The evaluation of structural performance of existing concrete buildings, built according to standards and materials quite different to those available today, requires procedures and methods able to cover lack of data about mechanical material properties and reinforcement detailing. To this end detailed inspections and test on materials are required. As a consequence tests on drilled cores are required; on the other end, it is stated that non-destructive testing (NDT) cannot be used as the only mean to get structural information, but can be used in conjunction with destructive testing (DT) by a representative correlation between DT and NDT. The aim of this study is to verify the accuracy of some formulas of correlation available in literature between measured parameters, i.e. rebound index, ultrasonic pulse velocity and compressive strength (SonReb Method). To this end a relevant number of DT and NDT tests has been performed on many school buildings located in Cesena (Italy). The above relationships have been assessed on site correlating NDT results to strength of core drilled in adjacent locations. Nevertheless, concrete compressive strength assessed by means of NDT methods and evaluated with correlation formulas has the advantage of being able to be implemented and used for future applications in a much more simple way than other methods, even if its accuracy is strictly limited to the analysis of concretes having the same characteristics as those used for their calibration. This limitation warranted a search for a different evaluation method for the non-destructive parameters obtained on site. To this aim, the methodology of neural identification of compressive strength is presented. Artificial Neural Network (ANN) suitable for the specific analysis were chosen taking into account the development presented in the literature in this field. The networks were trained and tested in order to detect a more reliable strength identification methodology.

Thanks to the increasing slenderness and lightness allowed by new construction techniques and materials, the effects of wind on structures became in the last decades a research field of great importance in Civil Engineering. Thanks to the advances in computers power, the numerical simulation of wind tunnel tests has became a valid complementary activity and an attractive alternative for the future. Due to its flexibility, during the last years, the computational approach gained importance with respect to the traditional experimental investigation. However, still today, the computational approach to fluid-structure interaction problems is not as widely adopted as it could be expected. The main reason for this lies in the difficulties encountered in the numerical simulation of the turbulent, unsteady flow conditions generally encountered around bluff bodies. This thesis aims at providing a guide to the numerical simulation of bridge deck aerodynamic and aeroelastic behaviour describing in detail the simulation strategies and setting guidelines useful for the interpretation of the results.

Shape memory materials (SMMs) represent an important class of smart materials that have the ability to return from a deformed state to their original shape. Thanks to such a property, SMMs are utilized in a wide range of innovative applications. The increasing number of applications and the consequent involvement of industrial players in the field have motivated researchers to formulate constitutive models able to catch the complex behavior of these materials and to develop robust computational tools for design purposes. Such a research field is still under progress, especially in the prediction of shape memory polymer (SMP) behavior and of important effects characterizing shape memory alloy (SMA) applications. Moreover, the frequent use of shape memory and metallic materials in biomedical devices, particularly in cardiovascular stents, implanted in the human body and experiencing millions of in-vivo cycles by the blood pressure, clearly indicates the need for a deeper understanding of fatigue/fracture failure in microsize components. The development of reliable stent designs against fatigue is still an open subject in scientific literature. Motivated by the described framework, the thesis focuses on several research issues involving the advanced constitutive, numerical and fatigue modeling of elastoplastic and shape memory materials. Starting from the constitutive modeling, the thesis proposes to develop refined phenomenological models for reliable SMA and SMP behavior descriptions. Then, concerning the numerical modeling, the thesis proposes to implement the models into numerical software by developing implicit/explicit time-integration algorithms, to guarantee robust computational tools for practical purposes. The described modeling activities are completed by experimental investigations on SMA actuator springs and polyethylene polymers. Finally, regarding the fatigue modeling, the thesis proposes the introduction of a general computational approach for the fatigue-life assessment of a classical stent design, in order to exploit computer-based simulations to prevent failures and modify design, without testing numerous devices.

This research has focused on the study of the behavior and of the collapse of masonry arch bridges. The latest decades have seen an increasing interest in this structural type, that is still present and in use, despite the passage of time and the variation of the transport means. Several strategies have been developed during the time to simulate the response of this type of structures, although even today there is no generally accepted standard one for assessment of masonry arch bridges. The aim of this thesis is to compare the principal analytical and numerical methods existing in literature on case studies, trying to highlight values and weaknesses. The methods taken in exam are mainly three: i) the Thrust Line Analysis Method; ii) the Mechanism Method; iii) the Finite Element Methods. The Thrust Line Analysis Method and the Mechanism Method are analytical methods and derived from two of the fundamental theorems of the Plastic Analysis, while the Finite Element Method is a numerical method, that uses different strategies of discretization to analyze the structure. Every method is applied to the case study through computer-based representations, that allow a friendly-use application of the principles explained. A particular closed-form approach based on an elasto-plastic material model and developed by some Belgian researchers is also studied. To compare the three methods, two different case study have been analyzed: i) a generic masonry arch bridge with a single span; ii) a real masonry arch bridge, the Clemente Bridge, built on Savio River in Cesena. In the analyses performed, all the models are two-dimensional in order to have results comparable between the different methods taken in exam. The different methods have been compared with each other in terms of collapse load and of hinge positions.

Although democracy promotion initiatives have spread around the world and supported transition, many countries have fallen back into autocracy or stalled on their way to democracy. However, the events in the Middle East and Northern Africa have revitalised the issue of democratization. On the other hand, this cry for democracy seems to be homegrown, casting doubts about the efficacy of external democracy promotion. Nevertheless, stalled and setback democracies cannot be blamed solely on the flawed strategies of democracy promoters or autocratic stubbornness of democracy targets. Similarly, labelling democracy promotion as “the grand failure” of the West is an argumentative overstretch, which lacks any practical application. This dissertation argues that democracy can be achieved from outside, but the obstacles associated with it are more serious than anticipated by promoters. More specifically, the chances of liberal democracy being exported from outside will increase provided the utility of domestic adaptation to democracy is at least moderate, promoters are actively involved in resolution of pressing national issues, and there is no regional actor that blocks democracy and receives support for its policies from the target country. By structurally and conceptually expanding Schimmelfennig’s international socialization framework, this study develops an analytical framework to decipher mechanisms, strategies, and subsequent outcomes of democracy promotion and democratization. While applied to Armenia, the proposed framework is a useful reference for both academics and practitioners as it provides tools for researching the outcome of democracy and democratization and provides policy recommendations. This dissertation introduces the concept of democracy blocker—a powerful authoritarian regional actor capable and willing to influence domestic policy choices of a democracy promotion target in order to block democratization. This study also makes an empirical contribution by comparing democracy promotion policies in a country that has long been neglected by the academic literature. Using process-tracing, within-case, and before-after analyses, this study compares democracy promotion policies of the EU and the USA within three different target-sectors in Armenia. The analysis of three different target-sectors of democracy promotion—elections, parties, and the media—shows democratic transformation on the macro level of a country and micro level of specific sectors. This study argues that increased political and economic interdependence and interconnectedness of different realms within a democratizing country has led to merging of international democracy promotion and domestic democratization. In addition, the mere adoption of a law or a code of conduct does not guarantee the establishment of democracy and democratic behaviour by domestic stakeholders. Consequently, a likely upgrade of a formal democratic transformation into a behavioural one, would require democracy promoters to guarantee consistency in their efforts and follow-up on their activities, without assuming that a formally adopted rule or a completed project will necessarily assure rule-based behaviour. Thus, democracy promotion needs to be simultaneously cross-sectoral, offering material incentives for democratic transformation. Democracy promotion has the potential to not only produce numerous academic and policy analyses but also to result in a genuine democratic transformation, if promoters rationally choose their strategies and base them on existing domestic conditions.

In the last decades, an increasing awareness of instances of grave violation of human rights on a massive scale has brought to attention the problematic that whether states and the international community have an ethical responsibility to react to such cases, and (when the conditions require so) to undertake humanitarian military interventions. In the immediate post-Cold War environment, this has taken place parallel to the shift of focus in the security literature from national security towards human security. The varying responses to the grave cases of the 1990s such as Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo reaffirmed the necessity to undertake decisive and timely collective action, reminded the question of an ethical duty on the part of the international community to react to mass atrocities. By December 2001, the introduction of the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) set a new framework to take up this question with the aim of transforming the notion of the “right to intervene” into a “responsibility to react”. With all its controversies humanitarian intervention continues to be a part of international political conduct. At the current state of affairs, humanitarian intervention has become politically relevant within the context of the RtoP doctrine. In this context, this dissertation seeks to assess the role of moral/ethical motives in the decisions and/or behaviour of the international community. Accordingly, it takes the assumption of humanitarian intervention as a moral duty as its subject matter, and puts it into test in relation to its newly defined limits and conduct within the RtoP framework.

States often invoke international norms to justify their foreign policy-making. In the last twenty years, a large body of literature has shown that norms matter in international politics since they provide frameworks for legitimate international action. Nevertheless, it is often overlooked that the absence of a centralized authority capable of enforcing and providing unambiguous interpretations of norms leaves states, particularly great powers, free to decide whether to recognize or reject the legitimacy of norms. In specific instances of foreign policy-making, states take actions that cohere with norms, while at other times they contest them. Operating in a decentralized system, international norms crucially depend on state support for their legitimacy, prominence, and effectiveness. Variations in the way states respond to norms call for an investigation into the domestic conditions that lead states to recognize or reject their legitimacy. These conditions will be investigated by comparing the attitudes of the United States and the United Kingdom towards the norms of humanitarian intervention and international criminal responsibility and by studying how these norms influence their policy-making. During the 1999 NATO intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, both countries invoked the norm of humanitarian intervention. In contrast, during the 1998 Rome Conference for the adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Court, their behavior diverged with the UK endorsing the Court and the US rejecting it. The analysis aims to discover the domestic actors that are responsible for how international norms are interpreted at the state level and the mechanisms and transmitters through which norms come to be viewed by states as legitimate or illegitimate frameworks of behavior.

Over the past two decades, the European Union has taken important steps towards the establishment of a common European asylum policy. The question of the impact of this cooperation on domestic asylum policy has so far received surprisingly little attention. Most explanations have focused on how an agreement on restrictive policies was achieved at EU level, and assumed a relatively unproblematic implementation of these measures domestically. More recently, some scholars have contested these explanations by emphasizing the rights-enhancing effects of recent EU asylum policy legislation. This thesis argues that rather than focusing on the question of whether EU cooperation increases or decreases domestic asylum policy standards, we should focus on explaining how EU asylum policy affects domestic asylum policy. The question can only be addressed satisfactorily if the inter-related processes of arriving at these policies at EU level and implementing them domestically are taken into account. The theoretical account proposed here conceives of preferences as the crucial variable connecting the processes of uploading and downloading. The main argument of this thesis is that governments try to project their policy preferences which reflect their desire to change or retain domestic status quo and to download policies in accordance with these preferences. At the EU level, governments seek to upload or support policies in line with their domestically-shaped preferences and oppose those which contradict them or at least seek flexibility allowing them to maintain existing policies. At the national level, states download EU policy selectively, in line with their domestically-shaped preferences, leading to over-implementing, under-implementing or not implementing certain provisions. In addition, the thesis locates the sources of these preferences on asylum policy in public opinion, party ideology, and the number of asylum seekers. The dissertation shows that issue salience in the media and among the general public affects the relationship between these variables. Depending on the political-institutional context, the factors identify above interact with each other, resulting in differential impact of EU asylum policy on domestic policy. The thesis distinguishes between simple and compound polities, and shows how they differ in their responsiveness to the variables identified above, in the frequency and stability of reforms, and in the way they use the EU to facilitate domestic change. It also demonstrates that in compound polities preferences are mostly influenced by party ideology while in simple ones they are more likely to reflect public opinion. In order to trace the impact of EU cooperation in asylum policy on domestic policy, this dissertation employs process tracing and a three-step analytical framework which encompasses preference formation, EU-level negotiations and implementation. Such framework allows us to answer the question of the impact of EU asylum policy on national ones without under- or overstating the role of the EU. The dissertation applies this framework to study all major EU asylum policy agreements adopted between 1990 and the completion of the first phase of the Common European Asylum System in 2007, and their impact in Germany and Britain.

Over the last decade, EU–Russia gas relations have witnessed significant deterioration—the bilateral agenda has been narrowed down to ad hoc consultations, disputes over investment and long-term contract provisions have multiplied, and disagreements between the EU and Russia have significantly hindered the multilateral process of the Energy Charter Treaty (the ECT). This deterioration seems to be rather paradoxical in light of high gas interdependence between the EU and Russia and a rich history of well-established cooperation during the Cold War under profound ideological and strategic constraints. In addition, conflictual patterns in EU–Russia gas relations occurred in the beginning of the 2000s, during the period of high oil prices and growing global natural gas demand—the period when enhancement of cooperation would be a more expected outcome. Therefore, the core research question of the thesis addresses the puzzle: why, despite decades of cooperation during the Cold War between Western European countries and the USSR, have EU–Russia gas relations become conflictual since the 2000s? By answering this research question, the study seeks to contribute to the analysis of institutionalisation of energy relations and to reveal factors that lead to cooperative or conflictual outcomes. So far, IR research inquiries in the field have prioritised resource and normative determinisms in addressing the success or failure of energy cooperation, which assume a geopolitical-realist struggle for energy resources and a priori benevolence of free markets in line with the neoliberal economic agenda respectively. The broader geopolitical approach has explained energy conflicts by structural factors of unequal resource allocation across the world and attributed a direct impact of a state resource base (an energy-rich or energy-poor state) on states’ behaviour in the international arena. Another strand of the literature, ‘the market approach’, has also viewed problematic cooperation as a result of different interests of energy producers and consumers—but from a slightly different perspective. Limited institutionalisation of interactions has been explained by different models of gas markets producers and consumers choose. Thus, consumers favour a model of the competitive liberalised gas market (a market actor model), while producers would opt for a model of vertically-integrated monopoly and resource nationalism (a geopolitical actor model) in order to preserve control over resources. Pointing to a number of opposite cases, this study disregards the straightforward assumption that there is a direct link between a resource base and states’ strategies in the international arena. Bringing domestic conditions back to these debates, the study argues that increasing differences between the EU and Russia’s domestic institutional models of the gas market have been the main factor that has triggered conflictual patterns in EU–Russia gas relations since the 2000s. These domestic institutional changes have replaced attempts to build a strategic partnership with ad hoc consultations at the level of practical implementation, and have triggered broader deinstitutionalisation of multilateral gas governance in Europe. The three case studies analyse three instances of EU–Russia gas relations, tracing the crucial differences to determine the outcome—cooperation (a creation of a new or enhancement of an existing international institution), institutionalised conflict (disagreements regarding institutional settings of interactions, which are discussed and settled within the procedures of pre-existing or negotiated international institutions), or institutional conflict (expansion of disagreements beyond the pre-existing or negotiated framework of international institutions, which are no more accepted by the parties for conflict resolution) between the parties. The thesis contributes to ongoing debates about the impact of domestic institutions on actors’ policy strategies in the international arena, bringing insights from energy economics, energy law, and regulatory studies to IR. It argues that differences in domestic models under conditions of high interdependence might lead to politicisation of gas market issues and broader aspects of energy governance. The study also enriches debates about energy security, arguing that energy security depends also on a stable and predictable institutional framework for interactions, which inter alia requires compatibility of actors’ domestic models.

RRecent years have witnessed increased French military activism in Africa. Despite efforts to normalise its post-colonial relationship and considerable downsizing of its permanent military presence, France remains a sought-after actor in solving African security problems. Notwithstanding French decision-makers repeated promises that the gendarme of Africa belongs to the past, French troops have participated in nine military operations since the turn of the millennium. Against all expectations, the Hollande administration has stood out for being particularly interventionist, concerting a military intervention in Mali and deploying a peacekeeping force to the Central African Republic within two years of assuming office. The ambiguity between an interventionist policy and a disengaged discourse suggests that French military interventionism in sub-Saharan Africa no longer follows the same automaticity as in the past. The two interventions in Mali and the CAR testify to the intense ideational struggles between different belief systems that had shaped French actorsâ minds and thus influenced decision-making processes and policy outcomes. Economic interests and neo-colonial continuity have been traditionally identified as the root causes of French interventionism in francophone Africa. For the past two decades the literature on French-African relations has been dominated by the so-called continuity vs. change debate, which scrutinises the presence of colonial / neo-colonial practices in the post-1990 French foreign policy. While ideational approaches to Franceâ s African policy are not rare, few studies have engaged with the decision-making processes that produce French military interventions. Most studies focus on policy outcomes, which are rooted in static conceptualisations of ideas that are aggregated at the level of the state. Starting from these observations, the present study argues that the mere analysis of policy outcomes tells us little about the actual motivations that drive French foreign and security policy in Africa. Instead of analysing French interventionism by relying on a predefined set of explanatory variables that are juxtaposed with a series of observable outcomes in order to falsify predefined hypotheses, this thesis explains French interventionism by drawing on actorsâ subjective perceptions and motivations. The study uses the actorsâ own utterances to explain why French decision-makers are ready to accept the considerable risks and costs involved in guaranteeing or re-establishing the security of African countries. Adopting an actor-centred constructivist ontology, this study not only identifies ideas as core explanatory variables but also traces their emergence and subsequent development throughout decision-making processes. This approach goes beyond the dichotomous view that reduces French motivations to material interests or post-colonial ambitions. Relying on discursive material such as official statements, verbatim reports of press conferences and parliamentary hearings, policy reports, and thirty-two high-level interviews with French decision-makers, the present study narrates military intervention in Mali and the CAR from the perspective of French foreign policy elites under the Hollande Presidency. This recent and largely unexplored empirical material provides new insights into Franceâ s foreign and defence policy. The study also demonstrates why and how the â Africa factorâ still matters in Franceâ s foreign policy considerations. The importance of Africa in Franceâ s security policy has less to do with neo-colonial ambitions per se, than with the understanding French policy-makers have of themselves and their country. More generally, the findings show how comprehensive explanations of foreign policy can be produced by considering actorsâ subjective perceptions. In so doing, the study not only explains Franceâ s current policies in sub-Saharan Africa, but also offers insights into foreign policy decision-making processes in general, and thereby provides further evidence about how ideational factors influence the making of world politics. Keywords: France, Africa, Mali, CAR, foreign policy analysis, international security, decision-making, political psychology, constructivism