Open Access

(In)security in Africa influences African societies, geopolitics, and geoeconomics. Yet African perspectives on (in)security are rarely sought, and how African states shape their security policies remains unclear: conventional internal/external, domestic/foreign, and secure/insecure distinctions are outdated, while Western/Northern-centric social sciences and African Studies/IR literatures remain trapped in essentialisms, stereotypes, and mono-causal explanations. This thesis argues for new analytical devices to study African security policies in less essentialist and more context-sensitive ways by understanding the practice turn and appropriating Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive, practice-theoretical, and field-analytical sociology through an in-depth sociospatial reading. This helps interpret his concepts as global, interrelated thinking tools for African social formations, against a superficial Bourdieusian International Studies literature. Taking Nigeria as exploratory case study, the thesis traces how field and habitus intersect, develops a Field of Nigerian Security Policy (FNSP) as object and tool, and treats habitus and capital primarily as outcomes of the analysis. It asks how Nigeria shapes its security policy towards Boko Haram as a contemporary space of (in)security, drawing on almost four months of self-reflexive, ethnographic fieldwork. It combines sociological discourse analysis of textual sources with interviews with leading Nigerian experts and practitioners. It reveals how a FNSP is constituted by diverse agents, relations of (informal) cooperation, competition, domination, and transversality, a dual habitus of problems/scarcities and aspirations/necessities, and multiple (including negative) kinds of capital—and how agents' classificatory practices ultimately produce Nigeria's security policy towards Boko Haram. The thesis thereby advances African International Relations theoretically and offers deep practical insights into Nigeria's political space.

Addressing environmental governance challenges necessitates collaboration among diverse societal actors to collectively develop and modify rules, norms, and social structures. A significant obstacle in environmental governance lies in the problems of institutional fit, where the existing governance arrangements may be mismatched with the specific social-ecological conditions at the local level. This misalignment poses a hurdle to effective and sustainable environmental management. Collective action’s theoretical lens is used in this study to navigate the varied interests, goals, and perspectives involved, aiming to comprehend the different factors influencing collaboration in the management of shared resources. Recognizing that collective action is inherently difficult, this dissertation focuses on the importance of deliberation to facilitate discussions on the risks, benefits, values, and capacities of different actors.

Over the past 40 years, a modern welfare state has emerged in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Social protection has thereby extended from a selected group of privileged state employees and civil servants to most of the population. This dissertation argues that the significant extension of social protection, and of pension schemes in particular, is not only a consequence of domestic economic development and political reform; international influences also manifested themselves during the course of the development and reforms of the Chinese social protection system. My key research question is: How have international influences impacted on Chinese social security and pension reform? While I do analyze the roles of “Western” influences and International Organizations, I particularly focus on one important gap in the literature – the scarcely studied role of “Eastern” or East Asian influences on Chinese social protection development. Theoretically, this dissertation builds on the policy learning literature as well as the concept of East Asian welfare productivism to explain how international influences impacted on Chinese social protection expansion and reforms and to better understand welfare features the PRC shares with its East Asian neighbors. Regarding methodology, this dissertation employs several methods in the tradition of qualitative research: process tracing, document analysis, and discourse analysis. The core data of this research was collected via expert interviews during fieldwork in China. Moreover, archive data, official policy reports in Chinese, English and Japanese, and other primary and secondary data were utilized. This cumulative dissertation consists of four interdependent articles focusing on the development and expansion of Chinese social protection under international influences, and especially on the two major reforms of Chinese pension schemes: the 1990s Urban Employee Pension Reforms, and the 2009 New Rural Pension Scheme.

The social-ecological systems framework (SESF) was proposed by Elinor Ostrom in 2007 as a diagnostic tool to examine what influences collective action in the commons by identifying the social and ecological variables which interact and shape sustainability outcomes. Many have since cited the framework as a useful conceptual tool. However, substantially less literature has applied the framework empirically or examined the methodological challenges for using the framework. Rigorous exploration and analysis of the different methods and challenges for applying the framework and its conceptual development are largely absent in the literature, but are needed to guide future progress. I argue that a primary barrier for future research using the framework is a lack of knowledge on different methods and challenges for applying it. This thesis is a compilation of eight research articles building this knowledge. I explore different concepts and methods to continue building a research program with the SESF. The thesis is split into four parts. In Part 1: Introduction, I provide an overview of commons scholarship, and argue that the development of new interdisciplinary methodologies have been an essential feature of past progress and thus need to be an integral feature the SESF’s progress. In Part 2: Context and Concepts, I present a review article on the field of tropical marine science, to situate the context of this thesis. Two articles then explore conceptual development of the SESF, linking the framework to the closely associated concepts of ecosystem services and sustainability science. In Part 3: Empirical Research, the core of this thesis is presented. Each of the four articles applies the SESF in a different way in three small-scale fisheries cases and one pond aquaculture case. Finally, in Part 4: Synthesis and Conclusions, I provide an article which reviews all the existing literature applying the SESF to orient the contributions of this thesis.

Oil wealth is often associated with prolonged authoritarian rule, poor governance and other institutional pathologies. These unusual effects of petroleum have been variously described as the 'Paradox of Plenty' (Karl 1997), 'Natural Resource Trap' (Collier 2007), and the 'Oil Curse' (Ross 2012), and an increasing number of studies have examined the causes and effects of the oil curse (Humphreys et al. 2007). However, the prevailing assumption in most studies has been that oil will have an equally strong anti-democratic effect across authoritarian regime types (Ross 2001; 2012; Jensen and Wantchekon 2004; Haber and Menaldo 2011). Theoretical and empirical studies on the resource curse have ignored institutional differences in authoritarian rule emphasized by scholars of authoritarian politics (Linz and Stepan 1996; Geddes 1999; Schedler 2009; Geddes, Wright and Frantz 2014). In this study, I combine these two strands of literature and show that oil has a particularly dire effect on the democratization prospects of a particular subtype of authoritarianism, namely, personalist autocracies. The analysis of regime development patterns across oil and non-oil producing states presented in this study shows that oil wealth particularly strongly harmed democratization prospects in the personalist sub-set of authoritarianism. Using three country-case studies of Azerbaijan, Cameroon, and Venezuela, I illustrate the ways in which oil can reinforce personalism and undermine the democratization processes and suggest that the causal channels linking oil and regime outcomes (authoritarian durability and democratic transitions) depend on the composition of authoritarian rule in place, and may not be uniform across regime types. The case of Venezuela under Chávez also indicates that in democratic regimes with a long history of oil-induced elite corruption, oil wealth may contribute to the personalization of power in a failing democracy.