School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemSexing up the international( 2006-10)This thesis takes sexuality as its subject matter and uses a methodology informed by postcolonial studies to explore new possibilities for thinking about the international, its construction, and its contemporary politics. I argue that postcolonial readings of sexuality can impel us to rethink the meanings and politics of international theory and to challenge notions that have come to appear fixed and unchanging. The thesis canvasses how such an intervention might occur – calling especially for a focus on the local and the everyday – and considers both the utility and the limits of the contributions sexuality might make to a rethinking of international theory. My arguments are made with reference to a series of specific examples from contemporary East and Southeast Asia: the nationalistically imbued gendered and sexed figures of the national serviceman and the Singapore Girl in Singapore; the political and social repercussions of the trial of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on charges of sodomy; newly emerging homosexual identities in Hong Kong; and the connections between sexuality and disease that inform the Thai response to HIV/AIDS.
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ItemGovernance and uncertainty: the public policy of Australia's official development assistance to Papua New Guinea( 2002)Against the backdrop of the historical failure of official development assistance to alleviate poverty in the Third World, this thesis examines the current approach of Western aid donors toward development. The thesis asks whether aid policy processes indicate a willingness, or capacity, on the part of official donors to more fully engage with the causal complexity of development, and so potentially improve development outcomes. Considering the case study of the Australian bilateral aid program to Papua New Guinea from both top-down and bottom-up policy perspectives, the thesis concludes that, in relation to Australia, there are significant structural and institutional impediments to change. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and its interpretation of national interest, dominate high-level aid policy-making, even though the objectives of foreign policy and those of foreign aid differ. Australia's official development agency, AusAID, is limited in its capacity to legitimately challenge this dominance, not least because its use of contracted-out projects restrict its corporate knowledge and its ability to influence policy agendas and networks. Overcoming this impasse requires creative management on the part of senior public servants and non-governmental members of the aid policy community alike.
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ItemMaking a meal of it: the World Food Programme and legitimacy in global politics( 2008)The world faces many complex and difficult problems at the global level – problems that are increasingly recognised as requiring political as much as technical solutions. While such issues are often taken to concern, in broad terms, global governance, more specifically, the political aspects of such governance are fundamentally linked to interactions between the United Nations system and the power exercised by the United States of America (US). One important and distinctive arena within which these interactions can be viewed is the international food aid regime, and its central organisation, the World Food Programme (WFP) - an area lacking in concerted political science study in recent years. This thesis is concerned with the role of the US in shaping the legitimacy of the WFP within the institutional context of the international food aid regime. Legitimacy is defined as deriving from the three elements of inclusion, accountability and effectiveness. The WFP and international regime are, it is argued, well respected, relatively effective, and enjoy high levels of legitimacy. At a micro level there are many specific historical and localised factors resulting in this legitimacy; at the macro level many of these factors can be linked to the interaction of norms and interests between the US and the regime. In particular, the regime’s development and success has been closely related to both a congruence between the US domestic feed-the-hungry norm and the regime’s international feed-the-hungry norm, and a process of divergence between those norms. It is this normative interplay that has enabled US power to be deployed and constrained in a manner resulting in high levels of legitimacy for the WFP. While in many respects this has limited WFP’s capacity to do more with the problem of global hunger than merely ameliorate it, the nature of the problem is much bigger than the capacities of any single operational agency of the United Nations.