This thesis is a critique of the prominent strand of contemporary liberal political theory which maintains that liberal political authority must, in some sense, rest on the free consent of those subjected to it, and that such a consensus is achieved if a polity’s basic structure…
This thesis draws on an ethnographic research in Ghana to question mainstream views on decentralisation that local level institutions can be consciously crafted to enlist the participation of marginal actors in governance thereby leading to efficiency and equity in development. …
This thesis seeks to place drama of the Caroline commercial theatre in its contemporary political and legal context; particularly, it addresses the ways in which the struggle for supremacy between the royal prerogative, common law and local custom is constructed and negotiated i…
Authority is a social relation between two parties. In sociology, authority is the legitimate power that one person or a group holds and exercises over another(Giddens, 1997). Sociologist Max Weber significantly divided authority into three types: traditional type, charismatic t…
The cultural aspects of guilt/innocence, shame/honor, and fear/power have received much attention since the twentieth century. While theologians in Western contexts have considered the guilt/innocence aspect and missiologists have researched the shame/honor aspect in missiologic…
Most scholars recognize that Jesus was believed to be divine very early and in a Jewish context. But how much continuity is demonstrable between this early belief and Jesus’ own claims? In this dissertation, I investigate the kind of authority Jesus claimed to possess by examini…
The large church, with an average attendance of 500 to 1,000 attendees, plays an important role in the American church landscape. It is also unique in structure because of its place in between the very large group of midsized churches and the much smaller group of megachurches. …
Black men in America have a long-standing, strained relationship with authority in this country. History has shown time and again that racism has allowed authority figures to abuse their power and for some this subjugation causes Black men to be resistant to authority all togeth…
Pharaoh's command in Gen 41:55—“Go to Joseph; what he says to you, do”—aptly summarizes the breadth of authority Joseph attains in Egypt and the means by which he exercises it: direct speech. By interpreting Egyptian dreams, Joseph establishes himself as a “wise and discerning” …
The dissertation investigates the relationship between a polity ruled by the sharifs of Mecca, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and the expansionist Mamluk Sultanate, which ruled Egypt and Syria from 1260-1517. The dissertation argues that, during the first half of the fifte…
This study focuses on the ways in which small states in the frontier regions of eastern Sumatra developed their authority as both Malay states and localized reflections of their own social and ecological environment in the period prior to colonial rule. During the eighteenth cen…
In the formative first century of Islam, the key issue of authority within the community was only just taking shape. In retrospect, the general outline seems plain enough as the Umayyads strove for preeminence in that ground-swell of tribes welling out of the peninsula. However,…
Late-eighteenth-century Britain witnessed a wave of texts seeking to standardize written and spoken forms of English. This fact has recently provoked scholars to reappraise language pedagogy's role in enabling certain aesthetic developments typically associated with Romanticism.…
Amidst post-Soviet Central Asia's economic stagnation and political instabilities of the 1990s, Uzbek men in the city of Osh, Kyrgyzstan, interpreted a wide range of current events and trends through the frame of a political imagination about what an ideal postsocialist state lo…
The dissertation examines the creation and expression of authority during the extension of Habsburg administration over the recovered territories of Hungary and Transylvania at the turn of the eighteenth century and relates these processes to the development of absolutism and th…
Zoroaster, the prophet of pre-Islamic Persia, was already a legendary figure, highly reputed for his wisdom and antiquity, when his name first appeared in Europe in Greek authors of the fourth century B.C. From this date, well into the late nineteenth century A.D., Zoroaster's n…
As globally generated trends of education decentralization and alternative modes of education provision ripple out from national centers, this research examines what is intended by “decentralized” education in one country, how it is perceived by decentralization actors, and why …
In this essay, I provide a synoptic look at the literary practices of eight different Greco-Roman groups active under the Late Republic and the Empire up to roughly the third century. The dissertation comprises five chapters, each of which centers on the literary habits of a gro…