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How are we to live? How do we sustain our emotional commitment to utopia? Answering these questions necessarily calls for a reconceptualisation of subjectivity and sociality, in order to overcome the depoliticisation, resignation and despair captured by the neoliberal subject. Drawing together qualitative and theoretical research under Ruth Levitas’ framework for the ‘imaginary reconstitution of society’ – Utopia as Method – I argue utopia is the otherwise that we navigate, create and learn of, together, through every moment. Where the neoliberal subject signals a collapse of subjectivity that contributes to the depoliticisation and resignation of our contemporary times, I offer an alternative account of subjectivity through Gillian Rose and Ernst Bloch. In an original theoretical encounter, I connect Rose’s concepts of reason and ‘inaugurated mourning’ with Bloch’s concepts ‘the darkness of the lived moment’ and the ‘not-yet,’ towards imagining subjectivity differently. Further, through six conversations with seven activist-philosophers from Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) – Jen Margaret, Jo Randerson, Thomas LaHood, Richard D. Bartlett, Benjamin Johnson, Cally O’Neill and Kassie Hartendorp – I make visible already-existing emancipatory practices and subjectivities from within radical Aotearoa (New Zealand,) from which we can learn and locally ground our imaginings. Combining the conversations held with the activist-philosophers with the alternative account of subjectivity developed, I move outwards – from the individual and the particular to the collective – to specifically name five key modes of radical everyday practice: embodiment, not knowing, trust, care, and imagining. Understood as an articulation of docta spes, or a praxis of educated hope, these five modes capture a sense of everyday sociality imagined otherwise, as well as articulate a collaborative, sustainable and localised account of the emotionally demanding pedagogical pursuit towards the realisati

In the face of looming ecological catastrophe, ever-expanding neoliberalism and the ongoing integration of our lives into virtual spaces, there is an urgent need to expand people’s political imagination and responsiveness to these challenges. Engaging with philosophy outside the academic sphere – for example, in school and community contexts – can contribute to addressing this political need. Using the example of Philosophy for Children (PfC), an international educational movement, this thesis explores the potential for cross-paradigmatic approaches to philosophical inquiry. It observes that adherence to particular philosophical paradigms, as has largely been the case in PfC, binds the imagination to particular epistemic and political parameters and precludes ideas that contradict paradigmatic assumptions. Invoking the sensibility of Gillian Rose, I argue that we need a philosophy that permits people to imagine radically different political worlds in a manner that actively resists political ‘bubble-think’. This thesis illustrates how Rose’s cross-paradigmatic approach, speculative negotiation, can help to address some of the limits of paradigm thinking by inspiring a more transformative philosophy in contexts such as PfC. In doing so, this thesis contributes both to an expansion of the PfC programme and to questions surrounding the concrete practise of Rose’s rich theoretical oeuvre.

Spatiality in Israel and Palestine is mired in ongoing trauma and hardened differentiation. This thesis argues that spatiality must be reconfigured in order to break from a stagnated pattern of ongoing conflict. First, border lines become increasingly rigid, and come to enact a bordering practice that radically differentiates. Second, the site of the border itself offers opportunity for political possibility. Third, the spaces of violence must be subject to a process of mourning that enables emancipation from the conditions that would support ongoing violence. I draw upon the thought of Gillian Rose to re-articulate a notion of the border as a broken middle, and to set forth an approach to the spaces of violence that incorporates them into a process of inaugurated mourning. Re-articulating the border as a broken middle enriches the field of critical border studies which seeks to expand on the notion of the border as a site of potential connectivity and political or social possibility. A Rosean approach challenges the dualisms that a hardened border represents, persistently subjecting these dualisms to interrogation that undermines their rigidity. Re-configuring the spaces of violence through a process of inaugurated mourning gives expression to grief, and disentangles the organisation of space from ongoing violence, without forgetting past suffering. An inaugurated approach seeks a fuller and self-reflective understanding of the conditions of suffering; it works against retreating into a melancholic condition that would reproduce the conditions of violence. These arguments are developed through an exposition of projects by artist Francis Alÿs, and architect/artist collective Decolonising Architecture Art Residency. Through their propositional nature, these projects illuminate the possibilities of a critical approach to the production and re-configuring of political and social space.

Narrative politics reframes how we cultivate knowledge in the academy, foregrounding the voices of research subjects and their relationships with researchers to re-embed scholars in the social world. Narrative affects the reader’s emotional capacities and fosters empathic understanding, encouraging a more human engagement with figures that have been made threatening, as Elizabeth Dauphinée explores in The Politics of Exile and Richard Jackson in Confessions of a Terrorist. Narrative politics is concerned with the question of how academics respond to the violence of war and whether the analytical tools of the social sciences are an adequate response to the human horror of war. The narratives of peace people are particularly compelling in the way they challenge the assertions of the dominant culture of wider society and the discipline of IR. Aotearoa New Zealand has a rich history of grassroots peace movements and activities that have influenced wider society. However, their stories are not well recorded in the dominant narrative of state institutions or academia. Peace Activist Elsie Locke published Peace People, a broad historical survey of peace activism from pre-European Maori to 1975. Maire Leadbeater brings the account up to 2013 in Peace, Power and Politics. All accounts emphasise that ordinary people were at the heart of activities, organisations and movements for peace. One of these ‘ordinary’ people left out of Locke and Leadbeater’s accounts is Gita Brooke, co-founder of the Whanganui-based charitable trust, Peace through Unity [PTU]. As a self-identified ‘peace person,’ Brooke has written much about their work and been involved in peace activities in Aotearoa NZ since the 1980s. Narrative politics provides a lens in IR to explore the story of Gita Brooke as co-founder of PTU. I show the contribution PTU has made and continues to make to a culture of peace in Aotearoa New Zealand and as a worldwide network, explored through the themes of education for globa

My Master‟s Thesis explores the extent to which the international community has established processes of evaluation and learning that are improving humanitarian responses to complex humanitarian emergencies over time. It does so by reviewing a range of existing evaluations of successive crises in the former Sudan, with particular emphasis on Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) and Darfur. I assert that by addressing the shortcomings of past humanitarian operations and learning from them, the international community can improve the effectiveness of future humanitarian responses. OLS, which was the first multilateral humanitarian operation after the end of the Cold War and which is perceived as one of the biggest failures in humanitarian aid history, will be used as a starting point. Consequently, I used the case of Darfur in order to answer the following research questions: How has humanitarian effectiveness evolved in the former Sudan since the launch of OLS? Have lessons been learned from the failures of OLS? To answer these questions, I applied the UN OCHA-proposed Elements of Effectiveness as a framework, namely: performance, accountability, coordination, contextualization, principles and standards, relevance, participation, capacity, resilience and preparedness, innovation, and access. The thesis is divided into three main parts. The first part (chapter 2) explains how humanitarian aid has evolved after the end of the Cold War in regard to complex emergencies, and why the international community has felt the need for evaluating and improving humanitarian effectiveness. Chapters three and four critically analyse humanitarian effectiveness in the former Sudan, during OLS and in Darfur, respectively, in order to demonstrate how ineffective humanitarian aid has been and how little has changed in the international response, despite the fact that the former Sudan has been one of the largest recipients of humanitarian aid since the end of the Cold War. I argue that humanita

The potential role of women in conflict and post-conflict environments has been the subject of much debate in the field of peace and conflict studies. In 2000 the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325, which called for a greater involvement of women and acknowledgement of gender issues in conflict and post-conflict environments, and this has led to further discussion about what this might mean and how it might be implemented. Despite this women are continually under-represented in nearly all peace processes and there is no universally agreed upon way to ensure this situation does not come about. The barriers women face range from cultural to logistical and economic, and surmounting them can be hard to achieve. One case where women have been involved at all levels in the peace process with substantial success is the Pacific island of Bougainville, where a conflict over mining issues and secession from Papua New Guinea was waged from 1988-1997. Women were active in attempts to bring all parties to negotiations during the conflict and have also been heavily involved in the continuing reconciliation and healing processes. For cultural reasons Bougainvillean women were well placed to perform the role of peace-builders but that is not to say that they did not face challenges and barriers to their involvement. This thesis examines the involvement of women in both the immediate peace negotiations and the longer-term aspects of the peace process in Bougainville in order explain how and why they enjoyed these successes and what lessons can be learnt from this case in regards to the potential roles of women in other post-conflict environments. Four factors will be identified as key to women's involvement in the peace process: the history of Bougainville up to and including the conflict; the grassroots mobilisation and organisation of women; the traditional cultural roles of women in Bougainville; and the identification of women with motherhood and its associat

Peace operations from the 1990s have increasingly been driven by the assumption that conflict and social unrest can be ‘solved’ through the establishment and support of liberal structures. Known academically as liberal peace, this approach advocates the liberalisation of politics and economics, and the establishment of rule of law and international human rights norms, claiming such liberal structures offer the necessary foundation to lasting peace. This claim has become unquestioned logic for many of the international bodies and individual actors that participate in the peace industry and has led to a standardised approach to post-conflict situations. However, is this “peacebuilding consensus” justified? Does liberal peace foster sustainable peace? This thesis interrogates the concept and application of liberal peace to assess the extent to which liberal peacebuilding delivers on its claims and provides the foundations of sustainable peace. Due to the enormous size of such a project and the limitations of this thesis, I focus on one case study in my analysis of the liberal peace approach – East Timor. Relying on a single example of peacebuilding allows for a more in depth discussion of efforts, however, it is insufficient to draw broader conclusions about liberal peace. This body of research, therefore, is intended to contribute to existing academic work that evaluates liberal peace. Where this thesis deviates from existing research, however, is in the application of an immanent critique to assess liberal peacebuilding in East Timor...

This paper sets out an approach – post-modern cosmopolitanism – that seeks to allow moral conversation and moral justification between groups and individuals who do not share any substantive values. It does this without denying the plurality of value systems (universalism) and without allowing groups to retreat behind inviolable walls of ethical self-containment (relativism). The approach relies on many aspects of Jurgen Habermas’s discourse ethics, but it takes discourse ethics in a new direction, leading to a unique approach. I start the paper by showing the problems with the current dominant alternatives – universalism and relativism – both in terms of their lack of internal consistency and in terms of their inability to mitigate and resolve conflict in practice. I then introduce some of the important concepts that form the basis of the post-modern cosmopolitan approach: discourse ethics, communicative reason, the principles of discourse, and the idea of fundamental goals. Following this I discuss the nature of ‘reasons,’ in order to make sense of the claim of discourse ethics that we should engage with each other via an ‘exchange of reasons,’ and also to outline some of the key distinctions necessary for understanding the praxis of post-modern cosmopolitanism, the ‘cosmopolitan conversation’. Finally I examine some of the deficiencies in Habermas’s discourse ethics, and show how post-modern cosmopolitanism can overcome them. I conclude by outlining the nature of the ‘cosmopolitan conversation,’ and gesture at how we might begin to apply post-modern cosmopolitanism in real-world situations.

Poverty is one of the most serious issues of our time, and the major seat of the poverty eradication discourse is at the United Nations. The term participation has increasingly featured in the high level poverty discourse in recent years, as well as in development practice. However, in contrast to other identity groups, such as women, indigenous people and people with disabilities, the participation of people living in poverty in high level UN processes is not given priority. They are not seen as an identity group in their own right, rather they are subsumed into others. Furthermore, any participation is assumed to be acceptably realised at the local level, with little priority placed on the facilitation of participation in transnational or global institutions such as the UN. NGOs are assumed to be able to represent the poor, a situation which is problematic and serves to further marginalise people living in poverty. As NGOs translate and represent, they effectively silence people living in poverty. In the absence of the poor, perceptions held by the general public and by decision makers about the poor continue to hamper the debate and restrict possible solutions. Furthermore, the exclusionary statistics-dominated language of UN debate and procedural restrictions present barriers to people living in poverty being meaningfully involved in the poverty discourse. Additionally, the overuse of statistics in these debates serves to abstract and dehumanise the poor. This thesis makes the normative argument that people living in poverty should have a place and space at the United Nations, as do other identity groups. Their participation represents an opportunity to force the debate beyond statistics, and expose the harsh realities of ongoing suffering resulting from the world's failure to act. Their testimony and input could provide an effective catalyst for mobilising political will. Drawing on critical theory, I argue that regular participation and testimony of the poor h