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Despite increasing recognition of the role of education in peace and conflict, critical peacebuilding literature and post-war education literature rarely converge. However, as international peacebuilding projects increasingly address the reconstruction and reform of post-war education systems, international education interventions merit examination from a critical peacebuilding perspective, moving beyond problem-solving and technical approaches to investigate the politics of education initiatives and explore alternatives. Therefore, this thesis assesses international interventions in the reconstruction and reform of Kosovo's post-war primary and secondary education systems from a critical peacebuilding perspective. Despite the direct role of education in Kosovo's conflict, leading international actors approached educational reconstruction and reform as a secondary issue in the liberal peacebuilding framework, operating under the assumption that international development norms and EU standards for education promote security, democracy, a market economy, and human rights. However, by limiting the peacebuilding potential of education to the parameters of the liberal peacebuilding framework, international education interventions prioritized stability, governance institutions, and development standards and encountered local resistance and cooption that transformed intended outcomes, enabling the education sector to maintain the underlying structural and affective dimensions of the conflict and promote a negative hybrid peace. Through comparatively examining alternative approaches to educational reform beyond the liberal peacebuilding framework, the thesis explores possible opportunities and challenges for education interventions to support a more transformative and emancipatory peace in Kosovo, demonstrating the potential of localizing education agendas and practices through a local-liberal hybrid peacebuilding approach.

This dissertation offers a framework for understanding the strategies of states engaged in competition for regional hegemony. Although international relations literature refers extensively to such competition and obliquely to states' strategies, to date little has been done to show how states' strategies in such competition may be analyzed. Drawing on a variety of strategic literature, this dissertation synthesizes a theoretical approach to analyzing the strategies of states engaged in regional security competition. Employing insights drawn from business strategy, this dissertation argues for an essentially asymmetric understanding of fundamental policy goals for states engaged in competition for regional hegemony, with one state attempting to maintain a dominant position and another attempting, by focusing limited resources, to supplant it. The competition is understood metaphorically (based on an anecdote from the end of the Cold War) as a “race with no finish line,” with the reigning hegemon attempting to extend the race and the challenger attempting to create a finish line and cross it. With homage to realism, liberalism, and constructivism, possible state goals are categorized as belonging to three realms: security, welfare, and intangible goals. These are used as metrics for a state's success or failure in any given competitive scenario, as well as the resources at its disposal. Drawing on military strategic literature, this thesis then applies decision-cycle analysis to state competitive behavior. The conclusions from this analysis are then synthesized into a framework for analysis of similar regional competitive scenarios, the first such framework yet devised for such purposes. A case study: the “Dreadnought Race” between Britain and Germany prior to World War One, is then examined, in which states' performance is analyzed in the competitive scenario in light of the above strategic precepts.

Rowland Kenney was a British propaganda agent operating in Norway during both the First World War and the Second World War. He has been forgotten by history but the re-discovery of his private collection of materials allows for an analysis of his work. Kenney was deeply involved in the development of propaganda policy and practice. In the First World War, his work in Norway resulted in thousands of pro-British articles appearing in the Norwegian press as well as the realignment of the Norwegian national news agency. In the interwar years, in spite of severe medical difficulties, Kenney continued to work within the field of propaganda, becoming instrumental in the establishment of the British Council. At the start of the Second World War, he returned again to Norway, but was forced to flee during the German invasion of April 1940. During the Second World War, Kenney became the Director of the Northern Section of the Foreign Division in the Ministry of Information where he continued to affect policy-creation and the development of propaganda. There is no doubt that Kenney was a key figure in this development. His professional network and his varied roles within the propaganda bureaucracy speak to his level of involvement, and his documented accomplishments even more so. Finally discovering Kenney's story and his impact illustrates vividly a few aspects of how the practice of propaganda mutated and changed between 1916 and 1942.

This study explores the foundations of US counterinsurgency policy and doctrine in order to better understand the main historical influences on that policy and doctrine and how those influences have informed the current US approach to counterinsurgency. The results of this study indicate the US experience in counterinsurgency during the Greek Civil War and the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines had a significant influence on the development of US counterinsurgency policy and doctrine following World War II through the Kennedy presidency. In addition, despite a major diversion from the lessons of Greece and the Philippines during the Vietnam War, the lessons were re-institutionalized in US counterinsurgency policy and doctrine following the war and continue to have significant influence today, though in a highly sanitized and, therefore, misleading form. As a result, a major disconnect has developed between the “rhetoric and reality” of US counterinsurgency policy. This disconnect has resulted from the fact that many references that provide a more complete and accurate picture of the actual policies and actions taken to successfully defeat the insurgencies have remained out of the reach of non-government researchers and the general public. Accordingly, many subsequent studies of counterinsurgency overlook, or only provide a cursory treatment of, aspects that may have had a critical impact on the success of past US counterinsurgency operations. One such aspect is the role of US direct intervention in the internal affairs of a supported country. Another is the role of covert action operations in support of counterinsurgency operations. As a result, the counterinsurgency policies and doctrines that have been developed over the years are largely based on false assumptions, a flawed understanding of the facts, and a misunderstanding of the contexts concerning the cases because of misleading, or at least seriously incomplete, portrayals of the counterinsurgency operations.

This dissertation seeks to make a unique contribution to the study of geopolitics and empire in Central Asia by focusing on both the indigenous developments of grand strategies and their legacies by examining several key points in the history of the region's geopolitics in order to determine the peculiar and specific nature of regional geopolitical evolution, and how its basic concepts can be understood using such a locally based framework. By putting the focus on several key concepts which hold steady through major societal and technological upheavals, as well as foreign incursion and both the inward and outward migrations, which together create the conditions which I have dubbed ‘The Formless Empire', it is possible to see the elements of a regional and homegrown tradition of grand strategy and geopolitical thinking which is endemic to the area of Inner Eurasia, even as this concept adapts from a totality of political policy to merely frontier and military policy over the course of time. This indigenous concept of grand strategy encompasses political, military, and diplomatic aspects utilizing the key concepts of strategic mobility, and flexible or indirect governance. These political power systems originated in their largest incarnations amongst the nomadic people of the steppe and other people commonly considered peripheral in history, but who in a Central Asian context were the original centerpieces of regional politics until technological changes led to their eclipse by the big sedentary powers such as Russia and China. However, even these well-established states took elements of ‘The Formless Empire' into their policies (if largely relegated to frontiers, the military, and a few informal relationships alone) and therefore the influence of the region's past still lingers on in different forms in the present.

This thesis is a study of the impact of militarisation, conflict and Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) proliferation on women and children amongst the pastoralist communities of North East Africa. It explores the way pastoralists communities' lives have changed over the decades with the introduction of SALW to make cattle rustling a lethal pastime that involves all members of society but with implications for the vulnerable population caught between warring groups. The study delves into the variety of options facing them, such as the fact that the dangers posed by introduction of SALW in turn militarises the vulnerable population caught between being helpless bystanders or taking up arms to defend their herds or else perish from hunger when the remaining stock are stolen at gunpoint. After an introductory chapter examining thematic issues involved in the complex web knitted by militarisation, conflict, SALW proliferation, cattle rustling and pastoralist communities, the thesis examines circumstances surrounding the need to wage war on neighbours in cattle raids pitting pastoralist communities' against governments interested in the pursuit of politics that disfavour their interests. The following chapters examine various aspects of this complex militarisation/SALW proliferation/cattle rustling web placing it in the context of the subsequent implications for both the pastoralist communities' vulnerable population and the security of the entire region. It delves into ways the vulnerable population is impacted upon with a view to show that the side effects have far-reaching implications for the pastoralists and citizens of the states they belong to. We analyse existing efforts to combat proliferation and instruments aimed at protecting the vulnerable population in armed conflict with a view to ascertain their strengths and challenges. We finally examine possible ways out of the quagmire resulting from the marriage between SALW proliferation and cattle rustling and conclude by offering policy recommendations.