Alastair Morgan - "British Foreign Policy Towards North-East Asia, in particular China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, 2010-2024"

This study will cover developments in the British government’s foreign policy towards North-East Asia in the defence and security, political, economic and commercial fields. It will cover the period of the governments led by the Conservative Prime Ministers Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.  It will map changes in British government perceptions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during this period and how these have influenced policy towards the PRC, Japan and the Republic of Korea (RoK).  Within the discipline of Foreign Policy Analysis, it will assess various factors underlying changes in perception and portrayal of the PRC.  It will then evaluate the extent to which these changes have (or indeed have not) in practice shifted policy towards Japan and the RoK, as well as the PRC itself.  The study in intended to draw on information from semi-structured interviews with British foreign policy practitioners and other experts in the field, as well as government publications, speeches, memoirs and other published material.

Joe Ruffell - "A Telos of Isolation? Organisation, ideology, and history in communist Albania"

My project concerns the evolution of Communist Albania from a Soviet ally, through its anti-Soviet alliance with the People’s Republic of China, through to its status as an isolate state after its break with China in the late 1970s. It considers this as result of a radicalisation of internal discourse when the state came under pressure to reform, using several theoretical resources. Historical sociology provides the key notion of a Jacobin semantics developed from the European revolutionary tradition which constructed the world in Manichean and conspiratorial terms. Social systems theory provides an understanding of the communist-party state as an organised system which has eschewed the differentiation common to modern societies, instead attempting to rule a national society through a single hierarchy and with an all-encompassing totalitarian narrative. Foreign policy role theory provides a means to analyse state behaviour shaped by the ideational commitments embedded in the state apparatus and wider society. These resources allow us to consider the withdrawal of Albania from its alliances and the continuing use of high Stalinist methods of repression and purge into the 1980s as a faltering system’s attempt to keep its self-constructed world intact in the face of a changing environment.

Chris Smith - "Lower than vermin? A rhetorical political analysis of British political invective 1971 - 2024"

This thesis is essentially asking if politicians are ruder to each other than in the past and hopes to identify continuities and changes in how they have insulted each other over recent history to attempt to answer this. It is a response to concerns raised by academics and journalists that politicians have lost the ability to disagree agreeably (if indeed such an ability was ever in evidence) and that since 2016 in particular the “Brexit Wars of 2019” represent “the point that British Politics...hit rock bottom due to the stark divisions and threatening abuse that had become part of everyday life for politicians” (Parry & Johnson, 2023, 4 & Marr 2019). In seeking to answer its enquiry this study endeavors to theorise “political Invective” as a distinct rhetorical tool politicians employ to give their rhetoric emotional appeal. It also hopes to use it as an umbrella term able to account for rhetoric interchangeably described as insulting, violent, inflammatory, divisive or toxic. In achieving this the following working definition of political invective has been devised: rhetoric which insults to some degree the personality, identity or motives of an opponent. Seeking political gain, through undermining an opponent’s ethos opposed to engaging with the merits or details of a policy in deliberative fashion.

In devising this theory of invective the method of Rhetorical Political Analysis (RPA) as practiced by Finlayson 2007 & Atkins & Turnbull et all 2014, has been used to identify how ethos, pathos and logos create remarks of an invective character. Through establishing a working theory of political invective this paper hopes to provide an understanding of a distinct technique, like metaphor (Charteris-Black, 2011) that can add to the literature concerning how politicians seek to construct rhetoric which persuades audiences through emotional appeals. It also hopes to identify continuities and changes to the frequency and nature of invective over time to contribute to debates around the wider nature of British politics. Particularly concerning the significance of identity politics and culture war issues which are perceived to be of greater significance than in past and responsible for a rhetorical culture where invective is more normalised than in past eras. In achieving this its primary enquiry questions become: To what extent has the frequency and nature of political invective changed over the period 1971 - 2024

Jane Stevens - "Cultural complexity in Europe’s regional order"

In a competitive and contested global order, understanding how regional cooperation is sustained is increasingly important.  My research project asks about the extent to which European regional international society relies on culture, from a perspective rooted in the English School of International Relations.  I apply the English School’s flagship concept of international society to a broader European geography than the EU core, as originally proposed by Diez and Whitman (2002).   Addressing recent criticism from Philips and Reus-Smit (2020) that the English School has retained an inaccurate ‘essentialist’ conceptualisation of culture, I treat culture as a fluid, diverse and contested process of meaning-making and argue that the School was primarily concerned with diplomatic culture. 

Adopting Knudsen and Navari’s (2019) structuration approach, I examine the ways in which European diplomats and political actors construct, reconstruct and alter their regional international society, while being constrained and energised by both embedded social practices and regional organisations and regimes.  Discourse analysis of official documents, archive material and elite interviews will be used to develop two case studies on the Council of Europe, the oldest pan-European regional organisation, and the newly-created European Political Community.  My project ultimately seeks to make a contribution to the English School’s theorisation by developing  an understanding of how cultural processes are involved in sustaining a regional international society.

Emma Connolly - “I Can’t Remember if I Kissed You: Digital Media and Multidimensional Memory after 9/11”

Kevin Graham - “The Effect of the Formation and Decline of the Social Democratic Party on the Centre Ground in British Politics”

Chris Hastings - “The Prince of Wales and UK Government Policy”

Raymond Keitch - “Politics of Sovereignty: The Path to the Brexit Referendum”.