School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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    Crime or governance?: challenging the modern discourse on the (il)legitimacy of organised crime
    Aberdeen, Tammy Lee ( 2011)
    Authors in the state failure school of thought in the literature on organised crime routinely fail to acknowledge the potential legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance in weak states. This is in spite of providing evidence that organised crime often performs functions similar to that of the state. The unwillingness of authors in the state failure school of thought to acknowledge the potential legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance results from their use of a state-centric modernist discourse to frame the issue. This discourse routinely privileges the state’s claim to the monopoly on the use of violence and concomitant right of extraction at the expense of other social groups, including organised crime, even in weak states. This thesis challenges the dominant discourse in the state failure school by arguing that organised crime can be a legitimate form of governance in weak states when it exists in some way as a functional equivalent of the state. To test this claim, the thesis uses a historical-sociological approach to state formation and legitimacy to compare the supply of protection by the medieval state with that by contemporary criminal protection rackets in post-Communist Russia and Bulgaria in the 1990s. The results of a focused comparison between Russian and Bulgarian criminal protection rackets indicate that the legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance in contemporary weak states is contingent on its ability to provide protection to certain social groups in the absence of effective state forms of governance.
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    Arguing about the climate: towards communicative justice in international climate change politics
    Brookes, Andrew ( 2009)
    This thesis examines international climate change politics from the perspective of communicative justice, and in turn uses the lessons learnt from climate change politics to interrogate and refine the theory of communicative justice. Communicative justice is developed as an ethical ideal for discourse with the normative aspiration of expanding the boundaries of political community, recognising marginalised identities, and facilitating cultural translation. It is argued that while the international climate change regime is formally inclusive and has a number of features conducive to unconstrained dialogue, a communicative justice framework allows the substantive deficiencies of the negotiating process to be revealed. In particular, the failure of the regime to agree on voting rules has meant it has been forced to fall back on consensus as the means for making decisions, which often inhibits unconstrained dialogue and efficacious outcomes. The thesis also explores the contribution of a diffuse range of climate change policy networks and public spheres – including the media – towards translating and transforming understandings of climate change. The analysis of climate change politics forces us to reflexively confront the ethical tensions inherent in the notion of communicative justice in response to the contingencies and distortion of everyday political practice. This process requires are calibration of the way in which theories of communicative justice conceive of means and ends, so that communicative justice provides a holistic and flexible normative framework that can be marshalled in pursuit of the broader goals of enhancement of autonomy and human welfare, rather than in terms of the legitimation of specific political decisions.