the principle of multi-ethnic coalition, a genuine power-sharing and the presence of accommodative attitudes and motives among the elites which the consociational model highlights.

This thesis is a political history of the Nagas of the Naga hills, from the 1820s to the 1960s. By drawing on a wealth of primary sources unutilised hithero, and an extensive contextualisation with comparative and theoretical literature, it seeks to render the respective agents' actions meaningful and thus challenges the established historiography in three periods - pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial. While imperialist historiography of the pre-colonial period still predominates, and made the Nagas responsible for their own subjugation, this work shows that the logic of the British empire made it poised for conquest. Subsequently the colonial rulers were able to blame the vicissitudes of Naga society on the Nagas themselves. This thesis offers an alternative version of the Naga hill region as home to a plethora of polities conscious of the superior power of their plains' neighbours. While social science' writings tend to blame colonialism for post-colonial identities and wars, here it is demonstrated that agency and identity-formation are an on-going process and neither started nor ended with colonialism. Although the interaction of the local population with colonialism produced a Naga national elite, it was the Indian political class that came into existence the same way which succeeded in, having access to superior means of nation and state-building so as to enable it undertake the modem Indo-Naga war. And it was this war that firmly made the Nagas into a "nation" - setting them onto the road to independence. This work fundamentally revises our understanding of the existing "histories" of the Nagas by exposing them as ahistorical - consciously or unconsciously - influenced by colonial or post-colonial narratives of domination.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

This study seeks to fill a critical gap in the burgeoning literature on the Grenada Revolution, viz, the attempt of the People's Revolutionary Government (PRG) at economic transformation in Grenada during its brief, but eventful, period in office from March 1979 to October 1983. The thesis is divided into two major but inter-related parts. The first four chapters explore the empirical and theoretical issues which lay behind the strategy of transformation adopted by the PRG. Examined, respectively, are Grenada's integration in the world economy, the objective circumstances which gave rise to the Revolution (particularly the role of 'Gairyism'), and the main theoretical currents which informed the PRG's development strategy both prior to 1979 and once it was in government. The second four chapters examine in detail the performance of the PRG in the three critical sectors of the Grenadian economy - agriculture, tourism, and manufacturing - to determine the success or otherwise of its policy of transformation. Special emphasis is placed on the issue of the international airport, the relationship between the PRG and the private sector, and the macroeconomic performance of the economy under the PRG. A major finding of the study is that by early 1982 the Grenadian economy was engulfed in a profound crisis, manifested principally in dwindling capital inflows, widening balance of payments and budget deficits, and a halting of major capital projects. The economic crisis in turn exacerbated the parallel crisis which was operative on the political front. Another central finding is that the economic problems resulted not so much from the structural characteristics of the economy (smallness, openness, dependence, and peripheral position in the world economy) but, more fundamentally, from the contradictions between the Soviet-formulated theory of non-capitalist development adopted by the PRG and the objective realities of Grenada's economy, society, and geo-politics.

No description available.

<p>This is a study of the contest over political and social legitimacy in a former precolonial kingdom, Oukwanyama, in northern Namibia, from 1915 to the present. It tracks the historical shifts in this long time frame through the history of one place, a site of important local power, Omhedi. The research begins with the colonial occupation of the kingdom by Portugal and South Africa during World War 1, which resulted in the displacement of the kingship to the southern half of the territory which was now bifurcated by an&nbsp / international boundary between Angola and South West Africa. Following resistance by the last king Mandume, the institution of kingship was abolished and a Council of Headmen installed in its place. Omhedi emerged as a site of important opposition to Mandume by a leading headman, Ndjukuma, and he became one of the senior headman elevated to new levels of authority by&nbsp / olonial rule. The thesis tracks the establishment and consolidation of the policy of Indirect Rule under South Africa, whose aim was the efficient supply of migrant labour to the&nbsp / south, and the selective preservation of traditional customs in Oukwanyama in order to maintain stability in a time of rapid change. The main contribution of the research however is&nbsp / to follow this story into the second half of the 20th century, when Ndjukuma was succeeded by Nehemia Shoovaleka and then Gabriel Kautwima, at a time when nationalist&nbsp / opposition to South African rule was growing and old political legitimacies were tested. Omhedi became a site of the enforcement of headmen&rsquo / s authority over both striking workers&nbsp / and the educated elite in the early 1970s when Ovamboland became a Bantustan homeland under apartheid. After Independence in 1990 and the demise of Kautwima, Omhedi remained empty until the restoration of the Kwanyama kingship occurred under postcolonial legislation on Traditional Authorities. The question becomes one of how political&nbsp / legitimacy can be reactivated at such a contradictory site of &lsquo / traditional&rsquo / power like Omhedi, now the seat of the new Kwanyama Queen. The thesis engages with notions of gender,&nbsp / history, landscape and memory, as well as theories of space developed by Lefebvre and de Certeau, in order to understand the local reconceptualisation of Omhedi as different&nbsp / things over different times. It also analyses the textual, visual and cultural representations of the place, most notably under colonial rule, and the impact of this archive (or its limits)&nbsp / on postcolonial political developments.</p>