Odida, Amelia;
(2022)
Making Policy, Problems, and Constitutions: Decolonising the UN Policy of Constitutional Assistance.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This thesis is a decolonial analysis of the United Nations policy of Constitutional Assistance (UNCA). The United Nations (UN) has become a central figure in the most recent ‘wave’ of constitution-making processes which began following the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Constitution-making and the policy of UNCA has been articulated by the UN in documents as being both natural and necessary and has proliferated despite many failures to secure the objectives in which it seeks to achieve. Using theories of decoloniality and coloniality developed by scholars such as Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano, the objective of this project is to provide a critical account of how colonial practices are embedded in UNCA and then, to demonstrate how we can begin to detach from the fiction of Western epistemic superiority. Using poststructural discourse analysis and Carol Bacchi’s What’s the Problem Represented to be? Approach (WPR Approach) as the guiding analytic strategy for examining policy problems, the thesis breaks away from conventional literature on UN governance which treats policy as a means from which to address problems which reside externally in the ‘real world’ (Bacchi 2012). Instead, a poststructural analysis of problematisation inspired by the work of Foucault posits that the issues policies seek to address are representations of problems constituted within the policy process. By analysing the process in which issues have become to be perceived as problematic within policy, a critical analysis is opened which has the capacity to disable systems of thought which are perceived to be irrefutable and unveil relations of power which result from the adoption of one dominant system of thought at the expense of marginalised, rejected, or silenced alternatives.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Making Policy, Problems, and Constitutions: Decolonising the UN Policy of Constitutional Assistance |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10145104 |
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