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In this thesis I advance a critique of face-to-face charity fundraising (F2F), a very conspicuous and historically controversial mode of fundraising that was 're-invented' in the late 1990s, mobilising paid fundraisers to actively solicit direct debit payments in public spaces. In doing so, this thesis seeks to further refine and demonstrate the value of a dialectical materialist critique of ideology informed by the 'syntheses' of Marx, Lacan and Hegel developed inter alia by Slavoj Žižek. While F2F has notably escaped the attention of critical literatures on development and globalisation, the increasingly significant ideological milieu I locate it in – the growing importance of NGOs to the architecture of the global political economy and the concomitant attempts at global capitalism's 'humanisation' – has been subject to critique. Yet, such critique exhibits a set of distinct theoretical limitations which effect the explanatory and subversive power of their respective frameworks. Namely, they are bound by an unreflexive humanism and epistemological realism, an excessive functionalism/reproductionism, and an insufficient attention to capital, value and form. As such, this thesis stages a critical encounter with a set of phenomena which highlight the deficiencies of extant 'ideology critique' in critical studies on globalisation and development and develops an alternative framework for the 'critique of ideology' which can overcome such deficiencies. The central argument I advance concerns the validity of this approach on three levels; epistemology, explanation and politics, forming a sort of Borromean knot of theoretical engagement which implicate – but are nonetheless irreducible to – each other. Such an approach dialectically moves through three levels of ideological phenomena; ideology in-itself as its explicit symbolisation, ideology for-itself as its external materiality and ideology reflected-into-itself as the spontaneous fetishisation of its object. Operationalising this original approach – which reflects its dialectical and materialist commitments – and drawing on original fieldwork I argue that F2F, qua exemplary modality of capitalism's 'humanisation', functions as more than an instance of mere false consciousness, rational process of co-option or de-politicisation of neoliberalism. What this approach reveals is that F2F is deeply contradictory phenomena which functions through simultaneously concealing and revealing a central contradiction, itself deeply tied to the commodity-form. While it appears to operate in line with the 'humanitarian' project of shared humanity against neoliberalism, it functions through exploiting the immanent breaks in humanity in the pursuit of fundraising (or accumulation) for the sake of fundraising all the while fetishising itself as totally other to capitalism, a fetish of altruistic 'giving', which is nonetheless generated by the commodity-form and ties it ever closer to it. In response, I suggest an 'identification' with the figure of the 'chugger' – F2F's symptomatic point and receptacle of disavowed enjoyment – as a means to break with this formation, combining the Utopian impulse of charity as absolute love, and the 'mugger' as a violent figure of expropriation. In developing such an argument, I make both empirical and theoretical contributions. First, I contribute to critical literatures on 'commodified consumption' or 'marketised charity/philanthropy' by examining the novel empirical dynamic of F2F, integrating an almost absent discussion of the classic gift/commodity opposition. Second, I contribute to critical literatures on NGOs and their ideological role by theorising their ambivalence as such – as at once appearing to both challenge and support neoliberal development – through the representative case of F2F. Third, tying these together, I contribute to the critique of 'humanising' ideologies (and beyond) in critical development and globalisation studies, further refining recent psychoanalytically informed contributions by more closely incorporating themes from Marx's critique of political economy, engaging capitalism as such as opposed to simply 'neoliberalism'.

This thesis asks how Zimbabwean stand-up comedy intervenes politically. In a difficult political context with severe economic hardship, and a limited space for public debate, stand-up has flourished, growing from a handful of comedians in the early 2000s, to an industry with regular performances in 2019. Exploring original empirical material gathered during four months of fieldwork predominantly in Harare, but also Bulawayo, this thesis demonstrates that despite severe restrictions to freedom of expression in the country, and comedians being harassed, arrested and abducted, stand-up has become a space where social ordering can be interrupted. The argument made in this thesis is informed by a theoretical approach combining Homi K. Bhabha's emphasis on ambivalence, and conceptualisation of mimicry, with Judith Butler's understanding of performativity. This thesis looks particularly at three sites where the construction of Zimbabwean-ness is interrupted: the production of state autobiographies, the creation of an authentic national subject, and norms regulating how people should behave. Exploring these, it argues that the genre divulges the ambivalence of Zimbabwean-ness; highlights narrative contradictions; unsettles societal conceptions and addresses that which is commonly silenced. Embracing the ambiguous nature of comedy, it examines how stand-up enacts the ambivalence of state claims to homogeneity as it reiterates tribal narratives; displays anxieties pertaining to women's place in society; unsettles binary conceptions of patriotism; wrestles with gendered notions of artistry and the subordinate role of women in society, and interrupts gendered narrations of the public/private divide. As such, this thesis tells a story about Zimbabwean politics that has not been told in this depth and scope, or from this theoretical perspective before. Doing so this thesis makes three main contributions, first to research on Zimbabwean politics by looking at comedic resistance in Harare and Bulawayo, and showing how stand-up comedy contests, whilst also reinforcing norms, narratives and discourses through which Zimbabwean-ness is constructed. Secondly, it contributes to scholarship in critical global politics by developing a theoretical approach through which to understand comedic subversion as both reinforcing and disrupting dominant power relations, advancing research that asserts its resistive capabilities whilst also grappling with jokes that appear to be both prejudicial and unsettling. Finally, it contributes to critical global politics by advancing a fieldwork-based methodology for exploring comedic resistance in countries like Zimbabwe, extending beyond the often textual or narratively based studies on the topic, facilitating a better understanding of the comedian's position within social ordering, and their ability to interrupt it.

In an interview conducted in 1972 Deleuze describes his "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" project, written with Felix Guattari, as an effort to give psychoanalysis "some schizophrenic help." What if it is now time to return the favour? What if it is Deleuze|Guattari who are today in need of some psychoanalytic help? This thesis develops a re-reading of Deleuze|Guattari's figure of the minority as it appears in A Thousand Plateaus that is compatible with advances in psychoanalytic and Marxist theory and puts it to work in an analysis of the US anti-fracking movement. The thesis argues that there are in fact two theories of minorities to be found in A Thousand Plateaus. The first is anti-dialectical and vitalist, the second is dialectical and formalist. Though the vitalist account is more consistent with Deleuze|Guattari's philosophy and its reception in political theory and resistance studies it reduces politics to a substantialized ontology of becoming and to the level of life as such. In this way it cannot think the role that a historically bounded subject plays in the construction of a politics. The second theory of minorities leans heavily on mathematical set theory and comparisons with Lacanian psychoanalysis to present a formalist and historically specific theory of post-Fordist capitalism and its attendant forms of struggle and subjectivity. Here, Deleuze|Guattari present the minority in dialectical terms as the displaced form of appearance of class struggle under post-Fordist conditions and in so doing suggest an auto-critique of their more vitalist and anti-formalist proclivities. This second account, however, remains underdeveloped and is flawed in its use of set theoretical categories. Departing from Deleuze|Guattari's slips, mistakes, inconsistencies, and contradictions, this thesis reconstructs their second theory of minorities and gives it some psychoanalytic help. Working with, through, and alongside the US anti-fracking movement the thesis proposes that a formalist, Lacanian indebted, account of minorities is well-suited to theorizing the strengths and limitations of contemporary struggles against fracking and related infrastructure. In the process the thesis moves beyond Deleuze|Guattari to make broader contributions to political theory, political ecology, and post-colonial studies. In particular, it defends the role of universality in emancipatory struggle.

The concept of the common, found in Hardt and Negri, provides the possibility of theorising struggle that avoids the critiques that suggest Empire remains intangible, ethereal and postmodern. The concept, however, remains fragmentarily developed by the authors themselves, and is rarely the subject of sustained analysis in the secondary literature. Therefore, in order to substantiate the concept, I consider the common through three distinct moments which I identify as the urban, digital and political moments. This task is achieved through theoretical interlocutions and reflections on the 2011 Occupy movement. Throughout this thesis, and through each moment of the common, I argue that the concept must be understood as distinctly physical. Firstly, struggles over the urban common revolve around the physical (re)production of ideas, knowledge, culture and relationships in urban environments. Whilst the digital common often implies a lack of physicality, I argue that the common offers a means of thinking social media and perpetual connectivity primarily as a process of transforming the way humans engage with one another and their environments, and the radical possibilities therein. I argue that these moments of the common necessitate the development of an appropriate political moment of the common. Through centring on the physicality of struggle, Hardt and Negria's concept of the common is substantiated whilst contributing to wider debates in the field of radical theory and social movements.

This thesis asks how neoliberal enclavisation produces precarity. It focuses on eight months of fieldwork on large-scale dispossession of rural and peri-urban populations caused by the coal mining enclave in Tete, Mozambique, and my interpretation of Judith Butler's work on precarity, Henri Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the production of capitalist social space and Jacque Ranciere's understanding of politics. Bringing theory and empirical research together, I construct an original theoretical approach to explore how precarity as a condition of life, as well as the (im)possibility of politics, is constituted by contemporary capitalist expansion in Mozambique. I explore how precarity is produced through the interplay of structural, symbolic and direct violence of contemporary capitalist expansion, such as the coal mining enclave and resettlement sites inhabited by the dispossessed populations, in Tete. These processes of precarisation, I argue, result in the non-politics of abandonment that, whilst enabling life to be lived on precarious terms at the margins of the neoliberal mining enclave, does not openly challenge and only unwillingly reinforces the socio-material order of the neoliberal enclave. I demonstrate how this dynamic reconstitutes the precarity created by the violence of the neoliberal enclave and overshadows possibly different and progressively anti-neoliberal imaginaries of life and space in Tete. I conclude that these dynamics of precarity disactivate the possibility of transformative politics, and thus sustain and stabilise global capitalist expansion in Tete, and Mozambique more broadly. This reading of precarity makes several contributions to the literatures on the politics of precarity. It explores the condition of precarity outside the usual empirical and analytical focus of labour relations in the Global North, as well as developing a spatial reading of precarity. The thesis also challenges these, as well as broader literatures on agency in the context of structural inequalities and opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa, for overestimating possibilities of resistance in situations characterised by extreme precarity. Finally, the thesis contributes to the literature on contemporary neoliberal capitalist expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa by demonstrating how neoliberal enclaves result in human suffering outside of their own exclusionary spaces of accumulation.

This thesis seeks to investigate what shapes climate change policies in Kenya. Using Peter Haas' concept of usable knowledge, it argues the need to move beyond conventional perspectives on knowledge and power and provides a framework for understanding what knowledge and mechanisms are usable for policy makers. I argue that Kenyan climate policy is shaped by the interaction of knowledge and power across three crucial levels of influence - global, regional and national. As climate change forces us to rethink how we combine economic policies with environmental realities in Africa, each level encompasses distinct policy narratives where critical actors have an impact on national climate change policy. First, I argue that the standards, norms and regulations established by the global climate regime are directly reflected in national climate strategies of African countries, not only in terms of diplomatic moves to adhere to commitments made, but also in respect to benefiting from international mechanisms put in place to aid developing countries. Second, I examine the One Voice, One Africa narrative. This looks at the rise of the African Group of Negotiators within the global climate regime and their ability to influence Kenyan policy. Third, Kenya's climate change policy is shaped by the interaction of economic, political, and environmental constructs in national policy-making. The principle goal of this thesis is to open African environmental scholars and climate change policy analysts to a rigorous and flexible questioning of how climate policy processes operate in the African context.

The aim of this thesis is to understand the political struggles that underpin international investment law. Social movements of various kinds have expressed alarm over an 'epidemic' of international legal challenges by transnational corporations against state measures designed to protect the environment, public health, or human rights. These state measures have often been introduced directly in response to hard-fought civil society campaigns (ranging from antimining protests in El Salvador to climate change campaigns in Germany), yet academic analysis of what is formally known as 'Investor-State Dispute Settlement' proceeds on the premise that these are simply disputes between 'investors' and 'states', as indeed the term implies. In turn, where the academic focus shifts towards wider questions of why this field of law emerged, and what role it plays in global politics today, even the investors disappear from view, and only states remain. The theoretical argument of this thesis is that the state is not an agent in political struggles, but a social structure that is both the 'congealment' of historic social struggles and a 'strategically selective' arena within which social struggles are fought today. This theoretical argument challenges the state-centric premises of the academic literature, and enables a different empirical explanation of the politics of international investment law, and of the 46 investment disputes arising out of environmental protection measures that have been selected for closer analysis. Drawing upon the work of scholars such as William Robinson, Stephen Gill, and David Schneiderman, the empirical argument of this thesis is that international investment law arose at the initiative of a transnational capitalist class, and it is designed to constrain the political agency of opposing social groups by 'locking in' policies that favour corporations. At stake in the struggle over international investment law is ultimately the very possibility for a different future.

This thesis focuses on the lived experience of social scientific practice and processes of subject formation in the academic discipline of International Relations. It draws inspiration from Michel Foucault’s philosophy and critical ethos of self-transformation with special emphasis on his early writings on aesthetics, knowledge and discourse as well as his late Collège de France lectures on ethics. The genre and project of the ‘experience book’ takes Foucault’s self-transformative ethos seriously by translating it into action, into actual practice. As such, it provides a first person narrative of some of the ways in which ‘we’, professionals of the field, become sub-jects of particular experiences in the ‘disciplinary life’ of IR as academic knowers, thinkers, readers and writers. Through a series of accounts of the self, that is, through my own attempts at narrative reconstruction of the constitution of my scholarly sub-jectivity in the subfields of ‘sovereignty’ discourses and what we may call ‘Foucaul-tian IR’, the thesis develops a subjective, insider’s view of the experience of being in discourse and some of its subjectivating effects. As a political project the very pro-cess of the writing of this thesis is an effort to negotiate these discursive forces: the thesis sets out to cultivate alternative subjectivities and modes of being in discourse for the self and others. Through the exploration of the desubjectifying potentials of narrative writing the experience books seeks to open up possibilities to remake scien-tific experience by problematizing some of those unreflected everyday academic practices that reinforce and perpetuate disciplinary identities. Ultimately, it seeks to work towards the transformation of academic practice (and academic experience) in-to a site of resistance to contemporary forms of government.