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Small-scale farming communities in Scotland engaged in a combination of food sovereignty, agroecology, or land sovereignty have not only made themselves more resilient to the crises of capitalism but have done so by reducing their dependency upon it. What is more, during the recent crises caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit they were not only more able to sustain themselves when long food supply chains collapsed but were also able to increase their autonomy and sustainability through an increased demand for local food networks. Also, in certain areas, these strategies have transformed social relations and, at times, revealed alternative economic practices. The research for this thesis was conducted over a 15 month period and primarily consisted of seasonal interviews with 14 small-scale food producers in Scotland. It has examined the transformative qualities of these communities through an adaptation of Erik Olin Wright's theory of transformation (Wright 2010) by drawing on David Harvey and John Holloway's analyses of capitalism and of strategies for social transformation. Through this framework the research has examined the unintended trajectories of change that emerge from the crisis of capitalism, the gaps and contradictions these crises have revealed, the relationships these strategies have with these crises as they reveal alternative economic practices, and the sustainability of these practices in the face of capitalism's ability to reproduce itself. The research found that the transformative qualities of small-scale farming communities in Scotland are the ways in which these communities resist and, at times, reverse the reproduction of capitalism through their demand for autonomy and self-subsistence, particularly during crises. Ultimately, these are moments of withdrawal from, and non-participation in, capitalist social relations that are made possible, in the first instance, by access to land. In their entirety they should be thought of as being transformative towards an alternative rather than as an alternative themselves, but they do offer a glimpse of how an alternative might be achieved.

This thesis is the first ethnographic attempt to study contemporary dissident activism in Vietnam. As a country that became known and keeps being remembered as a war-torn postcolony by the West, Vietnam has managed to lift itself from one of the poorest to one of the fastest growing market economies in Southeast Asia. Yet, while holding on to the legacy of a communist-led liberation movement, the present-day Communist-Party (CPV) itself became subject to political challenges from below. In fact, dissident voices critical of the government's malgovernance over social, economic and environmental issues have mushroomed across regions, classes and generations. Based on 52 interviews with activists and numerous informal conversations with citizens conducted over a period of 11 months across Vietnam, this thesis interrogates distinct political practices and political ideas of Vietnamese dissidents. In doing so, it explores different anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian practices including online activism for democratic change (Chapter 7), rights-based resistance of workers and peasants (Chapter 8) and religious politics against environmental and social injustices (Chapter 9). What these practices have in common is the disclosure of politically subjugated knowledges (see Foucault 1976). On the way to exploring these subjugated knowledges, this research has revealed how anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian practices of Vietnamese activists are motivated by a set of contradictory political ideas and concepts including nationalism, anti-communism, statism, legal ideology, liberal democracy and Catholicism displaying the continuous hegemony of Westerncentric epistemologies in non-Western societies. Understanding this dissonance between political practices and political ideas lies at the heart of this study. By drawing on a decolonial-Marxist theoretical framework, I situate this dissonance between practices and ideas within the system of capitalist totality, ideological state apparatuses and epistemological coloniality. This thesis suggests a distinction between resistance in itself and resistance for itself. I conceptualise that resistance in itself is concerned with political practices that are mostly reactive to immediate moments of state repression (state-society relations), while resistance for itself centres on actively trespassing on the spatiality of ideological systems and ideological state apparatuses via capitalism, coloniality, nationalism and state institutions such as the judiciary (capital-epistemology relations). Thus, the trespassing on ideological systems and apparatuses hinges on a process I call cognitive resistance by which activists re-contest political concepts from dominant ideologies and re-insert them into new ideational structures. In other words, cognitive resistance gives new meaning to political concepts. Overall, this thesis argues against the idealization of resistance in Southern social movements but, instead, calls for a better understanding of the embeddedness of social movements within local and global structures shaped by capitalism, state authoritarianism and epistemological coloniality alike.

Recent studies of social movements in Hong Kong have shown increasing interest in emotions. However, they have yet to move beyond a movement-centric or an organization-based analysis, a problem persistent in the extant literature of Hong Kong political studies where a temporal lens to trace the evolvement of social movements over time and a spatial sensitivity to put local grievances and struggles in political spaces at different scalar levels are lacking. This thesis investigates the processual factors shaping socio-political conflicts in Hong Kong by examining the construction of emotions in time and space. It studies four major campaigns taking place between 2003 and 2014 with an original data set comprising textual data and interview data. A novel theoretical framework - the strategic temporal-spatial approach - is developed to assemble three core elements of mobilization: the social construction of emotions, the geography of political actions at multiple scales, and the interplay of social processes at different timescales. As the analysis unfolds, emotions have been constructed and moulded by the intersections, and sometimes conflicts, among socio-economic, political, cultural, and biographical processes in which multiple political players are involved. Located in political spaces at the local, national, regional, and global levels, these players react and respond to one another, both strategically and emotionally. Thus, the emotions of local players in Hong Kong are often manoeuvred by the Beijing national government who has endeavoured to curb popular mobilizations, influenced by the political economy in the Greater China region and East Asia, and shaped by global events such as the Colour Revolution and the Arab Spring. Emotions fashioned in these processes have played both a direct facilitative role in spurring the rise of political conflicts and an assisting role in discursive claim-makings and spatial actions. From 2003 to 2012, an expanded scope of emotions in expressing grievances towards the state was forged to boost activism. Since 2012, the emotional space has shrunk due to a predomination of anger and frustration. While some of these findings are specific to contemporary Hong Kong, a number of lessons are useful to the study of social movements more generally. The first is that we need an interactive and dynamic view to understand emotions in political contention. The second is that this interactive perspective has to appreciate multiple temporal processes and spaces at different scales so that the time and space of political actions at both macro- and micro-levels could be better delineated.

This thesis has three aims: i) to provide a characterisation of Corbynism; ii) to understand how Corbynism is shaped by the context in which it appeared; and iii) to consider the relationship between Corbynism and democracy. The thesis argues that Corbynism was a political movement, comparable to the sense in which Stuart Hall famously diagnosed Thatcherism. Following Hall, the thesis examines Corbynism's ideological repertoire and its political-economic objectives. But departing from Hall, the thesis emphasises the differences between the intentions of Corbynism and Corbynism in practice. For instance, the thesis' qualitative methods show that Corbynism was neither a social movement nor was socialist, at least in terms of its short to medium term strategic horizon. These differences between movement ideology and movement practice are understood by examining Corbynism in its context. Here, neoliberalism and the recent history of political-economic change since the 2008 banking crisis forms the key contextual backdrop of the movement. This analytical perspective is ordered via the lens of the movement's political opportunity structure, referring to both the contextual opportunities and constraints for political action. The thesis argues that ultimately Corbynism was both in and against neoliberalism, meaning the movement was constrained by its neoliberal context and unable to transform that context without first achieving state power. The thesis shows, therefore, that the major agent of substantive change within Corbynism was intended to be the state. Hence, Corbynism sought to affect political and social change from the top-down rather than led from the bottom-up. In regards to democracy, Corbynism provided political support for liberal institutions, a "function" of the Labour Party that was once diagnosed by new left commentators, foremost Ralph Miliband. Therefore, rather than populist, in the sense of being illiberal, Corbynism both legitimated liberal institutions and proposed reforms that were meant to provide a renewed social and political basis for contemporary liberal democratic capitalism. The thesis argues that to comprehend this latter point requires putting to one side thin understandings of democracy and instead considering democracy more broadly as an instituted process.