1851 International Sanitary Conference and the construction of an international sphere of public health

Focusing on the 1851 International Sanitary Conference, this dissertation analyses an important episode in the international regulation of health, trade, passengers, and cargo in a period of epidemic crisis. It argues that a group of diplomats and physicians appointed to represent 12 European nations instituted a new international forum that extended – and occasionally rivalled – national and local agencies for epidemic governance. Together, delegates endeavoured to establish a common sanitary policy in Europe and in the Orient. By creating shared surveillance and judicial mechanisms – while standardising definitions and practices – delegates aimed to engineer the flow of people, vessels, cargo, and diseases in the Mediterranean region. As a transnational forum, the Conference was a platform where doctors and diplomats reinterpreted models of public health and sanitary administration while creating institutions that challenged conventional concepts of borders, national policy, and state sovereignty. As a multinational event, the Conference marked the unprecedented transition from local, national and, bilateral public health policies into a coherent transnational project for the governance of epidemics. The dissertation is based on extensive research conducted in hitherto largely unexplored medical, diplomatic, and national collections in Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United States of America. Sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence to medical publications and personal diaries, tie together multiple national and professional perspectives while untangling a diversity of personal and state agendas that fundamentally shaped the foundation of international public health mechanisms and contributed towards the crystallisation of medical concepts. Chapter one demonstrates how economic and political concerns about the impact of quarantine on international trade led to calls for international regulation and the standardization of quarantine practices in the Mediterranean region. Drawing on medical reports, pamphlets and diplomatic correspondence, the chapter exposes the multitude of quarantine practices in the Mediterranean region and a growing international demand for prophylactic reform. These exchanges, it is shown, culminated with the organization of the 1851 International Sanitary Conference in Paris. Chapter two argues that the Conference challenged previous diplomatic and medical protocols by including two professional groups in the process of regulating international public health. The lack of precedent allowed diplomatic and medical delegates to establish new rules for the conduct of the conference, which gave them a relatively high level of autonomy from the states they represented. Chapter three focuses on the problems of constructing a shared aetiological classification and regulating quarantine practices. It shows that, although doctors gained progressive control over the Conference, ultimately diplomatic agendas shaped the final outcome. In addition, it demonstrates that, rather than defending the elimination of quarantines, liberal states supported the continuation of quarantine practice in the Mediterranean; albeit that they managed to severely limit its operation in practice. Finally, chapter four examines how European and Oriental sanitary institutions were uniformly redesigned and new international judicial mechanisms created. These measures variously affected the sovereignty of the participating states by limiting their independent capacity to set national epidemic policies. However, the chapter argues that these negotiations took the shape of sovereignty bargains: by loosening control over specific elements of their sovereignty, states managed to advance their political, economic and sanitary agendas. By looking at the International Sanitary Conference of 1851, this dissertation shows how the foundations of international public health had consequences not only for the control of epidemic diseases and the circulation of goods and people in the Mediterranean region, but also for the authority and status of the nation states. By doing so, it reveals that international public health governance resulted from the amalgamation of a particular configuration of expert and diplomatic struggles and compromises. Moreover, the dissertation shifts the traditional local and national focus in the history of medicine to a wider and international context where local and national traditions struggled to produce coherent discourses and practices

A civil-law prosecution system, presidentialism and the politicisation of criminal justice in new democracies: South Korea and Russia in comparative perspective

This study aims to comparatively explore how the politicisation of criminal justice would appear in several new democracies with the institutional combination of presidentialism and a civil-law prosecution system, by focusing on the strategic interaction between an incumbent president and prosecutors, in South Korea and Russia, in the new institutionalist perspective. Civil-law prosecutors could damage particular politicians’ moral foundations with specific timing and extent, manipulating criminal proceedings through their broad power within the centralised criminal procedure. This is why they must be cautiously checked by any other body of government, contrary to their common-law counterparts who exercise a limited power due to the decentralised criminal procedure. Fortunately, in most civil-law countries, prosecutors are accountable to democratic bodies, in spite of the global tendency of judicial independence. Also in practice, civil-law prosecutors have not often been involved in the politicisation of criminal justice, despite their extensive influence over criminal procedure, in the continental European countries wherein the tradition of parliamentary supremacy is strong. By contrast, in new democracies with the institutional combination between a civil-law prosecution system and presidentialism, prosecutors have often taken partisan behaviour in favour of or against an incumbent president. For instance, two South Korean Presidents, Young-sam Kim and Dae-jung Kim, and Russian President Boris Yel’tsin, had exploited civil-law prosecutors for the politicisation of criminal justice, but were faced with their defection immediately before their retirement. Unusually, only Vladimir Putin could avoid this unfortunate fate, even at the last phase of his tenure, among the South Korean and Russian Presidents after democratisation. According to this study, high-ranking prosecutors generally pursued their own career advancement, and consequently the prosecution service was loyal to an incumbent president during most of his tenure, but betray him in his last phase, during South Korean President Young-sam Kim’s and Dae-jung Kim’s periods, and in Russian President Yel’tsin’s period. Only in the Russian President Putin period in the two countries after democratisation, prosecutors unusually continued to serve the president even when he left the presidency. This could be because they had no incentive to betray the outgoing president in order to further their career development under the next presidency, given that Putin would undoubtedly maintain a strong political influence over their careers, even after his retirement, according to this research. On the other hand, South Korean President Moo-hyun Roh frequently came into conflict with prosecutors, and had his close allies investigated or even indicted by them, during his entire period, while repeatedly attempting major reform against the civil-law prosecution service, which President Young-sam Kim and Dae-jung Kim had abandoned, in order to maintain the alliance with the power apparatus. According to this study, prosecutors made their organisational resistance based on their far-reaching power over criminal procedure, against President Moo-hyun Roh, for protecting their great prerogative, and therefore he failed in the reform. By contrast, Russian President Putin was exceptionally successful in large-scale reform against civil-law prosecutors, which not only President Yel’tsin but Putin himself in his first term had also suspended, by establishing the new ‘investigative committee’ in June 2007. According to this research, this outcome was possible because the prosecutors could no longer enjoy the political opportunity structure enabling them to effectively defeat the president’s reform against their collective interests, and consequently President Putin could circumvent their organisational resistance, in the absence of political competition under his electoral authoritarian regime. This study provides three important academic implications. Firstly, under the institutional combination of presidentialism and a civil-law prosecution system, prosecutors are not likely to preserve political neutrality, but to display a partisan behaviour either in favour of or against an incumbent government. That is, the institutional factor of combination of a civil-law prosecution system and presidentialism tends to induce the prosecution service, as a judicial body, to behave differently from the expectations of both the democrats and the liberals. Secondly, the variation of political competition can seldom influence judicial officers, who are responsible to the other branches of government, to behave independently of politicians, but can influence them, especially the top rankers, to betray an incumbent government in the last phase of its tenure on specific institutional and political conditions. Thirdly, and most importantly, the variation of political competition can influence judicial officers to take collective action for protecting their collective interests. In particular, if the judicial officers could exercise far-reaching power over criminal procedure, as civil-law prosecutors, their organisational resistance against an incumbent government which pushes for reform encroaching on their collective interests, such as prerogative powers, would be threatening enough to make the incumbent abandon the reform plan

Thailand and the Vietnamese resistance against the French

This thesis traces the growth of Vietnamese resistance activities in Thailand from the beginning of the direct French colonisation of Vietnam in 1885 to the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949. Although Thailand's relative importance to the Vietnamese resistance movement did not increase at a constant rate during this period, but rather fluctuated in response to several factors, there was nevertheless an overall increase in Thailand's significance to the Vietnamese struggle against the French. This was most prominent during the immediate postwar period. Arranged chronologically, the present work is divided into six chapters that draw upon a large body of Vietnamese and Thai vernacular sources to detail the development of Vietnamese resistance work in Thailand during the period under study. The first chapter is divided into two time frames. The first part considers Thailand's importance to Vietnamese anticolonialists during the period between 1885 and 1925. Particular attention is paid to the extensive base building undertaken by scholar-patriots in Thailand in the early 1920s. The second section examines Vietnamese resistance programmes in Thailand in terms of their importance to the development of Vietnamese communism during the period between 1925 and 1940. Three major topics discussed in this section include: the role the Vietnamese played in the formation and leadership of the Siamese Communist Party, the part played by Vietnamese communists in promoting a Thai revolution via this Party, and the negative effects this had on Vietnamese resistance activities in Thailand. The second chapter discusses two trends in Thai politics that worked in the Vietnamese favour during WWII. The first stemmed from international events and internal Thai political changes that saw Phibun Songkhram adopt sympathetic policies toward the Vietnamese in a bid to gain their support during the brief 1940-41 Franco-Thai border war. The second, and most important development, resulted from the direct cooperation which emerged between Viet Minh and Seri Thai resistance leaders at the end of the Pacific War. These wartime Seri Thai contacts proved to be invaluable to the Viet Minh in the postwar period, one of the major factors explaining the ability of the Vietnamese to administer a wide-range of programmes in Thailand after the war. The last four chapters consider Thailand's unprecedented strategic importance to the Vietnamese in the immediate postwar period, with the discussion equally divided between the period prior to the outbreak of full-scale war in Indochina in December 1946 and the interval running from that point to 1949. Beginning at the end of WWII, chapter three side-tracks momentarily to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the complex strategic situation facing the Vietnamese, as the French moved to retake Indochina after WWII. Having done this, chapter four then shows how the Vietnamese responded to French actions in terms of expanding their military and diplomatic activities in Thailand during the same period. Chapter five focuses on the role played by Vietnamese representatives in Bangkok in the creation of the Southeast Asia League. This discussion serves as a vehicle to understanding better how Thailand became a key diplomatic outlet for the Ho Chi Minh-led government following the outbreak of war in Indochina. The last chapter examines Thailand's military significance to the Vietnamese between 1947 and 1949. The first part of this chapter deals with the period prior to the November 1947 military coup in Bangkok, when the conditions for Vietnamese resistance operations were most favourable. The second section shows that while Phibun's return to power in 1948 changed the rules guiding the operation of Thai-based Vietnamese programmes, Thailand nonetheless remained a key link to the Vietnamese until 1949. In this year, Thailand's importance effectively came to an end as Phibun began to crack-down stringently on Vietnamese activities in Thailand and the victory of the Chinese Communists opened more important northern bases and provided the Vietnamese with key access to Chinese diplomatic and military support

Legal and policy aspects to consider when providing information security in the corporate environment

E-commerce is growing rapidly due to the massive usage of the Internet to conduct commercial transactions. This growth has presented both customers and merchants with many advantages. However, one of the challenges in E-commerce is information security. In order to mitigate e-crime, the South African government promulgated laws that contain information security legal aspects that should be integrated into the establishment of information security. Although several authors have written about legal and policy aspects regarding information security in the South African context, it has not yet been explained how these aspects are used in the provision of information security in the South African corporate environment. This is the premise upon which the study was undertaken. Forty-five South African organisations participated in this research. Data gathering methods included individual interviews, website analysis, and document analysis. The findings of this study indicate that most organisations in South Africa are not integrating legal aspects into their information security policies. One of the most important outcomes of this study is the proposed Concept Model of Legal Compliance in the Corporate Environment. This Concept Model embodies the contribution of this study and demonstrates how legal requirements can be incorporated into information security endeavours. The fact that the proposed Concept Model is technology-independent and that it can be implemented in a real corporate environment, regardless of the organisation’s governance and management structure, holds great promise for the future of information security in South Africa and abroad. Furthermore, this thesis has generated a topology for linking legislation to the provision of information security which can be used by any academic or practitioner who intends to implement information security measures in line with the provisions of the law. It is on the basis of this premise that practitioners can, to some extent, construe that the integration of legislation into information security policies can be done in other South African organisations that did not participate in this study. Although this study has yielded theoretical, methodological and practical contributions, there is, in reality, more research work to be done in this area.School of ComputingD. Phil. (Information Systems

The hydropolitics of Southern Africa: the case of the Zambezi river basin as an area of potential co-operation based on Allan's concept of virtual water.

Southern Africa generally has an arid climate and many hydrologists are predicting an increase in water scarcity over time. This research seeks to understand the implications of this in socio-political terms. The study is cross-disciplinary, examining how policy interventions can be used to solve the problem caused by the interaction between hydrology and demography. The conclusion is that water scarcity is not the actual problem, but is perceived as the problem by policy-makers. Instead, water scarcity is the manifestation of the problem, with root causes being a combination of climate change, population growth and misallocation of water within the economy due to a desire for national self-sufficiency in agriculture. The solution lies in the trade of products with a high water content, also known as 'virtual water'. Research on this specific issue is called for by the White Paper on Water Policy for South Africa.Political SciencesM.A. (International Politics

Aligning Global and Local Aspects of A National Information Programme for Health: Developing a Critical and Socio-Technical Appreciation

Written by a full-time clinician, this thesis explores an example of ‘Big IT’ in healthcare, the National Programme for IT in the United Kingdom National Health Service. It is unique in exploring the interaction between people and information technology in the healthcare workplace, from an engaged standpoint within one of the National Programme’s implementation sites, in order to provide a critical and a socio-technical appreciation

Exceptional tunings: controlling urban events

This thesis is about space, law and control: how their relationship unfolds in the contemporary city, and how normative orderings emerge out of the urban mess, with particular attention to how this occurs in the extraordinary spatio-temporal context of mega events. The work is premised on the elaboration of an original spatial ontology through the notions of life, materiality and event, which culminates with the introduction of the notion of atmosphere and rhythm, and their folding into the concept of urban tuning. This understanding allows for re-thinking the spatiality and materiality of the urban from a non-dichotomous, immanent perspective, thus providing a novel way to investigate the spatiolegal configurations and the form they assume in the present-day city. Consequently, the thesis explores the exceptional relation between law, space and justice in modern and ‘post-modern’ times, by looking at contemporary forms of control and their on-going reformulation of urban space according to the twin requirements of consumption and immunity. Through this approach, I wish to push forward the urban and legal geographical debate, exploring the evolution of the spatiolegal into new, potentially oppressing logics of control, as well as delineating a radically material, ethico-politically worthwhile and strategically adequate concept of justice. Since I conceive urban mega events as paradigmatic contexts to investigate urban processes, I employ the 2010 World Cup in South Africa as the empirical testing ground for my conceptualisations

Exploring the politics of impeachment in Nigeria's presidential system : insights from selected states in the fourth republic, 1990-2007.

Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2016 .This study, through extensive empirical fieldwork research through interviews, interrogates the politics associated with the exercise of the power by the legislature to remove heads of the executive branch of government in the Nigerian presidential system. The study draws insights from the cases of impeachment in some selected states from 1999-2007. Through the frameworks of structural functionalism, elite and legislative role theories, the study analyzed the behaviors, attitudes and dispositions of the Nigerian political elite towards the exercise of requisite constitutional powers. The findings of the study show that external influence weakens the institutional capacity of the legislature to effectively exercise its oversight power over the executive. The prevalence of patron-client politics encouraged a selective application of impeachment provisions as an instrument of political vendetta and harassment. This has weakened the oversight power of the legislature thereby engendering accountability problems. It also deepens the crisis of governance because of the failure of the relevant institutional framework to tame unethical behaviour exercised by the political elite. Additionally, the Nigerian presidential system is unable to deliver public goods through an integrated institutional process. Policy outputs run contrary to the institutional framework that is supposed to provide the requisite capacity for the promotion of good governance in their exercise of political power, the political elite exploit institutional structures and processes at the expense of the public. This has evolved into a political culture that undermines good governance. The study therefore recommends the need for multiple measures of accountability, a truly independent judiciary, legislative independence and a reorientation of the people’s perception of political power

Responsibility to Protect

The principle of R2P – “Responsibility to Protect” – is intended to successfully counteract the international community’s powerlessness and failure to act in the face of crises and humanitarian catastrophes. It commits the international community to intervene in cases of genocide and crimes against humanity – in extreme cases even against the will of the state concerned. Originally established in peacekeeping, R2P, in certain ways a Canadian “invention”, also involves other areas of operation such as diplomacy, literature, and the media. The 19 articles assembled in this volume, which discuss the concept and the history of ist realization, contain both general reflections on a new understanding of state sovereignty and case studies dealing with particularly explosive political situations (Sudan, Afghanistan). Furthermore, beyond the responsibility of the political and diplomatic instances, the texts examine that of the media as sources of information, and the role of literature which – far beyond mere documentary writing – develops its own strategies and scenarios of how conflicts can be solved. - La “responsabilité de protéger” (R2P) est la tentative de combattre l’impuissance et la passivité de la communauté internationale en cas de crises et de catastrophes humanitaires, c’est-à-dire d’intervenir en cas de génocide et de crime contre l’humanité, et dans le pire des cas, d’intervenir même contre la volonté de l’État concerné. Se référant à l’origine au “Peacekeeping”, le projet R2P qui s’est développé avec l’importante participation du Canada, met également à contribution d’autres secteurs comme la diplomatie, les médias et la littérature. Les 19 contributions de ce volume qui éclairent le concept et l’histoire de sa réalisation comprennent aussi bien des prises de position pour une nouvelle conception de la souveraineté que des études de cas sur des situations politiques explosives (Soudan, Afghanistan). De plus, au-delà de la responsabilité manifeste des instances politiques et diplomatiques, les textes rassemblés abordent la responsabilité des médias en tant que sources d’information, et l’apport de la littérature qui, bien au-delà d’une écriture “documentaire”, propose des stratégies et des scénarios pour résoudre des conflits