Political Science

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/26548

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 127

Access status: Open Access ,
The Armonia Effect: A Global History of Canada's State and Civil Society Responses to Afghan Refugees
(2026-07-24) Azadah, Kushan; Tungohan, Ethel
This dissertation examines Canada’s response to Afghan displacement between 1979 and 2024. Despite constituting one of the world’s largest and most protracted displaced populations, Afghan refugees long occupied a marginal place within Canadian refugee governance, overshadowed by other humanitarian priorities and filtered through the geopolitical imaginaries of the Cold War and the War on Terror. NATO’s withdrawal and the collapse of the Afghan state in 2021 altered this landscape. Over the following three years Canada resettled more Afghan refugees than at any previous point in its history, seemingly reaffirming its reputation as a humanitarian leader. Yet the federal response also faced intense scrutiny as actors across state and civil society pointed to delays, restrictive eligibility criteria, complex application procedures, and extensive security vetting that obstructed access to protection. Canada’s response thus presents a paradox: an unprecedented expansion of Afghan admissions alongside heightened contestation. To account for this paradox, I advance the concept of the armonia effect in refugee governance. Drawing on the metaphor of the armonia—a hand-pumped instrument whose sound depends on both airflow and the configuration of stops and reeds—the concept theorizes how advocacy generates policy openings when it resonates with existing discourses of obligation, institutional precedents, and reputational commitments through which states imagine themselves in the international order. Protection expands when moral claims align with an inherited architecture of law, security, and political identity that renders certain demands legible to the state. Yet this configuration also produces dissonance. Competing interests, narratives of deservingness, and structural constraints introduce friction into the governance landscape even as pathways to protection emerge. Through a global-historical approach grounded in critical policy discourse analysis, the study traces three developments. First, it reconstructs the Cold War and post-9/11 institutional landscape that marginalized Afghan displacement while embedding refugee governance within a global counterterrorism regime shaped by racialized and civilizational logics. Second, it examines how Canada’s military engagement produced narratives of Afghan deservingness through frames of allyship, gendered rescue, and securitized suspicion. Third, it analyzes post-2021 advocacy by veterans and diaspora organizations, showing how these actors translated crisis into policy-legible demands that expanded protection in stratified and uneven ways.
Access status: Open Access ,
Far Beyond the Oceans, O Sa Mga Ibayong Dagat: Terraformations of National and Diasporic Belonging in Filipino Canada
(2026-07-24) Magsumbol, Nadjie Danielle Mediavilla; Tungohan, Ethel
This dissertation develops the theory of terraformation, which I define as a contested and co-constituted process of change that occurs at the political-affective terrains of belonging experienced at the scales of the nation-state and the diaspora. As this research project’s case study is the Filipino diaspora in Canada, I therefore examine the ways in which terraformation as a process occurs across three scales. Mirroring the journey of the Filipino migrant to Canada, I begin in the Philippines through a critical discourse analysis of the annual State of the Nation Addresses from 1965 to 2025, before the point at which Filipino citizens-migrants depart the homeland. I argue that the Philippine state has terraformed Filipino citizenship from a belonging into a possessive in its commodification of Filipinos in Overseas Filipino Workers. I then follow the migrants in their move to Canada and the Filipino diaspora as they become migrant-citizens; I contend that families and individuals experience legal terraformations of belonging not only in accessing permanent residency and citizenship to Canada, but also in how the migrant-citizen’s legal-affective relationship with the new home nation is influenced by the ways in which they are received into its social and cultural fabric. Finally, I examine how the diaspora challenges the terrains of diasporic and national identity within Canada as its new home nation. Particularly, I argue that through fictive works, the Philippines as a minoritised and racialised diaspora resists and unsettles the sedimented mainstream Canadian notion of Filipino identity in Canada as labourer, but that in doing so, it terraforms not only the ways in which the diaspora sees itself, but also how Canada as the new home nation understands itself vis-à-vis the diaspora. I conclude that terraformation as a theory of change and as a heuristic, with its insistence on remembering what has been invisibilised, has allowed me to explore the experience of the diaspora as a group that exists in contestation with political and cultural hegemony across the long span of political time.
Access status: Open Access ,
What's Cooking? Women's Home-Based Gig Work, Social Reproduction and Development in Egypt
(2026-07-24) Mourad, Laila; Agathangelou, Anna M.
This dissertation examines the everyday lives and labour of informal home-based women gig workers in Egypt’s emerging food tech economy. Drawing on six months of fieldwork with 25 women food vendors in Greater Cairo, it centers the lived experiences, socially reproductive knowledges, and relational strategies that shape how women navigate, sustain, and (re)imagine work under conditions of digitalization, economic precarity, and neoliberal development agendas. In Egypt, as in broader global policy circuits, women’s “empowerment” is increasingly framed through market-based solutions: formalization, entrepreneurship, upskilling and digital/financial inclusion. The dissertation asks: How is home-based labour integrated into the gig economy, and what does this reveal about binaries of paid/unpaid and production/reproduction in the digital domain? How do women experience and navigate precarity in informal, home-based gig work? In what ways does home-based gig work shape women’s economic participation and agency? In response, I propose ‘stretching’ social reproduction as a feminist analytical approach grounded in the specific context of Egypt and the SWANA region. This approach reorients labour analysis towards everyday life and household economies as critical yet invisibilized sites of participation, innovation, and feminist world-making. The dissertation develops three empirical interventions. First, it shows how women integrate into gig work through intergenerational skill transmission, experiential learning, reciprocal knowledge-sharing networks, and relational market-making organized through trust and obligation. Second, it conceptualizes precarity as a lived, household-embedded condition shaped by inflation, price volatility, irregular demand, and exclusion from formal supports, and analyzes women’s household hustling strategies, including spiritual grounding through rizq, informal financial practices (including gam’eyas), low-capital operations, and logistical planning that stabilizes volatility. Third, it argues that home-based gig work expands participation by transforming the household into a workspace while making it conditional on gendered moral expectations that can invisibilize and devalue women’s labour. Against narrow entrepreneurial metrics, women articulate value through nafas, kayan, and istiqlal, and sustain participation through relational agency. The dissertation contributes to feminist political economy, digital labour studies, and gender and development by offering a grounded rethinking of labour and economic justice from the Global South.
Access status: Open Access ,
Collective memory and Gentrification in the Deeply Divided Cities of Belfast and Montreal
(2026-07-24) Davis, Christophe; Hae, Laam
This dissertation examines the intersection of collective memory and gentrification, and the ways in which this intersection shapes urban landscapes and social dynamics in “deeply divided cities.” Engaging with Henri Lefebvre’s theories and contemporary debates on gentrification, this dissertation articulates how gentrification erases local memories and manufactures particular interpretations of past nationalist conflicts, promoting capitalist peace. It also examines “haunting” as a critical, yet underutilized, concept in the gentrification literature. Haunting, as an expression of subaltern agency, challenges dominant neoliberal narratives by conjuring up community histories that are being erased by them. It proposes the concept of “the right to urban memory” as a normative and ethical ground on which communities can reclaim their histories in the face of gentrification. I articulate this right through a comparative analysis of Montréal’s Sud-Ouest and Belfast’s Titanic Quarter (TQ). Both cities have been shaped by their colonial pasts and presents, and experienced deindustrialization, high unemployment, and social unrest resulting from nationalist conflicts. The rise of state-seeking nationalist movements in both cities is intricately linked to deindustrialization. The fieldwork for this comparative research was conducted using a multidisciplinary qualitative approach, including walking interviews, visual analysis, and archival research. I gathered real-time insights and personal stories from residents through walking interviews, and visual analysis provided resources to illuminate how collective memory has shaped spaces in urban and symbolic landscapes within the boroughs under study, especially how, under the directive of neoliberal peace, it has been simplified and altered for marketization. Through archival research, I traced the histories of each city and the evolution of urban spaces. The analysis of Montréal’s Sud-Ouest demonstrates how nationalist restructuring during the Quiet Revolution transformed its memory landscape, and how the transition to a Québécois nation involved sanitizing working-class histories to appeal to gentrifiers, while also erasing the history of Black communities and Indigenous peoples in the neighbourhoods. In Belfast, the post-1998 peace agreement transition saw capitalist peace projects like the TQ, which sanitized the history of the working-class communities and limited their access to it. This gentrified memory landscape is now encroaching on East Belfast, further displacing historical working-class communities. This research underscores struggles over memory alongside other forms of struggles over neoliberal urban capitalism. Furthermore, it shows the evolving ethno-national and cultural power dynamics and the complex interplay of memory politics with it in gentrified/gentrifying places, illustrating the multifaceted nature of urban restructuring driven by gentrification.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Political Architecture of Intergovernmental Policy Coordination in Liberal Democratic Federations: Australia, Austria, Canada & Switzerland 1945–2025
(2026-07-24) Desjardins, Patrick Levon; Cohn, Daniel
This dissertation examines long-term and consistent differences in the dynamics and patterns of intergovernmental policy coordination among four liberal democratic federations (LDFs): Australia, Austria, Canada, and Switzerland. It argues that focusing on the configuration of representation in the central legislature can enhance our understanding of the dynamics of intergovernmental policy coordination. This approach complements existing research that has focused primarily on the preferences and constraints of political elites (Riker 1964; Simeon 1971; Elazar 1987) or on linguistic, national, and territorial divides (Erk 2008; Greer et al. 2023). The dissertation develops a novel explanatory framework centred on the inherent tensions all LDFs face between ensuring regional equality and individual equality. Terming the unique way each country institutionalizes this tension the “federal equity bargain,” the dissertation applies this framework to examine patterns of intergovernmental coordination in three policy sectors: vertical fiscal equalization, higher education, and domestic economic union. The broader aim is to comparatively assess these patterns in terms of their ability to facilitate egalitarian federalism—defined as maintaining cross-regional policy cohesion and individual fairness alongside high degrees of regional autonomy and difference. The dissertation concludes that LDFs combining countervailing intergovernmental dynamics—such as universalism with self-rule, or territorialism with shared-rule—better capture the contradictory tensions between the equality of individuals and the equality of regions at the heart of liberal democratic federalism, and thus more effectively approximate egalitarian federalism.
Access status: Open Access ,
Resource Nationalism in Africa: A Neo-Gramscian Analysis of Petroleum-Driven Industrialisation in Ghana
(2026-07-24) Graham, Emmanuel; Saunders, Richard G.
The dissertation focused on three case studies in Ghana’s oil and gas sector, namely, national policy response and hegemony; local content policy; and community engagement, contestation and social justice. It shows that resource nationalism emanates from the imposition of global capitalist production limits, the neoliberal hegemony of institutions, the domestic political elite's choices and somewhat the desires and actions of civil society movements and their articulation of Ghana’s colonial past and the visions of early resource nationalism under Nkrumah’s resource sovereignty. Using interviews from key stakeholders in the industry, documentary analysis, policy analysis, and as well as reflections on key field observations during the study period, the dissertations’ findings chronicle the trajectory of oil’s emergence in Ghana and its subjugation to specific political projects and class interests. The dissertations’ key point of departure is that political elites, technocrats, and international capital created a power bloc which domesticates oil governance through discourses such as transparency, investment, and development. This power bloc functions as an integral state, mixing coercion and consent to reconcile international interests. Hence, resource nationalism appears not as a rupture with global capitalism but as passive revolution. The dissertation contributes to the furtherance of Neo-Gramscian theoretical concepts of hegemony, counter-hegemony, passive revolution, and the integral state in the context of resource governance in Africa. Empirically, it shows how the convergence of domestic elite interests and transnational capital determines the terms of Ghana’s oil economy. The dissertation, therefore, argues that the concept of resource nationalism in Ghana is not a unified project, but an unfinished hegemonic project, a site of continual contestation between the logic of domination and subaltern resistance, accommodation and autonomy, within a global energy order that continues to evolve.
Access status: Open Access ,
A Climate for Change? Green Party Success in Guelph Ontario
(2026-07-24) Kroon, Evangeline Jael; Pilon, Dennis M.
In the summer of 2018 Canadian history was made in Guelph Ontario when Mike Schreiner became the first ever Green MPP to be elected. Taking 45% of the vote, Schreiner’s win marked the first time that four different parties were elected to the Ontario Legislature since 1951. Then, in the fall of 2019, Steve Dyk the Green MP for Guelph, came in second to Liberal MP Lloyd Longfield, in Canada’s 43rd federal election. It is evident that voters in the riding of Guelph are experiencing a shift in political mindset. My research proposes to look into what factors have contributed to this shift and what the changes in ideology, identity, and values in Guelph have occurred to spark this political change and it will explore whether the changing political compass in Guelph is due to swing voting or to new alignments of partisanship with the Green party. Is this a one-time occurrence due to protest voting? Is Green party success sustainable in Guelph? Will this success lead to others across Ontario and Canada? Drawing on more established Green Party literature from parliamentary systems in the EU and Australasia, this dissertation proposes seven themes of emergence and success for Green politics. These themes are post-materialism, permissible voting systems, a strong economy, party funding, populism, environmental or social movements, and party competition. Then, taking these themes, the federal and provincial Ontario Green Parties in Canada are examined to determine which of these themes are relevant to the Canadian case, with the results being mixed. As this is a case study of the 2018 Guelph election, to provide context and further explanation, the demographic and political history of both Ontario and Guelph are reviewed in detail and then compared to this project’s seven themes. The results find that, with a few situational exceptions, the Green victory in Guelph followed its national and global counterparts in success.
Access status: Open Access ,
Thwarted and Delayed: Three Eras of Legislating Labour Rights in the Ontario Public Service, 1867-2017
(2026-03-10) Carson, Thomas Jonathan; Pilon, Dennis
Seeking to understand why public servants took so long to achieve labour rights—particularly the right to strike—compared to those in the broader economy, this dissertation explores the historical evolution of labour relations within the Ontario Public Service (OPS) from 1867 to 2017. Through an examination of the interplay between institutions and broader socio-economic and political forces, viewed through a critical institutionalist framework, this study argues that the development of OPS labour relations is defined by three distinct eras. The first era, from Confederation until the 1960s, was dominated by the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, which limited the labour rights available to public servants. The second era, from the 1960s to the 1990s, saw the ideology of the governing party as the primary dynamic, with party ideology playing a significant role in the emergence of public servants’ right to strike. Starting in the 1990s, the third era saw the rise of neoliberalism shift the focus of governments of all partisan stripes toward cost containment. As a result, this era was marked by hard bargaining and practical constraints on the feasibility of the strike option. This study demonstrates how these primary factors, along with other influences such as worker militancy and class relations, have shaped the long development of the OPS labour relations regime. The dissertation concludes that, despite significant legislative changes, the government has nevertheless retained considerable control over the material outcomes of the public service labour relations system.
Access status: Open Access ,
Bots, Bias, and Borders: The effects of automated decision making on Canadian immigration systems
(2026-03-10) Lallani, Mishall; Agathangelou, Anna M.
When used in public programs, AI-based technologies, whether through automated decision-making systems or through surveillance software (i.e., facial recognition), act as sieving tools for the state by extracting, sorting, and creating social categories of the “good” subject and the “bad” or even non-subject. The convergence of AI-based decision-making and algorithmic governance with new and emerging immigration technologies enacts and furthers racial statecraft. Questions of race and racialization have become even more pronounced as states seek to pre-empt risk through “smart” border technologies in the post 9/11 era. Given that discourses around refugees and asylum-seeking cannot be divorced from projects of sovereignty, the deployment of AI-powered border technologies must be studied in relation to the enforcement of sovereignty through technological bordering regimes and global geopolitical hierarchies Within Canada, the deployment of AI tools in border technologies is implicated along several registers: neocolonial geo-political asymmetries of power; the low rights environments for displaced persons; and statelessness, which has become both a basis for data extraction and the means to mitigate the mobility of asylum and refugee claimants. This dissertation argues that the nature and operations of AI systems in the context of Canadian immigration policy and practice both shapes and is shaped by social categories of difference such as race, gender, and citizenship status. The proliferation and use of AI in Canadian immigration signifies a mode of statecraft through the consolidation of the state’s AI capabilities and power as expressed through innovation in and desire for a strong domestic AI economy and market. Finally, it argues that Canada’s use of AI and digitally mediated decision making further exacerbates ongoing issues of racialized and gendered discrimination, further prompting the need for social innovation over technosolutionism.
Access status: Open Access ,
Cattle, Capital, and Cannon: War-Making and the Construction of a Liberal Accumulation Regime in the Platine Basin
(2025-11-11) Suben, Stefan; Webber, Jeffery Roger
Abstract: This thesis historicizes the emergence of nation-states in the Plata region of South America during the half-century of civil and international chaos which followed independence. Drawing on several approaches within the broad ambit of historical materialism, it argues that Latin America became part of global capital accumulation with the conquest but that the (geo)political framework of its incorporation has been substantially remade over the following centuries. Case studies of the Argentine Civil Wars (~1810-70) and the related War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70) demonstrate how nineteenth-century conflicts had economic dependency as a central outcome. This was so because export-oriented agrarian and commercial elites succeeded in defeating internal and external obstacles to their class rule. As a result, the Plata became incorporated into the “informal empire” of British capital, with harsh lasting consequences for its economic development. This argument contributes to bypassing a general opposition or lack of constructive engagement between “world-systemic” and “geopolitical” Marxisms. It is contended that both approaches have crucial lacunae in explaining the patterns of postcolonial nation-building in Latin America and especially the Plata. Also addressed are broader methodological and theoretical questions about the task of historicizing the nation-state, modern geopolitics, and capitalism.
Access status: Open Access ,
World of Desertion: Fossil Capitalist Liabilities & Contradictions in Alberta's Conventional Hydrocarbon Economy
(2025-11-11) Hermanutz, Alie; Zalik, Anna
In this dissertation, I analyze the political-ecological and economic conditions of ‘orphaned’ conventional oil and gas infrastructural assets in the province of Alberta, Canada. Specifically, I research fossil capitalist firms’ legal obligations to these deserted, rather than orphaned, infrastructural assets through the lens of liability management. To my knowledge, I offer the first critique of this region’s fossil capitalist liability management regime through a combined critical physical geologic and political economic framework utilizing geoscientific scholarship, political ecology, theories of capitalist crisis, and Marxian critique of statecraft. Specifically, this dissertation explores 1) the conditions under which infrastructure can be deserted; 2) the history and design of the provincial Alberta Energy Regulatory (AER), which is responsible for the ongoing mismanagement of corporate liability and ecological restoration; 3) the conditions under which geotechnical labour operates within the industry to produce capitalist value; 4) the relationships, both in terms of competition and cooperation, between the two major factions of fossil capital and finance capital in the province. To analyze these processes, I consider the geotechnical aspects of wells, pipelines, and processing facilities and their fate in becoming deserted assets. I then turn to analyzing the province's historic and modern liability management regime of fossil assets. I argue that the failure of the region's environmental governance follows from the overwhelming political power of the fossil capitalist hegemonic bloc, as understood by Marxist theories of the capitalist state. The dissertation concludes by arguing that the industry's Orphan Well Association (OWA) was founded as an attempted socioecological fix to the structural contradictions of fossil capitalism manifesting in the 'slow-motion landslide' of deserted fossil assets. I qualify these structural crises in hydrocarbon extraction and production present in Alberta, undermining the ability of fossil capitalism to reproduce itself, through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with key informants. Through this research, it is evident that the province has been subject to fossil capitalist political power which has led to ecological mismanagement, the sidelining of scientific expertise, and the continual destruction of the physical conditions of production which fossil capital relies on to (re)produce itself.
Access status: Open Access ,
Kwayeskastasowin ᒃᐗᔦᔅᑲᔅᑕᓱᐎᓐ (Setting Things Right): Cree Pathways to Modernizing Treaty 9
(2025-11-11) Fleming, Ryan; Slowey, Gabrielle A.
Treaty 9 stands at a decisive crossroads where intensifying extraction pressures, notably Ontario’s Ring of Fire, collide with unresolved Indigenous sovereignty and governance. While signatories understood the treaty as a covenant of coexistence and shared stewardship, Canada imposed a land-surrender narrative, entrenching jurisdictional ambiguity, ecological degradation, and Indian Act dependency. This thesis advances a decolonial framework for treaty renewal by bridging Indigenous legal traditions, wahkohtowin, kaapimaacihkaawaatisiwin, and minopimaatisiiwin, with Canadian constitutional jurisprudence, legal pluralism, UNDRIP and FPIC standards, and comparative governance models. Its original contribution is the Treaty Modernization Toolkit, the first to operationalize Indigenous law into governance innovation through jurisdictional clarity tables, enforceable FPIC protocols, co-governance institutions, and accountability mechanisms. Combining Indigenous methodologies, relational accountability, and comparative analysis, this research contributes to critical political science, constitutionalism, and global Indigenous governance debates, equipping Treaty 9 rights holders with transformative pathways to reclaim inherent rights, protect lands, and sustain intergenerational nationhood.
Access status: Open Access ,
Activating Communities, Mobilizing Women: Affective Organizing in Bangladesh's Ready-Made Garment Industry
(2025-11-11) Quayyum, Nausheen Neeman; Nastovski, Katherine
This dissertation explores the development of class consciousness among women workers, the process of their activation, and their contributions to contemporary labour organizing in Bangladesh. Focused on the country’s ready-made garment (RMG) industry – a notoriously anti-union sector where women comprise approximately eighty per cent of the work force, and which generates USD $46 billion per year in export earnings – this dissertation demonstrates that contrary to the popular portrayal of garment workers as victims to forces outside or beyond their control, women workers in the Bangladeshi RMG industry have been at the forefront of efforts to transform their workplaces, and the communities that have formed around them, through affective organizing. I begin with a discussion of methodology and introduce the analytical framework used to conduct my study. In this section, I bridge recent work on social reproduction and affect to explain how women organize themselves. Next, I contextualize this framework in reference to the industry and worker in question. This section documents the shift of global garment production to Bangladesh, how it altered the demographic composition of the Bangladeshi working class by bringing women into the world of formal waged labour and, finally, the specificities of the women employed in the RMG sector. I then introduce the institutions at the forefront of mobilizing these women. Discussed here are the formal/informal spaces and strategies activists use to mobilize women workers, and how the networks formed in this mobilization support an emergent infrastructure of dissent which sustains women’s activism in the sector. Critically, this section discusses how these efforts have upended the formal compartmentalization of workers’ public and private lives to not only to advance workplace rights but, equally, longer-term efforts to broaden the social lives of women workers. While traditional workers’ institutions in Bangladesh have been slow to identify, address, and incorporate strategies relevant to the growing proportion of working-class women in Bangladesh, labour activists have developed unique patterns of affective organizing amongst women workers that have proven to be essential to the development of their growing class consciousness. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with workers and organizers, and participant observation at activist training sessions in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this dissertation contributes to theoretical debates on women’s activism in anti-union industries of the Global South today.
Access status: Open Access ,
Dependent Contractors and the Ontario Labour Relations Board: Understanding the Board's Role in a Capitalist Economy
(2025-07-23) Walchuk, Bradley Peter; Pilon, Dennis
This dissertation explores the evolution and politics behind the concept of the ‘dependent contractor’ in Ontario, from its earliest incarnations in the late 1970s to its current usage in the gig economy, as interpreted and applied by the Ontario Labour Relations Board (OLRB). It examines how the Board’s interpretation and application of dependent contractor provisions has impacted workers whose employment status falls somewhere between traditional notions of independent contractor and employee, i.e. the ‘grey area’ as the Board has referred to it, over a period of changing employment relationships and of increasingly precarious work. The research tracks these changes over time, examining how previous OLRB jurisprudence on dependent contractors can be seen to impact its decisions in more contemporary contexts (e.g Foodora, 2020) and what this might tell us about the Board’s understanding of employment relations in a changing capitalist economy. The analysis seeks to place the actions of the OLRB into a broader social context to assess what factors have influenced the Board’s decisions and gauge how it understands both its potential to address employment inequities and the limits it faces in doing so within a capitalist economy. This dissertation argues that the OLRB operated with an implicit industrial pluralist understanding of labour-capital relations and made decisions informed by that approach and, in doing so, lacked an appreciation of how capitalist workplaces were changing over time in a way that evaded control via that understanding. It further argues that while bodies such as the OLRB have some autonomy from capitalists and the capitalist state, they are unable to, nor are they designed to, overcome or dramatically alter the power imbalances that exist in capitalist civil society.
Access status: Open Access ,
Far-Right Civilizationism: Limits and Contradictions
(2025-07-23) Stewart, Blakely Royal; Gill, Stephen
This thesis critically explores the ideological aspects of political contestation within the states and societies of the so-called Liberal International Order (LIO) in recent years. Such divisions are associated with key capitalist social and political formations which are concerned with the LIO’s nature, its governance model, and the future of this political bloc within the twenty-first century world order. The focus of this thesis is concerned with the ideological aspects of political contestation and the rivalries and tensions such contestation has produced within the states and societies of the LIO and contemporary world order. Specifically, it will note how the elite-led transnational ‘hegemonic project’ of post-Cold War liberalism has been challenged in recent years by an emergent transnational far-right governance model, with supportive networks of far-right collective intellectuals who are ambitious to provide leadership within the post-war historic bloc of the LIO (or ‘Western civilization’) and greater world order. I will discuss the various discourse coalitions comprising of elite intellectuals for the two rivalling hegemonic projects for the LIO and world order: 1) “neoliberal cosmopolitanism” (Gowan 2001); and 2) “far-right civilizationism” (Stewart 2020, 2022). I will outline the core ideological aspects of each hegemonic project as well the transnational networks of politicians, institutions, and elite intellectuals attached to each project. To illustrate the far-right social forces associated with this ‘clash of hegemonic projects’, I will discuss the National Conservatism Conference (NatCon) a major node within in a burgeoning transnational far-right ‘collective intellectual’ network with hegemonic ambitions in the field of global governance knowledge production within the LIO. Founded by political scientist Yoram Hazony in 2019, NatCon has sought to shift the liberal consensus amongst elites and professional managerial class(es) on questions of culture, identity, and public policy in the West. Attracting academics, activists, military figures, politicians, and capitalists from across the LIO, NatCon has created a venue for far-right elites to organize/harmonize the social forces opposed to some of the proposals, core principles, and influence of ‘globalist’ liberal elites and their collective intellectual institutions such as the World Economic Forum and Open Society Foundations. This dissertation will then 1) examine the structural factors or contexts relevant to the rise of the contemporary far-right social forces within the LIO; 2) describe the ideological basis of the far-right’s opposition to the ideas, institutions, and material capabilities associated with the ‘left’ and/or elite liberal ‘establishment’; and 3) explore the case study of NatCon as an example of a transnational collective intellectual organization which represents a hegemonically ambitious far-right elite discourse coalition in the field of global governance. I will discuss how this emergent coalition, which I label as the Budapest Men, has designs for the transatlantic-bloc and world order. This bloc of social forces cannot be reduced to frequently used descriptors such as populist, nationalist, or illiberal.
Access status: Open Access ,
Regimes of Human Security, Intellectual Property and Social Reproduction: Ideas, Institutions and Material Capabilities from the 19th Century Liberal Capitalism to the 21st Century New Constitutional Architecture
(2025-07-23) Evrenosoglu, Latife Demet; Bakker, Isabella C.
This dissertation develops a historically grounded understanding of human security by examining the contested trajectory of the relationship between intellectual property regimes and human security concerns institutionally and ideationally in the different eras of capitalism, and the unprecedented emergence of patent protection as the ‘common sense’ of subsistence in neoliberalism. Developing a novel synthesis that integrates Robert Cox’s framework of historical structures of ideas, institutions, and material capabilities, and the forms of power arising from their interaction, feminist social reproduction theories, ‘new constitutionalism’, and Fernand Braudel’s analysis of long-term patterns of historical continuity and change, it examines subtle and often obscured ways in which patent regimes have shaped the global governance of human security, particularly of food security and hunger, and the social reproductive contradictions of capitalism across different accumulation regimes. The dissertation explores significant shifts and continuities in the dominant ideas and institutions related to the commodification of knowledge and hunger, and puts forth three primary claims. First, the ideational and institutional origins of the relationships between patents and the global governance of subsistence lie in the normative framework of the ‘liberal utopia’ of nineteenth-century economic liberalism, colonial rule and the invention of the corporation as a legal subject. Secondly, the neoliberal patent regime is a new constitutionalist mechanism that locks in a financialized and deeply depoliticized human security regime that institutionalizes the precarity of subsistence as a permanent condition, particularly for the impoverished populations in the Global South. The neoliberal institutionalization of patents on seed and, more broadly, the ‘technological fix’ of what I frame as “the plants of market civilization” suggests a neoliberal human security regime that is difficult to transform and systematically insulated from democratic accountability and popular contestation from below. Third, the enduring legacy of the new constitutionalist logic of depoliticization has been reinforced in the different eras of capitalism by hegemonic ideas and institutions that relegate hunger and food security to the ‘economy’, to international institutions and corporate philanthropy/charity.
Access status: Open Access ,
Conflict And Solidarity Between Anti-Colonial Environmentalism, Indigenous Anti-Pipeline Resistance, And The Labour
(2025-04-10) Golkar, Niloofar; McNally, David
Climate change has reached crisis mode, and confronting it requires confronting corporations, economic planning, policies that exacerbate this process, and social relations that enable such policies and economic paths. This dissertation shows how settler colonialism in Canada revolves today around extractivism. This fact makes the struggle for land critical and highlights how Canadian nationalism is an obstacle to Indigenous solidarity and environmentalism. In 2020, the Shut Down Canada movement that started from Wet'suwet'en territories against building the CGL pipeline on their land, which was a scale-up from the Idle No More movement, underscored the importance of the Land Back movement for environmental justice. Its tactic of shutting down critical infrastructures was the largest scale in Canada's recent history of Indigenous resistance at the time. The well-documented militarized attacks on Wet'suwet'en unceded territories creates a dilemma that should concern every activist. At the same time, the impressive organizing efforts that started from Unist'ot'en as a space of resistance provide lessons for every movement. The case of the CGL pipeline and Wet'suwet'en resistance puts us at the conjuncture of three movements: the issue of solidarity between labour, anti-capitalist Environmentalists and the Indigenous movement. In this dissertation, I strategically explore possibilities for building strong Indigenous-environmentalist-labour solidarity. Through extensive policy analysis of the critical infrastructure risk management approach and media analysis of the CIRG task force, I explore a hidden link between the security arm of one of the largest global investment corporations, KKR, RCMP, and TC Energy executives. The government's risk management approach has enabled such a link, which facilitates and encourages conversations between the involved actors. The state's claim to the so-called public/Canadian interest in pipelines is of utmost importance to this dissertation. The concept of Canadian interest works as a settler colonial and national ideology of governing; historically and presently, the concept creates an umbrella that includes the Canadian working class as it excludes Indigenous communities, along with the processes of reproducing nature and non-capitalist forms of economy that many radical environmentalists try to create through commons. A lack of land-based analysis of the situation of working-class people in Canadian labour has turned the labour movement into a more economistic version of trade unionism, one that does not actively oppose Canadian nationalism.
Access status: Open Access ,
"A Nurse is not a Nurse is not a Nurse": The Social Construction of Skill Among Internationally Educated Nurses Through the Lens of Feminist Economy and Disablement
(2025-04-10) Vega, Temoc Thania; Vosko, Leah F.
This dissertation examines policies from 2000 to 2024 regarding the assessment of internationally educated nurses' (IENs) skills, including credentials and work experience needed to enter Canadian nursing. I show that federal and provincial initiatives, like the National Nurses Assessment Service and fair access legislation, have made the process stricter, longer, and more expensive. As a result, many IENs are pushed into lower-tiered healthcare jobs, such as personal support work, characterized by high job insecurity, low wages, and increased risks of disability, including injuries, illnesses, and mental health distress. I argue that IENs' downward occupational mobility extends beyond a policy failure or racial biases; it is intricately connected to the racialized and feminized segmentation of care work, underpinning Canada’s development as a settler-colonial capitalist state. It is a continuation of a gatekeeping mechanism where (a) white nurses enhance their power and privilege—like better pay, benefits, and social status—by upholding masculinist and colonial beliefs about skill, often marginalizing labour associated with poor, non-white women, and (b) settlers access a pool of easily exploitable labour to fulfill the nation’s social reproductive demands. Unlike past racially explicit exclusions, the current policy uses “managed” integration, marked by selectivity (higher scrutiny) and assimilation (limited to those who approximate Canadian nursing standards). This segmentation is masked by race-neutral policies focusing on public safety and upholding international applicants' rights to fairness. Despite the advantages of racial segmentation processes, I illustrate how the downward occupational mobility of IENs adversely affects their health and the welfare of impoverished communities in their home countries, particularly the Philippines, and is closely linked to neoliberal privatization and declining care standards in Canada. By integrating insights from critical policy analysis, feminist political economy, critical race theory, and critical disability studies, I develop a framework to (a) examine the ideological and socioeconomic interests integration policy supports and (b) advocate for a fundamentally different approach to healthcare organization, specifically, one that challenges the hierarchical classification of skills (i.e., distinguishing between high-skilled and low-skilled jobs) as the mechanism that determines workers' unequal access to compensation, benefits, job security, legal protections, and social status.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Creatures of the Province Doctrine and the Neoliberalization and De-Democratization of Local Governance in Toronto from 1996-2023
(2025-04-10) Kelpin, Ryan Justin; Murray, Karen
In 2022, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced new legislation, the Strong Mayors, Building Homes Act. The Act enshrined something once unthinkable to people living in the City of Toronto: granting the mayor the power to veto decisions made by the City Council while requiring the council to summon a super-majority (two-thirds) of votes to overrule the mayor. Any new local bylaw passed seen as clashing with “provincial priorities” could be vetoed by the mayor, creating a direct political link on all local issues between the municipal mayor’s and provincial government premier’s offices. This dissertation questions broad assumptions about, and examines and theorizes to what degree, this type of governing was a stark break from, or a continuation of, the longstanding norms pertaining to liberal democratic institutions and intergovernmental governance between the Government of Ontario and the City of Toronto. Using three case studies over the period from 1996 to 2023, the dissertation focuses on three Ontario premiers: Mike Harris (1996-2002), Dalton McGuinty (2003-2006), and Doug Ford (2018-2023). The argument put forth is that in the neoliberal era, the provincial government has routinely utilized the creatures of the province doctrine to restructure liberal democratic institutions and undercut democratic decision-making processes within the City of Toronto. This was done in the name of the neoliberalized notion of “efficiency” through centralizing power and insulating neoliberal austerity measures from critique.
Access status: Open Access ,
Plant-Based Contraceptives and Bioprospecting in the Americas: A Genealogy of Petiveria alliacea
(2025-04-10) O'Donnell, Rachel Tucker; Whitworth, Sandra L.
This doctoral dissertation examines Petiveria alliacea, an overlooked but politically significant plant used for contraception throughout the Americas. Plant materials are often referred to as the ‘raw materials’ for development and biotechnology, but they are in fact the products of local innovation by individual communities. The science of botany frequently disregards the questions of historical and cultural process, as well as the social, political, and economic relationships involved in the creation of pharmaceutical contraceptives and their connection to natural knowledge. This dissertation seeks to redress this. Rarely do we see the concepts in the field of Feminist Science Studies brought into conversation with imperial political processes. By using Foucault’s concept of genealogy alongside key works in Feminist Science Studies, we see how gender is collapsed, both symbolically and materially, onto the process of knowledge production. I draw on Sandra Harding’s concepts of knowledge (2011), as varied and specific to geographic space and culture. This analytical framework is used to explore the political history of Petiveria alliacea in the Americas, from early modern exploration among European physician-botanists and the plant’s ‘discovery’ in the Caribbean to its contemporary use as a menstrual regulator in a highland Mayan community in Guatemala. This dissertation argues that what is now known as Petiveria alliacea in the field and the laboratory has been constituted through the gendered knowledge, discourses, and practices of local communities, as well as the Western development of ‘botany’ as a field of study and ‘science’ as a category and a method. It analyzes primary sources related to Petiveria alliacea and botanical research on abortifacient plants throughout the Americas, including USDA expeditions in the twentieth century and original documents related to the development of the birth control pill. The concluding study of a particular region’s knowledge about Petiveria demonstrates a local resistance to Western forms of health care and pharmaceutical application, and opens up a new line of inquiry in the study of gender and politics.

Browse

Recent Submissions