This thesis explores what the process of making a theatre performance, as a method of research, could add to our understanding of complex issues in the field of International Relations....Show moreThis thesis explores what the process of making a theatre performance, as a method of research, could add to our understanding of complex issues in the field of International Relations. Specifically, it engages with the question of how our theories about what world politics is, give shape to our world and our understanding of it. Through the making of an absurdist theatre performance it makes us aware that our theoretical positions are precarious. It does so by exploring the philosophical underpinnings of three divergent theories in International Relations Theory: Liberalism, Poststructuralism and Relational Cosmology and how they shape our possibilities for thinking and being in the world.Show less
In the past decade, the relationship between the United States and Iran has been through significant changes, particularly playing out in the realm of nuclear proliferation. The establishment of...Show moreIn the past decade, the relationship between the United States and Iran has been through significant changes, particularly playing out in the realm of nuclear proliferation. The establishment of the landmark Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) under the Obama administration, thought to be the start of a new chapter of US-Iran relations, was uprooted by the Trump administration almost immediately after the change in leadership. In order to understand how this radical policy shift is possible, this thesis analyses and compares the policy discourses on Iran of the Obama and Trump administration in terms of Self-Other identity construction. Taking a poststructuralist approach to policy discourse analysis, the ontological link between discursive identity and policy decision making is the central subject of study. The thesis concludes that the decisions to establish and withdraw from the JCPOA are constituted by discourses which in fact construct a highly similar radical Self-Other relationship between the US and Iran, within which the US is positioned as having to change the behaviour of the Iranian regime as arbiter of the Middle East and ally of the Iranian people. Crucially, they differ when it comes to the use of orientalist binaries, the capacity for change attributed to the Iranian regime (temporal identity) and the position of the US vis-a-vis the international community (ethical-spatial identity), which is congruent with the diverging policy decisions on the JCPOA.Show less
There is a strong tendency in mainstream literature to discuss cross-strait relations in terms of security threats or growing economic interdependence. On the other hand, cultural exchanges have...Show moreThere is a strong tendency in mainstream literature to discuss cross-strait relations in terms of security threats or growing economic interdependence. On the other hand, cultural exchanges have received considerably less attention. Nonetheless, scholars that do elaborate on culture conceptualise culture as a fixed set of norms and values that fosters mutual understanding. Similarly, cultural exchanges between the National Palace Museum (NPM) in Taipei and the Palace Museum (PM) in Beijing are lauded as signs of warming cross-strait ties. Michelle Jana Chan (2010) remarked that the museum directors have risen above politics to organise their first joint exhibition in 2009. Yet, this thesis argues that politics is firmly rooted in cultural exchanges across the Strait. Taiwanese and Chinese governments have purposefully (re)constructed culture to determine what “true” culture entails, what goal it serves and what it says about the relationship between people on both sides of the Strait. From a poststructuralist outlook, multiple truths need to be elucidated as “the truth” does not exist. Presidential statements and documentaries about the NPM are analysed from a spatial perspective to explain how culture and the NPM are constructed through the ‘One China’ discourses and the ‘Taiwan-centric’ discourse, struggling to define communities, boundaries and realities rooted in the broader background of the collaborations between the NPM and the PM. This study contends that competing and changing meanings and purposes of culture embedded in these cultural exchanges are the result of power struggles and should be acknowledged as sources of conflict in cross-strait relations.Show less
