The Devils Lake defection of 2005 demands a re-evaluation of the venerable Boundary Waters Treaty (BWT) between Canada and the United States. Why was the long-successful water agreement unable to solve this relatively minor dispute? More importantly, given irregularities between theoretical assertions and institutional history, what theory of international relations best explains a cooperative agreement that spans a near-century? Due to the complexities of shared river systems, any theory that seeks to explain international cooperation must adequately encompass three separate sources of state motivation. First, it must explain the technical, basin-position-driven realities that affect state attitudes towards negotiations. Second, it must explain the longer-term strategic factors that can inspire states to accept immediate losses for subsequent gains. Finally, it must acknowledge domestic sources of influence and understand how these forces constrain the state vis-à-vis others. This paper argues that liberalism, as defined by Andrew Moravcsik, is the best theoretical candidate. This is proven by comparing interpretations of the BWT history through realist, neoliberal, constructivist, and liberal lenses. After identifying and examining each theory's strengths and weaknesses, liberalism emerges as the most holistic view and should be favoured as a primary explanatory theory. Liberalism's theoretical underpinnings – interest group politics – best handles the technical, strategic, and domestic influences that affect Canada-US water relations. Whether examining what prompted efforts to initiate a water-sharing agreement, explaining the agreement's final structure, determining the impetus for continued cooperation, or identifying the incentives to finally break from treaty obligations, liberalism provides the most satisfying solutions. Though derived from the Canada-US border relationship, liberalism's superiority is not limited to the North American watershed. Because the factors examined are common to all shared international river systems and the paper's results are scalable, this suggests that liberalism will continue to be the appropriate primary IR theory to employ when examining state decision-making regarding water-sharing agreements.

This work considers the strategic value of the 1935 London Naval Conference to the United States Navy and the American Government. It addresses longstanding historiographical debates on interwar American foreign policy, including the nature of isolationism under the Roosevelt Administration, the degree of Anglo-American cooperation in the 1930s, and the strategic vision of the United States Navy in the Pacific in the interwar period. Taking into account in equal degrees the perspectives of the uniformed naval officers and the civilian diplomats in the State Department, this thesis will argue that American participation in the 1935 London Naval Conference shows a degree of international participation and a commitment to the international order that is often overlooked by historians in this field.

On April 1, 2011, the Maa-nulth Treaty went into effect. Negotiated between five First Nations, the province of British Columbia and Canada, the Treaty concerned territories never before ceded on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This study utilizes the Treaty as a point of departure to explore contemporary Indigenous-Settler relations. Using digital storytelling, youth from one of the five signatory First Nations identified their priorities for their Nation in a post-Treaty era. These stories are contrasted with a discourse analysis of mainstream media coverage surrounding the Treaty and a survey of local (mainly Settler) residents’ perceptions to explore dominant perspectives pertaining to this comprehensive land claims agreement. While youths’ ideas for the future were anchored to their Indigenous cultural identity, albeit integrating technology and novel art forms, Settlers’ perspectives remained statically centered upon ill-informed strains of colonial thought premised upon socio-political and economic stereotypes. Colonialism continues to be (re)produced structurally and individually; these findings point to the need for Settlers to engage in their own processes of decolonization.

The treaty verification field is of renewed importance as continued nuclear weapons disarmament is prioritized nationally in partnership with other nuclear weapons states. This interest has led to research and development on technologies that could support future U.S. verification missions. A technology employing pulses of high-energy photons from an electron linear accelerator is one technique under consideration. High-energy photons are advantageous as an interrogation source because they penetrate thick shielding and can generate neutrons inside a measurement object. The neutrons would then multiply when presented with an object containing fissile material and allow for detection in a time domain immediately after the pulse. The purpose of this work was to develop an understanding of neutron behavior following a high-energy photon pulse and then develop a tool set to analyze data from this region to determine if a measurement object contains multiplying material, the mass of that material if present, and the moderation in the measurement object. Results indicate the tool sets developed were able to determine multiplication was present accurately in 3 out of 4 realistic verification objects. Additionally the state of the moderation in each object was able to be determined, and the mass could potentially be determined by calibrating to representative samples.

One of the defining characteristics of early European colonial endeavours within the Americas is the discursive practice through which Indigenous peoples were transformed into ideological subjects whose proprietary rights and powers to be self-determining were subordinated to those of settler peoples. In this thesis, it is argued that a similar process of misrepresentation and disenfranchisement occurs when it is suggested that the material and financial poverty plaguing many rural First Nations can be eradicated through their direct and extensive involvement in natural resource extraction industries based on capital driven market economies. As is shown by the author’s participatory research conducted with members of Skownan Anishinaabek First Nation involved in local food production practices, the key to overcoming cycles of dependency is not simply the monetary benefit engendered by economic development projects. Rather it is the degree to which community members recognize their own nationhood oriented value systems and governance principles within the formation and management of these initiatives. The thesis concludes with an examination of one such community led enterprise in Skownan, which ultimately coincides with the political aims of the Indigenous food sovereignty movement.

Teacher educators at the University of Canterbury, College of Education, like all teacher educators in Aotearoa New Zealand, have ethical, legal, and moral obligations in relation to Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty is an agreement that was signed in 1840 by representatives of the British Crown and representatives of independent Māori hapū (sub-tribe). The failure of the Crown to uphold the Treaty plus the colonisation of New Zealand has held wide-ranging ramifications for Māori, including a negative impact on Māori education. Policy guidelines both at a national level and locally at the University of Canterbury provide requirements and guidelines for teachers and teacher educators in relation to the Treaty. The aim of many of these guidelines is to address equity issues in education and to support Māori ākonga (students) to achieve success as Māori. This thesis draws upon data from interviews with five teacher educators from the University of Canterbury, College of Education to explore their understandings of the Treaty and how these understandings inform their practice. A qualitative research approach was applied to this study. Semi-structured interviews were used and a grounded theory approach to the data analysis was applied. Three key themes arose from the data and these provided insights into the teacher educator participants’ understandings of the Treaty, how they acquired Treaty knowledge and their curriculum decision making. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory approach was used as a framework to situate how the teacher educators’ understandings of the Treaty have developed. Critical theory and concepts associated with critical pedagogy underpin this research. Critical pedagogy highlights the importance for teacher educators in New Zealand to have an understanding of the historical and contemporary complexities of educational issues related to the Treaty.

This thesis attempts to understand the intellectual milieu of Maori society in the early colonial period through the medium of Maori-language sources of information dating from that time. A base in Maori documentary allows Maori history to exist under the same disciplines as that of other literate peoples. The thesis argues that the imposition of English meanings on Maori language has shaded Maori meanings. It offers a rereading of documents including the Treaty of Waitangi in order to restore their Maori historicity. Maori society has also been misrepresented historiographically by the creation of false distance between metropolitan and indigenous culture, including the failure to sufficiently consider the shaping force of literacy on Maori perceptions of citizenship and on the politics of sovereignty that developed at mid-century. The thesis argues that land sales were the main Maori experience of government, and that the government's ability to define the terms of the market reconstrued society in ways which destroyed its former political structure.This turned it into a land-owning collective, in which power lay not in human consequence, as formerly, but in the size of the cultivations to which an owner could prove a right in terms constructed by officials. All members of the kin-group were constutued land owners, and the status of the chief was reduced to the size of the lands to which he could prove ownership. By 1865, when the Native Land Court was instituted, power within Maoridom lay in the land itself: te mana o te whenua. This position was written into culture, and endures into the present. The premise of the thesis is that change towards western norms is the proper frame of study of colonial Maori society, but that the magnitude of change has been obscured, both by the politicisation of the past on presentist premises and by the transformation of colonial models into what is now assumed to be 'traditional Maori society'. In order to separate the colonial from the traditional the thesis looks at precontact society custom regarding authority over land and fisheries. The thesis underscores the magnitude of change when tapu disappeared as the support of chiefs' civil governance, which was played out in the migration of mana (personal power) from chiefs to, modern, land. The disappearance of tapu also, however, aided the rise of Maori civil society within the colony on the basis of the desire for modernity which kept Maori engaged with the government - and therefore still governed. This is studied through letters that detail the operation of civil life in Taranaki and among Ngati Kahungunu, with special reference to the experience of Wiermu Kingi and Renata Kawepo.

This thesis employs discourse analysis to examine the human rights contradictions contained in the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). It follows the development of the CEAS since its inception in 1999. However, the principal emphasis of the thesis falls on the scope for realising a rights-based asylum regime in the post-Lisbon context. The research takes the form of policy analysis, and is grounded in a human rights framework of inquiry. This human rights perspective is used to examine the normative and legal inconsistencies inherent to the EU’s securitised approach to asylum, and to put forward suggestions for an approach to asylum in the EU, which engenders a rights-based approach to protection. The analysis of contemporary EU asylum policy and practice demonstrates the extent to which securitisation is present in EU asylum policymaking. It shows that, until the security paradigm in this policy area is supplanted, the realisation of a rights-based asylum system in the EU will not be possible. It also addresses the further challenges to the realisation of the EU as a ‘single asylum space,’ which stem from the limitations in the current instruments of the acquis, most notably the absence of burden-sharing mechanisms to ensure that the EU’s humanitarian obligations are shared equally amongst Member States. The recent ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon holds significant potential for the development of a rights-based asylum regime in the EU. However, it remains in question whether Member States have the political will necessary to accomplish this.

This thesis endeavours to address an identified gap in literature on the European Union’s (EU) scientific and political engagement in the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS). The examination of this engagement begins from the initiation of the EU’s formal participation in the ATS in 1983 as a Party to the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) mechanism, through to the EU’s contemporary role in 2011, for the facilitation of European collaborative scientific research on the Antarctic continent that remains under negotiation pending decisions on funding allocations for polar research under the EU Commission’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014-2020). Particular focus is placed on analysis into the EU’s role in global environmental discourse, for contextualised examination on the hypothesis of this research, which posits that the EU could upgrade its role in the Antarctic to further legitimise a strategic agenda for recognition as a global political actor in international relations. As most of the EU’s participation in the process of Antarctic political deliberation was afforded as an observer to the series of Special Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings (SATCM XI-1 to XI-IV) which developed the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (1991), a significant amount of analysis will focus on EU and Member State involvement in the development of this Protocol. There is also a supplementary exploration of Europeanisation of French foreign policy over this period. In addition to contributing to the academic literature, recommendations concerning the future of the EU’s scientific and political Antarctic engagement could be used as informative and topical research for a mixed audience of European Union (EU) strategists, policy-makers and officials who are tasked with furthering the development of the EU into a global political actor. It could also be of interest to those people in the Antarctic community who might opportunistically seek to maximise the benefits of an increase in direct and indirect EU participation in the Antarctic, particularly the availability of EU funding for Antarctic scientific research.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.