Thesiss

The contemporary phenomenon of the global rush for farmland has generated intense debate from different actors. While the proponents embrace it as a 'development opportunity', the critics dub it 'land grabbing'. Others use a neutral term: 'large-scale land acquisitions'. Whateve…

This thesis aims at furthering our understanding of the constitutional structures and processes of sui generic associations such as the European Union. The thesis argues that the problematical constitutionalisation of the European Union has highlighted the limitations of the pol…

This thesis provides a contextualised exegesis and re-evaluation of the anarchist Pierre- Joseph Proudhon's writings on war and peace. The thesis has two claims to originality. The first lies in shedding new light on Proudhon's voluminous writings on international politics. Thes…

In 1994 Ethiopia introduced a federal system of government as a national level approach to intra-state conflict management. Homogenisation of cultures and languages by the earlier regimes led to the emergence of ethno-national movements and civil wars that culminated in the coll…

The EPRDF ruling party in Ethiopia has come under much scrutiny for its governance through "ethnic federalism" following its coming to power in 1991. Much of the relevant political literature has critiqued Ethiopian federalism as a face-saving measure arguing that the Ethiopian …

In the last decade, a massive growth of international trade and cross-border commercial and civil transactions occur among individuals and entities of different jurisdictions and legal backgrounds, this international trend results in corresponding conflicts. This fact makes it c…

The dissertation analyzes the economic dimension of "ethnic federalism" in Ethiopia and evaluates the federal program in terms of its implication for equitable economic development. Inequality within ethnic groups, no matter where they live, is more important than inequality bet…

Since 2003 Iraq has struggled dealing with a new type of federal constitutionalism and engaged in three separate elections. It is expected that this federalism will encompass all the ethnic and religious groups and create more peace and stability between these groups. One of my …

What explains the variation in ethnic conflict in federal systems? Existing theory and empirical evidence are mixed, with some saying it decreases violence, and some saying increases it. This puzzle also leads to a number of research questions: why does federalism fail to resolv…

The United States of America has long been engaged in an increasingly bitter struggle to determine what is and what is not characteristic of American culture. Every citizen of the United States, Canada, and Mexico or for that matter, Iran, Tajikistan or the Republic of China has…

Through case studies of India and Nigeria, the dissertation examines the capacity of federal governance to promote national unity in heavily divided societies of the Third World. It revisits the familiar hypothesis that federalism, by means of power sharing, consensus building, …

This dissertation provides the first critical account of modernism as a constitutional culture. I explore how key Anglophone modernists responded to the emergence of federal governance as a national norm and international ideal, with particular focus on the movement for British …

This dissertation charts an intellectual genealogy of internationalist visions of the reorganization of the imperial Russian space that were frustrated and foreclosed by the emergence of the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1922, surviving and continuing to develop in exile communi…

This thesis examines the eulogies delivered after the death of George Washington in 1799, identifying themes in the texts and motivations of the authors. The death of the first president occurred during a series of national and international events that challenged the procedures…

Many developing countries with heterogeneous tribal, ethnic, and/or linguistic populations face a unique form of violence motivated by a desire to secede from the central state and form a new state, known as separatism. Motivated by a strong cultural identity and a sense of oppr…

The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the establishment of a Palestinian National Authority raised many Palestinians’ hopes that their decades of struggle and hardship would culminate in an independent state, peace and prosperity, as well as an implementation of their righ…