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This thesis explores the international politics of Pakistan’s conditional sovereignty through a comparative analysis of Pakistan-US relations during the Cold War (1979-88) and the War on Terror (2001-08). The thesis seeks to understand whether the end of the Cold War restructured, reshaped and reconfigured US attitudes towards Pakistan when caught up in a new geo-political conflict, namely the War on Terror. The thesis is constructed around three main arguments focusing on Pakistan’s sovereignty, US foreign assistance to Pakistan and Pakistan’s state failure. Firstly, the thesis demonstrates that US conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty fluctuate according to whether or not the US is strategically interested in Pakistan. In both cases, different sets of conditions are applied to Pakistan’s sovereignty. The thesis also details Pakistan’s response to these conditions on its sovereignty. Secondly, the thesis argues that given the importance of the normative value of state failure in the post-9/11 US policy and its absence in the War on Terror as a condition on Pakistan’s sovereignty, it is expected that Pakistan’s state failure status will come to dominate the conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty when the US is not strategically interested. Thirdly, the conditions on Pakistan’s sovereignty are a means to secure Pakistan’s compliance to US demands, by either withholding foreign assistance or disbursing it. In that case then, given the centrality of human rights and state failure in post-9/11 international relations, the thesis demonstrates that US statebuilding efforts remain pivoted on US political interests rather than human rights and development. The qualitative research includes elite interviews, unclassified documents and builds on existing literature, while the quantitative portion involves statistical data.

During earthquakes, emergence of a fault rupture has always been a major threat to the safety of critical structures, as it is very difficult to predict the exact location and magnitude of the fault rupture. Until recently , work concentrated largely on the effect of faulting on lifeine systems (e.g. pipelines) and highways. Recent advancements in the field of fault rupture-infrastructure interaction revealed subtle interactions with surface infrastructure, esepcially for shallow foundations, and suggested that appropriate foundation design could protect buildings from significant damage. The focus of this research is to imrpove understanding of the effects of earthquake fault propagation through soil and its interaction with shallow foundations. Physical modelling was carried out using the geotechnical centrifuge at the Universtiy of Dundee, where models of soil-foundation systems were subjected to reverse faulting. Fountainbleau sand was used in all the tests for its well-classified properties and a reverse fault with dip angle, a = 60º propagated upward through the soil interacting with the overlying foundation. A series of free-field reverse fault tests were carried out, investigating the effects of soil depth on rupture propagation and the 'modelling of models' (grain size effects) during reverse faulting. The development of fault localisation through soil is observed to be progressive, gradually decreasing its dip angle while approaching the soil surface. Further tests were performed investigating the effects of foundation position on the interaction of a reverse fault with shallow strip foundation. The response of the foundation was found to be very sensitive to the exact position of the fault. For a fault throw of 4m, rotation varied between 1.1º and 15.1º in the strip foundation tests, which were otherwise identical except for their position. Further tests were performed investigating interactin of reverse fault ruptures and a single or row of rectangular shallow foundations. Isolated (widely spaced) foundations were found to be more vulnerable to damage than a closely spaced row of foundations. Single square footing tests show an increase in roation as the orientation changed from being parallel to 16º and 30º to the line of strike of the fault rupture emergence. Reverse fault rupture propagation through soil and its interaction with rigid shallow foundations were successfully modelled in the centrifuge. The findings of the research have imrpoved the understanding of soil-structure interaction in near-fault zones and provided hope that structures with shallow foundations can be designed to withstand significant structural damage.

Years of growth in wireless communication services and conservative spectrum allocation policies by government regulators have led to spectrum scarcity. On the other hand, spectrum measurement campaigns have indicated that the actual occupancy of most licensed frequency bands is quite low. In recent years, Cognitive radio has emerged as a promising solution to increase spectrum occupancy and tackle spectrum scarcity. Cognitive radio enables the unlicensed (secondary) user to establish a communication link in licensed spectrum on the condition that there is no or minimal interference to the licensee (primary user). In this thesis, the two main facets of spectrum sharing in cognitive radio networks are investigated; interweave access and underlay access. The former is an orthogonal scheme, where the secondary user only transmits in white space (idle primary user spectrum). The latter is a shared scheme in which concurrent primary and secondary transmission is allowed, subject to any co-channel interference at the primary being below an acceptable limit.