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This dissertation analyzes the political and expert discourses behind the legalization of abortion from the first attempt to decriminalize it in 1920 when democratic Czechoslovakia was established to 1986 when the institution of abortion commissions was banned during socialism. Drawing on biopolitical theories and critical feminist and disability studies that problematize the liberal understanding of rights, choice and autonomy, I shed a new light on reproduction policies by drawing parallels between the socialist and democratic regimes. Instead of assuming the mutual exclusiveness of the two systems, my inquiry starts from a different position and destabilizes the boundaries between East and West, active and passive, liberal and totalitarian. My main research question explores what sustains the continuity of the 1986 law, which allowed abortion on demand, in the new post-1989 capitalist and allegedly more democratic system. The aim is not to answer why the law was enacted, but rather what it unleashes in terms of citizenship practices. Through a geneaological intersectional lens, I go back in Czechoslovak history and follow the simultaneous paths of women’s liberation from a patriarchal order of things and their subjection to the ableist desire to achieve a nation full of strong and capable citizens. I deconstruct how the ideal female citizen-subject – the white, bourgeois, healthy, well-off modern woman of reason who individually plans her reproduction and has children only when and if she can – was constructed throughout the different historical discourses; and with what effects for the “other” categories of women – the poor, young, old, sick, the disabled, ethnically different. I argue that from their onset abortion rights were conceptualized as a regulatory strategy of power aimed at maintaining a certain population optimum by redefining women’s responsibilities as mothers who were to deliver a healthy child into a healthy environment. I am thus concerned with a certain type of biopolitical rationality, which defied tradition and religion and started to fear the degeneration of a collective more than its depopulation. Hence not every pregnancy was desirable, especially when seen as a threat to women’s or children’s health. I identify three stages of this epistemological shift when women’s health and sexuality collided into law and children’s health: its building efforts after WWI, developing spasms after WWII and functioning as a normalized structure of recognition from the 1960s onward. I demonstrate how eugenics trespassed into population politics and together with planned parenthood created a complex system of socio-biological classes of (un)desirability, determining who should belong to the nation, who should reproduce, whose life is worth living, loving and thus worth of protection. By elaborating on what I have termed female biological citizenship – that women function as civilizational identifiers and (self-)regulators of the quality and health of the nation, I suggest they are never free in regard to reproduction regardless of the political system. I conclude that this focus on the biological erases the distinction between socialism and capitalism, integrating women’s will as a governing tool to achieve societal progress.

The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that international legal considerations played a vital role in the Cuban Missile Crisis All major areas of legal considerations are discussed, including both an American and Soviet perspective. An analysis of the American approach to the crisis exemplifies the participation of various departments of the Executive )branch, Congress, the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, and the President. The approach by the Soviet Union in justifying the deployment of offensive nuclear weapons and the Kremlin's objection to the U. S. quarantine of Cuba were influenced by legal considerations. The time period that this study encompasses is August 1962 through October 1962, a period much'longer than is usually associated with the crisis.

At the beginning of the Cold War, the gathering of intelligence on the Soviet Union's current and future military capability seemed a near-impossibility. Soviet high-level communications were secure against decryption. Agent networks in the USSR were very difficult to establish and of uncertain reliability. Aerial reconnaissance of warrelated targets in the Soviet Union was risky and could only be occasional. But valuable intelligence was gathered in the years 1945-55 on the USSR's frantic arms build-up, thanks to its policy towards Germans and their country. Its exploitation of Germans and its Zone of Germany in its war-related research and development and the reconstruction of its war-related industries gave British Intelligence penetrable targets in the Soviet Zone and gave great numbers of Germans sought-after information on the USSR itself. The ease of recruiting age nts in East Germany and the flight (including enticed defections) of refugees from it allowed research and development projects and uranium.-mining operations there to be penetrated. Intelligence of Soviet weapons development and of the quality of Soviet military technology was obtained. The mass interrogation of prisoners-of-war returned by the Soviets to the British Occupation Zone in the late 1940s yielded a wealth of valuable information on war-related construction and the locations of numerous intelligence targets in the Soviet Union: most importantly, those of atomic and chemical plants, aircraft and aero-engine factories, airfields, rocket development centres and other installations. When, in the period 1949-58, some 3,000 deported German scientists , engineers and technicians were sent back to their homeland from the USSR, promising sources among them were enticed West and interrogated for their knowledge of the Soviets' research and development projects. The cream of the information they provided was crucial intelligence on the locations of atomic plants and laboratories and uranium deposits; useful information on structural weaknesses in the Soviet system of scientific and economic management; expert (if out-of-date) assessments of the quality of Soviet accomplishments in atomic science, electronics and other fields; and well-informed indications as to possible lines of development in guided missile and aircraft design. One Soviet scientific defector in Germany provided similar information which influenced British perceptions of the Soviet Union's scientific potential and missile development plans. Refugees entering the British Zone from East Germany, intercepted letters and monitored telecommunications, informal contacts and, of course, secret agents all made significant contributions to the gathering of scientific and technical intelligence in Germany too. The British passed to the Americans much of the intelligence they acquired in Germany and the installations identified and located by German sources were overtlown by spyplanes in the 1950s and particularly by U-2s in the latter half of-the decade. Priceless information was obtained, which establi shed that the USSR's war-related scientific research and development and its actual military capability were both inferior to those of the West. Thus the Germans enabled Soviet security to be deeply penetrated and helped to stabilize the Cold War. They are the missing link between Ultra and the U-2.

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This thesis discuss the relations of the world superpowers (USA, USSR, China and the EU) with the developing countries in Africa since colonialism until present.

This thesis shows that despite the rhetoric of universalism and internationalism used by the Royal Society, especially after the onset of Cold War, its policies and actions in the period 1945-75 remained closely allied to the interests of the British state. More specifically, in its foreign relations the Society mainly operated within a network of Western intergovernmental organisations that were a response to, and operated in similar ways, to Eastern Bloc organisations. While financially dependent on a Parliamentary grant-in-aid, they effectively carved out a role in the sphere of international scientific relations which was built upon an image of independence from the state. Thus, Society Officers and staff were able to mobilise a double-sided discourse of utility to, and independence from, the state. The association between the government of the day and the Society was at its most effective when a consensus existed between like-minded government administrators and Officers of the Society. A culture of collaboration and informal networks allowed them to build relationships and share ideas. The Society was perfectly designed to facilitate this culture, as its Fellows permeated government networks as individuals as much as they did as direct representatives of the Society. The status of Fellows conferred on them eligibility for a variety of positions, both formal and informal, within the elite infrastructure of national life. The thesis also shows that party political and ideological motivations often prefaced associations between Fellows and like-minded politicians or civil servants, but these associations were principally between economic liberals to the exclusion of far left scientists. However, the Society’s connections with the government were also motivated by reasons beyond party politics. The Society had an overarching aim to preserve the United Kingdom’s position as a scientific ‘Mecca’. In the shifting post-war landscape, in which the country became more dependent on outside help and conscious of its relative decline in economic and political power, the Society looked beyond national borders to stay in the competition. The thesis shows that Officers of the Society responded creatively to the changing geopolitical landscape as old spheres of influence waned, such as the Empire-Commonwealth, and new ones opened up, such as the European Community and the special relationship with America. The Society pursued these new opportunities with patriotic ambition, often prioritising relations that promised scientific rather than political gains, but always within a Western framework.

To what extent was German unification (1989-90) a turning point (Wende) for the Sorbian national minority? Although a majority of scholars and commentators understand the period as one of ‘revolution’, there are grounds to query how radical or widespread were the changes which the collapse of communism promised to bring. In the case of the Sorbs – a national minority in Germany which was persecuted under the National Socialist regime, which became a protected minority under the German Democratic Republic, and which remains a protected minority under the Federal Republic of Germany – many difficulties persist in the relationship between the Sorbs, the German government, and wider German society, as well as amongst the Sorbs themselves. There have been extensive policy, legal, and constitutional changes since unification, but these have often led to similar outcomes as would have been expected under the GDR. The economy is one of the biggest challenges in the post-unification era, as the government and broader society seek to balance the legally recognised rights of national minorities with the economic interests of the state and society at large. This conflict is most evident in the continuation of brown coal mining in the Sorbian area of settlement, as well as in the privatisation of the GDR’s agricultural collectives after unification. Sorbian cultural institutions and organisations have remained relatively unreformed, which means that traditionalists have retained the upper hand in successive institutional debates. The case study of Horno, a village in south Brandenburg, illustrates these issues well, as it was destroyed in 2004 to make way for brown coal mining, and was the first village after unification to be relocated in this manner. These factors lead to the conclusion that German unification was not quite the turning point that it is commonly believed to be, as in many areas of Sorbian life, the continuities seem to outweigh the changes.

You Don’t Have to Be a Bad Girl to Love Crime uses archival research, textual analysis, and industrial and cultural studies frameworks to re-evaluate women’s representation in post-World War II American radio and television crime dramas. It complicates popular and scholarly understandings that postwar broadcasters simply responded to audience desires by marginalizing women across their schedules and removing recurring female characters from crime dramas altogether. Rather, the three major networks (NBC, CBS, and ABC) that dominated the broadcast industry’s transition from radio to television joined conservative religious and anti-communist groups to silence public debate over women’s roles. While late-1940s network radio programming incorporated varied opinions about postwar women’s desire and potential to expand their influence in the workplace and politics, postwar television naturalized a vision of passive housewives embracing husbands’ patriarchal authority. Women who chose to fight crime challenged this authority by claiming the right to enforce the law and judge their fellow citizens. This dissertation is organized into two parts: The first explores the industrial and cultural discourses that set the stage for postwar restrictions on women in crime. Network executives and anti-communist conservatives did not see each other as natural allies, but they mobilized complementary gender discourses emphasizing women as passive consumers rather than public actors. Archival industry research shows network executives ignored evidence female audiences liked crime programming, especially series featuring active, sympathetic women. Instead, executives and vocal conservatives framed such women as a sexualized threat to men, children, and themselves. Networks tolerated crime-curious women on radio and early television, when they struggled to retain and build a female audience. However, by the mid-1950s, executives feared such women would undermine their commercial emphasis on domestic consumption and attract regulation or censorship. Part two explores three major types of crime-curious women who appeared on postwar radio and television programming. Investigative wives and detectives’ secretaries investigated crimes with male husbands or employers. Female detectives, however, directly challenged men’s control over criminal justice, the most overt sign of patriarchal social power. All three types gave female audiences a powerful model of feminine agency within patriarchal society. They also established representational norms that endure in modern crime dramas.

Focusing on transborder travel narratives by two German authors and one Polish author, “Cold War Crossings” investigates how their writing responds to the postwar demarcation of separate Eastern and Western spheres of influences. Central to each of their oeuvres is the topos of the border broadly conceived, from the material, ideological, and psychic boundaries of the Iron Curtain to the Saussurean bar of the linguistic sign. By presenting border-crossing as an act of both political and aesthetic transgression, these writers advance uniquely literary alternatives to the rigid geopolitical divisions of their age. This dissertation analyzes the way in which each author’s poetics of the border informs, among other things, their manipulation of narrative structure, their unique employment of figurative language, and their shared proclivity for intertextuality, all of which address and reorient different kinds of textual boundaries. In this way, it is a contribution to the ever-expanding field of border studies and other scholarly investigations of the discursive production of mental maps. At the same time, however, the dissertation argues by way of its three case studies for a closer examination of the formal elements of literary texts that often go overlooked in such analyses. Conceived as an interdisciplinary and comparative study, “Cold War Crossings” seeks to overstep barriers between national literatures as well as disciplines by combining cultural studies, literary criticism, and historical analysis. Furthermore, the dissertation’s joint study of German and Polish literatures also contributes to recent debates on Europe as it counteracts traditional Eurocentric approaches that disregard Eastern Europe.