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Political Science

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  • ItemOpen Access
    The Political Life of Anxiety: Market Psychopathologies and the Production of Subjectivity
    (2023-12-08) Kingsmith, Adam Taylor; Latham, Robert E.
    This dissertation critically examines the phenomenon of increasing anxiety in the context of modern capitalist societies, or what is termed ‘anxio-capitalism.’ The research starts by analysing the historical and conceptual trajectory of anxiety, exploring the development of its definitions, perceptions, and instrumental function in the production of subjectivity under capitalism, feeding a perception of humans as self-interested market actors. Through a survey of market psycho-pathologies that looks at shifts from ‘laissez-faire misery’ and ‘Fordist boredom’ to ‘neoliberal anxiety’ it illuminates how the dynamics of mental and emotional health evolved alongside new forms of economic and socio-technical management termed ‘social factories.’ Subsequently, the dissertation focuses on the rising influence of the biomedical industry, laying out its tendency to commodify and pathologize mental health and wellbeing. The discussion then delves into the intersection of biomedical practices and machine intelligence, revealing a system that fosters a culture of normalized anxiety and self-quantification that is perpetuating the mental health crisis. It argues that a deep-set paradox of dis/empowerment underpins this mental health crisis, as the social factory of anxio-capitalism simultaneously promotes the idea of the sovereign, rational individual yet imperceptibly structures people’s experiences and perceptions of anxiety within a market-driven framework. This pathologizing of unproductive behaviours and emotions leads to their medicalization, leveraging human suffering as a market for pharmaceuticals and therapeutic services. The resultant effect is the formation of disoriented epistemologies that draw people into isolating reactionary fantasies and conspiratorial ‘hypercultures.’ The dissertation examines both the personalizing and de-personalizing impacts of these pathologies on the potentials for collective consciousness and communal politics, proposing a reframing of anxiety through ‘trans-diagnostic praxis’ and ‘anxious solidarity.’ In essence, this project offers an in-depth critique of the systemic structures that produce and manage the proliferation of anxiety, simultaneously probing strategies for responding to escalating mental health challenges in the context of anxio-capitalism.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Left Universalism: Towards a Muslim Feminist Ethics
    (2023-12-08) Khurshid, Nuzhat Salma; Bell, Shannon M.
    How can we understand Muslim women’s agency? Is it possible to see such agency through the rubric of feminist universalism rather than through the standpoint of religious difference? This project presents a critical examination of the creative capacity of Muslim women to contribute to feminist and political goals, not as women who are Muslims, but through their religious identities. My objective is to build a theoretical grounding for a feminist ethic espoused by Muslim women that is not based on difference. Furthermore, I argue that this ethic can be politically engaged, and can articulate meaningful interventions for universal expressions of feminist struggle. As such, it is a critique of current literature on Muslim women’s agency which focuses on their particularity as the only site of legitimate knowledge production. I will argue that an exclusive focus on difference prevents these women from being understood as agentive through their religious identities and serves to isolate them from inclusion in larger feminist political discussions. As the title of this proposal shows, I rely on the concept of ‘left universalism’ as articulated by Sekyi-Otu. He presents a strong argument for the use of universalism as a tool in the hands of non-Western cultures to bring out organic and generative theoretical ideals that lead to progressive social and political change. Within poststructural and postcolonial studies, universalism has (rightfully) been deemed suspect in projects of Western cultural and political domination. However, Sekyi-Otu points out that condemning universalism as an imposition ultimately prevents non-Westerners from reclaiming parts of their tradition that overlap with Western values. Left universalism provides a theoretical methodology to better theorize religious women’s agency, ultimately highlighting universal aspects of feminist agency, such as multidimensionality and relationality.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Pure Heart: A Medieval Japanese Buddhist Political Theory of Legitimacy
    (2023-12-08) Bouthillier, Maxime Marcotte; Bell, Shannon M.
    Due to narratives stemming from the currently-dominant Eurocentric belief-system, contemporary works on legitimacy generally avoid the inclusion of ‘belief’ as a core analytical tool. However, pioneer of social science studies Max Webber clarified in The Profession and Vocation of Politics (1919) the necessary relationship between beliefs and legitimacy when he demonstrated that structures of authority/power can never be legitimate based only on their existence alone; rather, they find their legitimacy through the belief system which sustains them. This means that to understand catalyzers of political change – even more so the legitimizing of new political dynamics – political theorists need to set aside their Eurocentric assumptions and start engaging with beliefs seriously again. Translating and applying an East-Asian commentary methodology to texts written in the Heian 平安 (794-1185) and Kamakura 鎌倉 (1185-1333) era of Japanese history, this work excavates key beliefs that play a central role in discussions surrounding politics. More specifically, this work focuses on passages found in the works of Buddhist authors, namely Eisai 栄西 (1141-1215), Dōgen 道元 (1200-1253), and Nichiren 日蓮 (1222-1282). Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to systematize these passages into a coherent medieval Japanese Buddhist political theory of legitimacy, while clarifying the core beliefs in which this theory is anchored. This work first establishes that the medieval Japanese Buddhist political theory of legitimacy places at its core beliefs in the heart (kokoro 心), purity (shōjō 淸淨) and karma (gō 業), and proposes political analyses of and solutions to legitimate leadership stemming from such beliefs.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Rethinking the Anglo-American Road to Neoliberalism: Public Finance and Welfare from the Gold Standard to the 2008 Crisis and Beyond
    (2023-08-04) Wamsley, Dillon Bruce Michael; Gill, Stephen R.
    This dissertation seeks to contribute to a new understanding of the American and British roads to neoliberalism. It develops a novel theoretical framework that combines Gramscian political economy with critical literature on the welfare state and social reproduction to provide a more integrated approach to the study of international and comparative political economy. This framework is applied to examine two interconnected themes in the developmental histories of the US and Britain that are typically studied independently. First, this thesis explores the emergence of depoliticization as a model of liberal economic governance predicated on the insulation of economic policymaking from popular political contestation. Against a backdrop of uneven patterns of state formation and capitalist development, the origins of this approach to economic governance are traced in the US and Britain from the gold standard through the post-World War II period. I then examine its role in the emergence and consolidation of Anglo-American neoliberalism. Despite institutional variegation between the US and Britain, I argue that depoliticization has remained a cornerstone of macroeconomic governance in both countries since the late 1970s. Second, this dissertation analyzes the political coalitions associated with the welfare state in each country, focusing on the social antagonisms and class divisions generated between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. I contend that the politics of anti-welfarism, and the historical blocs mobilized around welfare reform since the 1980s, have been deployed as a divide-and-rule hegemonic strategy to generate political support for Anglo-American neoliberalism. By examining these themes concurrently, this study offers an original analysis of how policies and practices that have eroded democratic control over economic policymaking in the US and Britain have nonetheless continued to generate popular political support. Finally, this dissertation examines these themes amidst the re-emergence of crisis management, austerity, and welfare restructuring in the decade after the 2008 global financial crisis. It argues that both countries have experienced an ongoing crisis of social reproduction, which has contributed to an unfolding crisis of legitimacy within Anglo-American neoliberalism.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Public Financial Institutions, Industrial Policies, and Quebec Capitalist Development, 1960-2018.
    (2023-08-04) Pepin, Christian; Albo, Greg
    This thesis analyzes the role of public financial institutions and industrial policies in Quebec capitalist development between 1960 and 2018. This study is informed by a Marxist analysis articulating the transformations in public financial institutions and industrial policies to the systemic shifts in private finance and business organization during different phases of the uneven capitalist development in Quebec. Quebec’s public financial institutions evolved in response to the weaknesses and “short-termism” of private finance. The dissertation argues these policy instruments became disciplined by market imperatives, enabled by class conflicts that made public financial institutions and industrial policies subservient to capitalist “catch-up” and internationalization. Documentary analysis tracks the main regulatory changes of these policies and institutions and the political struggles waged by business associations and unions over their goals. Multiple firm-level cases reveal that Quebec’s public financial institutions shared features with “patient capital” at odds with financialization, but they still accommodated neoliberal corporate restructurings. This process is captured by the concept of “neoliberal loyalty”. While these institutions protected the province’s businesses from predatory rentiers, these firms still faced intensifying capitalist competition in the world market. A case study of Bombardier analyzes if the company’s accumulation practices were consistent or in contradiction with Quebec’s industrial policies. Bombardier became involved in financial activities distinct from its core manufacturing operations, but it still remained predominantly an industrial conglomerate. The case study supports a conception of financialization intensifying financial discipline upon “real” production, and as compatible with the province’s neoliberal industrial policies. In contrast to the institutionalists depicting the “Quebec model of development” as a policy regime divergent from neoliberalism, this thesis contributes to a literature locating Quebec’s economic policies, labour market trends, and overall policy regime as a variety of neoliberalism. A conclusion of this thesis is that public banking should not be considered as a ready-made “progressive” alternative to financialization. This conclusion challenges the assumptions of institutional perspectives on “patient capital”.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Speech, Law and Civil Society: Liberal Thought Against Democratic Politics
    (2023-08-04) Andersen, Grant Taylor; Maley, Terry
    Historically-informed reflection on democracy reminds us of a curious fact: representative government, supposedly the modern form of democracy, was not originally envisioned as a technical solution to the difficulty of assembling the citizen body of an extensive nation state, but rather as a qualitatively different political form. The first thinkers to dedicate their attention to representative government in a systematic way were perfectly candid in contrasting this type of regime with democracy, which they viewed as an archaic form of politics that was at worst anarchic and at best inappropriate to modern conditions. Much of twentieth century democratic theory has been staged as a dispute between the advocates of a normative model of participatory democracy and an empiricist research program that takes the identification of democracy with representative institutions for granted. This project does not attempt to relitigate this dispute, but rather to widen its stakes. Political representation is only one facet of the modern anti-democratic project. The fact that modern democratic institutions are composed of anti-democratic political forms raises a more extensive set of problems than an exclusive focus on representation would permit us to see. Behind the debate concerning participatory and representative democracy lies an older and more extensive field of conflict: the dispute between liberalism and democracy. Whether one considers the norm of popular sovereignty, the use of elections, or the practice of parliamentary government by discussion, a cursory historical investigation reveals that the political forms which today are considered inseparable from democracy originate in a struggle waged by hereditary aristocracies against monarchical power, or a struggle waged by the “natural aristocracy” of civil society against democracy itself. The following study has two stages. The first is a history of liberal thought written with an emphasis on this tradition’s responses to the threat of democracy. This history is divided into three moments, each of which outlines a distinct family of political reflection: juridical liberalism, empiricist liberalism, and parliamentarism. The second stage is an attempt to identify the contribution of each family of liberal reflection to the modern understanding of democracy. In the final chapters, this is extended to contemporary democratic theory, which is correctly understood as the inheritor of liberal, not democratic, political forms, and which renews many aspects of the liberal tradition’s critique of democracy despite its avowed acceptance of democracy.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Sovereignty Through Security? Canada's Arctic Defence in the Surveillance Age
    (2023-03-28) Johnson, Benjamin Tyler; Slowey, Gabrielle A.
    This project considers how materials, practices and semiotics align and structure the development and use of security technologies in the Canadian Arctic. The dissertation asks: does the development of new technologies geared towards surveillance of the Canadian Arctic represent a new approach to security in the North? It is argued that current technological developments are grounded in a particular sociotechnical imaginary that is at once predicated on historical state practices while drawing from a more comprehensive assemblage of modern state strategies that are refracted through a lens of futurity. Notably, how the Arctic is understood and rationalized as a space of social and political life is dependent on a uniquely securitized image of the future. Within this imaginary, the Canadian state's rhetorical claims to sovereignty are threatened by the potential for competing expressions of power enabled by climate change, technological diffusion, and other trends at the international scale. Consequently, technologies developed for surveillance, intelligence, and Arctic security more broadly are designed to support practices of pre-emption as techniques of state power. Canada is prioritizing technological innovation as a governance strategy designed to rationalize and consolidate its power over its Arctic territory. Broadly, this strategy is predicated on illuminating the Arctic using the visible and non-visible spectrums, which contributes to sovereignty as a rhetorical, material, and symbolic signifier of state power and control. In order to demonstrate the interplay between this imaginary and material expressions of state sovereignty, the concept of full-spectral dominance is deployed as a technique of power that captures the state's security ambitions through the joint practices of surveillance and intelligence (sensing). This concept is illustrated through an examination of current technological developments being pursued by the Canadian state through the All Domain Situational Awareness (ADSA) Program led by National Defence along with related programs and developments. In sum, these developments exhibit how increasingly imaginative views of the Arctic’s future contour state-led practices in the present.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Conflicting Visions: Political Struggle Over Urban Space in Lawrence Heights
    (2023-03-28) Careless, Jon Robert; Latham, Robert E.
    This dissertation is a case-study of a public housing district in North York, Toronto known as Lawrence Heights, a so-called “priority neighborhood” undergoing the largest “urban revitalization” project in Canada. Typically, a revitalization is formed through a public-private partnership between a government and private developers, which together direct the razing of a disinvested area, followed by the building of new residential developments, commercial businesses, and public amenities in its place. It happens that government officials, planners, architects, and developers are employing enormous resources towards a revitalization project unfolding in the context of late neoliberalism (as a once revolutionary paradigm) undergoing fracturing since the crisis of 2008. In this situation, however, people continue struggling against, and are actively resisting, the long-standing and increasingly visible consequences of neoliberalism as a market-driven de-democratizing force that has leveled social service provision while also driving up living costs. The research uncovers forms of political conflict that have arisen during the Lawrence Heights revitalization. In so doing, I map out a chronological narrative detailing the past and present of this district as it continues transforming. To this end, I address the following questions: What do ongoing relations between interested parties involved in remaking Lawrence Heights tell us about the capacity for late neoliberalism to absorb and modify the multiple visions put forward for the neighbourhood’s future that align with its principles? What political outcomes arise in the deliberations over the use and distribution of resources associated with the revitalization? How do these interactions in this localized case study fit into larger struggles between different groups to leverage the state to institute certain policies in an environment where neoliberalism’s negative impacts on poorer communities have fueled energetic counter-pressures? Borrowing from Gramscian thought, this dissertation argues that the early stages of the Lawrence Heights revitalization suggests the potential unfolding of a localized passive revolution with grassroots anti-systemic organizers seizing meaningful levels of control over the direction of revitalization planning, as evidenced by their securement of resources for resident-led programs, employment opportunities, and decision making power, while struggling against the prevailing limits and power enforced by neoliberal policy regimes.
  • ItemOpen Access
    SECULARISM, FEMINISM, AND ISLAMOPHOBIA: A STUDY OF ANTI-VEILING LAWS IN FRANCE AND QUEBEC
    (2022-12-14) Jahangeer, Roshan Arah; Agathangelou, Anna M.
    Anti-veiling laws require Muslim women to un-cover parts of their bodies in order to work, go to school, or even walk in public space. Since 2004, French-style anti-veiling laws have been debated and enacted globally, including in Quebec, Canada. My research asks: How and why have anti-veiling laws been enacted in both France and Quebec? How have anti-veiling laws circulated transnationally between these two sites? What are the impacts of anti-veiling laws on Muslim women who practice veiling in France and Quebec? Using a qualitative approach, I spent nine-months conducting fieldwork research in Paris and Montreal between 2012 and 2014. I interviewed 47 Muslim women who currently, previously, or periodically wore a headscarf or face-veil, and/or who identified as activists who opposed anti-veiling laws. To analyse my data, I used Saidian citational analysis alongside a transnational feminist and critical race theoretical framework. The dissertation shows that political leaders in both France and Quebec used anti-veiling laws as a legal-political strategy to solidify their national identities around “la nouvelle laïcité,” an identity-based secularism that takes Islam, rather than Catholicism, as its main interlocutor. It also shows how a number of politicians, feminists, and media purveyors facilitated the circulation of anti-veiling laws between France and Quebec by sharing common assumption, lexicons, knowledge, and expertise, and by forming powerful networks through traveling, organizing conferences, and writing books. My findings also demonstrate that anti-veiling laws increased Islamophobia in both France and Quebec, prompting veiled Muslim women to develop survival strategies to mitigate its impacts on their everyday lives. Survival strategies included changing the way they dressed; changing their jobs or studies; starting their own associations or businesses; withdrawing from society; engaging in political/feminist activism; and finally, migration (hijra). My findings suggest that instead of promoting secularism and gender equality, anti-veiling laws negatively impact Muslim women’s education and employment—forcing them to choose between their religion and their daily survival. Their migration away from France/Quebec may also exacerbate labour shortages in sectors that require highly-skilled workers. Finally, I discuss threats to democratic minority rights that anti-veiling laws enable, including ongoing legal challenges to them.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Governing Disappearance: Re-figuring Canadian Responses to Violence Against Indigenous Women and Girls
    (2022-12-14) FitzGerald, James; Kernerman, Gerald P.
    This dissertation considers the history of Canadian policy responses to violence against Indigenous women and girls. I think through how these policy responses constitute processes that figure Indigenous women as objects of policy cut off from social relations and histories. In turn, these measures erase Indigenous agency and augment structures that sustain the disappearance of Indigenous women and girls. In this way, I expose how knowledge production is implicated within processes of disappearance and how relations of elimination are reproduced within policy responses to violence. I argue that settler-expert discourses subtly reassert state power through narratives of care by figuring Indigenous women and girls as “damaged.” I build upon Eve Tuck’s (2009) writing on deficit models of advocacy and Michel Foucault (1978) and Wendy Brown’s (1995) analysis of knowledge production to interrogate the assumptions emerging from expert discourses and truth-telling commissions. My work also draws on critical insights from 15 key informant interviews to consider specific policies within four areas: social planning, harm reduction, human rights, and policing. With these theoretical and methodological insights, I undertake a discourse analysis to consider the figuration of Indigenous women across 17 government and nongovernmental reports from the 1960s to the early 2000s. I examine the creation of policy figures as a technique of governing. Through this work, I consider how expert discourses produce new policy figures and generated new techniques of regulation and surveillance that targeted Indigenous women and expanded outward to target Canadian society. My work finds that the downloading and privatization of public and social responsibility to the community and the individual persisted across the postwar period and were enduring facets of disappearance. Expert discourses of care were central in depoliticizing the assertions of Indigenous peoples and their allies while normalizing state power.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Reconciling for a culturalized past: The collective memory of Indigenous residential schools in Toronto's Nathan Phillips Square
    (2022-12-14) Mariano, Kad Chasy; Hae, Laam
    Since 2011, the City of Toronto has been co-implementing place-making efforts in Nathan Phillips Square with Indigenous communities, people, and organizations that holistically acknowledge the historical presence of Indigenous people and promote their resilience and vibrant contemporary existence. Using autoethnographic work, metaphors established in collective memory studies, and interviews with relevant actors, I argue that Toronto’s reconciliation strategy through these initiatives operates within culturalist and multiculturalist praxes, producing a ‘legitimate’ Indigenous subjectivity according to a past chiefly characterized by cultural genocide. Although the resulting reconciliatory relationship between the municipality and Indigenous people is premised on accepting and equitably including the latter in history-making and memory-preserving processes, thereby resolving Toronto’s memory and identity crisis between multiculturalism and settler colonialism, it limits possible ways of creating and changing discourses about Indigenous experiences, histories, and voices. They become constrained within a politics of recognition, reinforcing cultural recognition as the primary means for reconciliation.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Temporal Capitalism: How Time Shapes Democracy Under Capitalism
    (2022-12-14) Page, Kristopher; Pilon, Dennis M.
    This thesis uses a Marxist analysis of capitalism to better understand the relationship between capitalism and democracy by specifically looking at the way in which capitalism distributes control over time. With centralization of time under the control of capitalist employers the outcome of liberal democratic inputs is naturally skewed towards the owning class, and against the working class. Understanding time this way offers a route to its politicization and can serve as an argument against the seeming neutrality of capitalism by making explicit the fact that its core logic is oppositional and alien to a truly democratic society.
  • ItemOpen Access
    "ALL RIGHTS MATTER": A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE ONTARIO HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION'S SYSTEMIC CHANGE INITIATIVES IN
    (2022-08-08) Bernhardt, Nicole Shelley; Vosko, Leah F.
    This dissertation examines the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s (OHRC) partnership engagement with police services via the use of voluntary Project Charter agreements. Through an analysis of OHRC policy documents spanning from 1962 to 2016, qualitative research with three municipal police services (Ottawa, Toronto, and Windsor) and the OHRC, utilizing methods developed out of the epistemological insights and normative commitments of Critical Race Theory, Feminist Political Economy and Critical Policy Studies, the analysis centres on the duality of law and the race-neutral logics that work to constrain the viability of human rights-driven anti-racist structural change. This work engages the notion “All Rights Matter” to describe a flattened approach to human rights that restricts focussed consideration of the operation of structural racism. The “All Rights Matter” approach employed within these voluntary Project Charter agreements obfuscates areas of institutional inaction or resistance and deflects attention away from inaction, or failure, toward addressing structural racism and community concerns of racial profiling and misuse of force. This flattened approach to difference is intimately connected to a diversity management posture favouring business vernacular and rationales over equity. The five chapters comprising the dissertation reveal the emancipatory limitations of rights claims – vis-a-vis racism in particular – within the Ontario context. Chapters one and two offer theoretical and historical background to the “All Rights Matter” approach. Chapter three attends to the role of policing in reproducing a racially inequitable social order, the OHRC’s partnership-oriented adoption of diversity management, and the settlement agreement that brought about the Ottawa Police Race Data Collection Project. The case studies of the Toronto and Windsor police services examined in chapters four and five illustrate how these partnerships with the OHRC serve as containment strategies, quelling public pressure to address racism within these services. By way of conclusion, the dissertation underlines the importance of severing human rights approaches from a diversity management framework that extracts value from racialized groups without addressing inequitable racial orders and the pressing need for human rights accountability and legally-enforceable public interest remedies.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Democracy, Decolonization and the Politics of Reconciliation in Canada
    (2022-08-08) Lincez, Calvin Zachariah Lennon; Maley, Terry
    Using Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (IRS TRC) as an occasion and a lens, this dissertation aims to critically assess the capacity of the Canadian state to make good on the promise of transformation that the politics of reconciliation harbours. Canada’s IRS TRC is an opportunity to renew reflection on the sort of transformations that might bring about post-settler-colonial forms of commonality that do not presuppose the impossibility of decolonization and Indigenous self-determination. Using the topic of collective memory and methods drawn from emergent anti-imperialist sub-traditions in Western political thought, this dissertation forwards the claim that the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential entails both democratic and decolonial elements. This, in turn, grounds an attempt to bring radical democratic thought (with a focus on Sheldon S. Wolin) and Indigenous resurgence theory (with an emphasis on Glen S. Coulthard) into a conversation based on the assumption that not only are these two traditions of political thought not mutually exclusive but can be brought together in ways that can contribute towards the realization of political reconciliation’s transformative potential. This, however, entails a systematic decolonization of those elements of the foundations of Western democratic thought that render it amenable to imperial projects as a condition for freeing it up as a resource in the struggle for decolonization. This approach resulted in a twofold conclusion. First, the politics of reconciliation in liberal-democratic, settler-colonial contexts can be broadly divided into two contrasting and diametrically opposed models of political reconciliation: reconciliation ‘from above’ and reconciliation ‘from below.’ The second conclusion is that the form that the politics of reconciliation assumed in Canada is a form of reconciliation ‘from above,’ which, amongst other things, might be characterized by its selective social amnesia, its non-participatory and elitist decision-making processes and an incapacity to make good on the promise of change that the politics of reconciliation harbours. The liberal-democratic settler state’s inability to facilitate political reconciliation’s transformative potential is due to an enduring structural predisposition to promote the opposite of a decolonizing transformation in Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial contexts such as Canada.
  • ItemOpen Access
    A Blast from the Past: Armed Drones, International Humanitarian Law, and Imperial Violence
    (2022-08-08) Andersen, Kirsten Per; Alnasseri, Sabah
    Scholars of conflict and its regulation have regarded armed drones as a new ‘puzzle’ for international humanitarian law’s (IHL) theory and application to adapt. While drones indeed offer exceptional technological capabilities, their significance to the future of war resides not in their strategic or tactical possibilities but in their ability to reveal the contradictions in the idea of war embodied in its regulating law. This dissertation argues that the seemingly novel challenges weaponized drones present to IHL are, in fact, not new at all. Rather, it is through the introduction of drones that the kinds of violences occurring for centuries in the global periphery are made both visible and recognizable. The real trouble drones pose for IHL is that critical analyses of their regulation under IHL yields conclusions that directly challenge the persuasiveness of IHL’s ostensibly humanitarian motives. These conclusions reveal that IHL was developed and applied to facilitate the use of force by hegemonic and imperial state actors against foreign populations by means of increasingly sophisticated weapons technologies. In arguing this, the dissertation revisits not only IHL’s history, but also the narratives that have been (and continue to be) told about the regime’s origin, development, and application. It considers the particular actors, weapons, and violences IHL incorporated across the trajectory of its historical development, as well as the representation of war it depicts versus its realities. The argument is illustrated by way of a case study examining drone use by the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Emmanuel Macron and the Passive Revolution of French Neoliberalism: Discipline, Defection, and Dissent in Contemporary French Politics
    (2022-08-08) Biscahie, Thibault; Gill, Stephen R.
    Understanding the rise of Emmanuel Macron – and by extension, the expansion of French neoliberalism – necessarily entails a breakdown of traditional disciplinary boundaries. Political science alone cannot account for the seemingly contradictory patterns and dialectics of change and continuity inherent to the current French moment. Concepts and ontologies derived from history, economics, sociology, discourse analysis, international relations and political science must be mobilised and fused in this endeavour. In parallel, linguistic gaps – from French to English, and inversely – must also be bridged so as to combine the proximity offered by the source-language and the perspective afforded by the foreign language. An original contribution of this dissertation is thus to offer a single integrated approach – both in disciplinary and linguistic terms, drawing on various perspectives and upon both French and English language sources – to the election of Emmanuel Macron and its implications for French politics, economics, society, as well as social theory. This research first aims to situate Emmanuel Macron's election in the longue durée of neoliberalisation efforts in France in order to contextualise the long decay of the traditional Left and Right, as such deliquescence laid the ground for the recourse to rigid solutions of the 'Caesarist' type which Emmanuel Macron seems to incarnate. Against this background, Fernand Braudel's conception of the longue durée is mobilised to delineate the long-term cycles and to distinguish the socio-political trends that derive from conjunctural circumstances from other types of tendencies which are deeply inscribed in the structural dimensions of society and politics. This study seeks to contribute to the development of a neo-Gramscian perspective on French politics, highlighting the French state's organic crisis and the role of organic intellectuals and subaltern social groups in the formation of historic blocs. It thus problematizes the strategic project of Emmanuel Macron as a molecular and group-specific trasformismo from the 'extreme centre' that gave way to a form of 'authoritarian anti-populism'. Nevertheless, the legitimacy of this project from above and its associated mode of governance – analysed as a passive revolution with Caesarist elements – remains contested by opposition and resistance from 'subaltern' social groups in contemporary France.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The International Political Economy of Land Reform and Conflict in Colombia 1936-2018
    (2022-03-03) O'Connor, Dermot Thomas; Short, Nicola C.
    Why did land reforms attempted in 1936, 1961 and 1994 not lead to more equality, stability, and peace in Colombia? Using a theoretical framework informed by Gramscis theory of passive revolution, this study examines the origin of inequality and the propagation of conflict in Colombia by exploring the relationship between international political economy, production relations and class conflict surrounding three cases of land reform (1936, 1961 and 1994). I argue that land reforms have failed to address inequality and have exacerbated class conflicts for three interrelated reasons: 1) though campesinos demanded the redistribution of large estates, pro-capitalist land reforms left productive plantations intact and instead promoted access to lands in frontier areas where the state had little effective control over property rights; 2) demands for reforms emerged during 'commodity booms', when a bourgeois-peasant alliance in favour of capitalist expansion was possible, but during phases of subsequent crisis and price collapse, agrarian reforms were coopted by landlord-bourgeois alliances that pushed the consolidation of larger, more productive holdings; 3) the failure of reforms to address popular demands for land contributed to an atmosphere of instability in which reactionary elites used popular unrest as a pretext for repression against opponents of capitalism with the support of international financial and military power. The result has been the intensification of land conflicts and several waves of landlord-led dispossession, popular resistance, and counterinsurgency in the 1940s-50s, 1960s-1970s and 1980s-2000s. Political instability in Colombia is indicative of the dynamics of passive revolution as the case lends itself to a Gramscian analysis of uneven development in the 20th century Latin American context. Colombia's experience shows the limits of "passive revolutionary" land reforms which may unite diverse constituencies under certain conditions, but which leave the material and social foundations of conflict fundamentally unchanged, leaving campesinos vulnerable to shifts in global market conditions. This leads me to the conclusion that there will be no stable peace in Colombia without redistributive land reform. Redistribution has been the demand of the agrarian social movement since the 1930s but has been consistently denied in land reforms during broader processes of passive revolution that favour large-scale corporate farming, natural resource development and the debasement and exploitation of labour through dispossession in a context of unevenly expanding capitalism.
  • ItemOpen Access
    From Sanctuary to Abolition: migrant justice organizing in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Ottawa
    (2022-03-03) Gardner, Karl Sebastian; Tungohan, Ethel
    In this dissertation I examine the politics, policies, and practices of sanctuary in Canada. Specifically, I offer the first comprehensive account of how migrant justice activists have understood and approached the work of building sanctuary cities in Toronto, Vancouver, Montréal, and Ottawa. I show how migrant justice activists have been crucial actors in the development and implementation of sanctuary policies and practices in Canada, despite being largely ignored in scholarly literature on the topic. Beyond an analysis of the rich grassroots theories and strategic practices that activists have developed over two decades, I discern and theorize two fundamental approaches activists have taken to building sanctuary cities: demanding "sanctuary from above" and cultivating "sanctuary from below." Both approaches seek to increase access to services for precarious and non-status migrants, but differ in their theory of change and in practice. On the one hand, demanding sanctuary from above seeks to increase access to services by pressuring municipal governments and public service institutions to adopt sanctuary or "access without fear" policy reforms. On the other, building sanctuary from below prioritizes working directly with frontline service providers, advocates, and migrant communities to secure localized access to services, build networks of mutual aid, and cultivate a culture of solidarity with and among precarious and non-status migrantswith or without the presence of a formal sanctuary policy. I find that both approaches contain common potentials and limits that are traceable across the four cities included in this study. I argue that each approach can hold strategic and tactical value in different circumstances, but also note that the sanctuary from below approach appears to hold more potential to achieve the kinds of long-term social transformation that migrant justice activists are committed to achieving. I conclude by theorizing an abolitionist approach to sanctuary organizing. I combine elements of Black liberation, abolitionist, anti-colonial, and no borders scholarship to construct framework to both evaluate past sanctuary policies and practices, as well as offer a radical agenda for future sanctuary organizing.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Journeying Home: Poetics, Silence, and International Relations
    (2022-03-03) Akbari-Dibavar, Aytak; Bell, Shannon
    This dissertation examines silence as a form of language, rather than a lack or void in need of being captured or ratified. It explores untranslatability as an onto-epistemology in International Relations, rethinking how one can attend to that which refuses to be captured. This poetic ethnographic refusal, which does not fit into words, derives from my journey with my own and others familial silences and in this way, I seek to understand how individuals' political identity (or their engagement with the political) have been shaped through the historical intersectional experiences of trauma and political oppression. My work provides a decolonial reading of silence through the pairing of Islamic Sufism with Quantum Physics and Methodological Hauntology in order to understand the effects that silence has on the transmission of political trauma intergenerationally – working/weaving the silenced narratives of Chilean and Haitian refugees in Canada, while actively refusing all claims to expertise that may be connected with the geographic locations associated with my co-travellers. Writing through the limits of ontology and epistemology this dissertation shows that, what appears to be nothingness, inconsistencies that challenge assumptions, in fact has a non-identifiable somethingness. Yet, through these indeterminacies and tensions to translate, nothingness – or silence – 'speaks' and/or appears in the shape of its absence. Questions of ethics, justice, unknowing and uncertainty when encountering 'the Other' in silence offers opportunities to mediate on the relationship between self and the universe, between micro and macro and between particular and universal. I engage with these problematics through the Sufi philosophy of Wahdat al-Vojud – Oneness of Beings – and the notion of entanglement found in Quantum Physics. By diffractively reading these two philosophies, silence becomes a matter of ontological indeterminacy rather than a state of perpetual doubt or epistemological uncertainty. The questions that this labor opens up go beyond the methodological or empirical landscape that revolves around what becomes visible, when and how; rather, it pushes us to grapple with the manner in which that which has been silent or absent refuses to become translated as distinct.
  • ItemOpen Access
    What's in a Political Risk? Re-Assessing the Policies and Determinants of Foreign Investments
    (2022-03-03) Campisi, Julian Michael; Maas, Willem
    This dissertation traces the history, methodologies and assumptions surrounding the complex field of political risk analysis (PRA), including attempts at theory-building over the past few decades. It suggests that while the study of politically charged risks has grown to encompass of number of fields and avenues of research—with solid methodological foundations—there is room for further discussion of political risk analysis that takes into consideration the geopolitical realities of the 21st century, specifically in developed economies. For many years, risk analyses often overlooked the potential for political risks in stable developed democracies. Although recent events have guided the field to better contemplate the changing political-economic and social realities in Western democracies, commonly used approaches to the assessment of political risk have hitherto not adequately incorporated new analytical and theoretical tools to more fundamentally consider the fundamentals of political risk in the global North. Through a combination of primary and secondary research, and extensive fieldwork with experts, this project traces the different methodologies behind the study and practice of political risk, and proposes a theoretically informed institutional approach to its analysis. The perspective I put forth appreciates necessary differences in economy types and development levels, the interdependent nature of different types and layers of risk, and the importance of non-quantifiable, qualitative sources of risk. Using an in-depth case study of Italy, I explain how such an approach can work to assess the complex nature of political risk in advanced democracies, and how it can complement the burgeoning advances in the greater field of risk analysis.