https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/144529 2026-06-19T16:12:27Z 2026-06-19T16:12:27Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/147476 2026-06-16T10:57:22Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: Embodied civic intimacy : small states, symbolic power, and the lived experience of democracy Abstract: How is democracy embodied in everyday life, and how can lived experience enrich how we measure it? Procedural indices offer fine-grained measurement of institutional architecture but capture less of the affective, embodied, and reputational textures of civic life in small, densely networked polities. Mainstream political sociology compounds this gap by centring large Western states and reducing small-state democracies to narratives of clientelism or elite capture. This thesis develops Embodied Civic Intimacy (ECI), a mechanism most legible in small state conditions but portable to compressed publics more broadly, to explain how compliance, dissent, and belonging are negotiated where visibility and proximity are inescapable, and where democracy is constituted through bodies, silences, and rituals as much as through institutions. The analysis is organised around three strands: the infiltration of elitism, the state management of dissent, and civil society's navigation of patronage networks. The question matters increasingly as compressed visibility, long characteristic of small states, now diffuses through digital publics and surveillance capitalism. Malta and Singapore are compared through a most-similar systems design: postcolonial island states sharing density and colonial inheritance yet diverging sharply in regime trajectory. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design integrates political ethnography, forty elite interviews, discourse analysis, and longitudinal V-Dem and Freedom House data (2004–2024), with divergence between strands treated as analytical evidence rather than measurement error. Extending Bourdieu's symbolic violence and building on Machin's embodied democracy, the thesis shows that despite divergent index scores, both states display convergent civic textures in which neutrality is conspicuous, absence is legible, and silence carries political weight. ECI operates through reputational sanction rather than material inducement or legal coercion. The contribution is empirical (small-state experience), theoretical (a relational, affective lens for ECI), and methodological (enriching quantitative indices with embodied evidence). Description: Ph.D.(Melit.)

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/144592 2026-03-04T13:45:34Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Title: The people and its enemies : a discourse theoretical approach to populism and the European Union Abstract: This study investigates how the European Union (EU) discursively constructs its institutional rationality and manages dissent during moments of political crisis. Anchored in the post-2008 financial and sovereign debt context, it analyses how the EU responded to two major challenges: the election of the left-populist Syriza government in Greece (2015) and the Brexit referendum in the UK (2016). The study aims to understand not only how the EU reacted to populist dissent, but how it constructs its own hegemonic self-image, rationalities, and regimes of truth in the face of political rupture. Bringing together Foucauldian framework of governmentality, Poststructuralist Discourse Theory (PDT), and psychosocial analysis, the study offers an original theoretical framework for studying EU institutional discourse. It conceptualises EU discourse as a site where technocratic rationality is not merely deployed but affectively invested in, sustained through fantasy, and disrupted by symptoms of ambiguity, contradiction and dislocation. The methodology combines a retroductive research strategy with lexicometric analysis and multimodal NVivo coding, applied to a corpus of 316 documents spanning six years. The findings show that the EU constructs itself as a morally superior, expert-led, post-national polity, projecting dissent as irrational, irresponsible or populist. In doing so, it masks the political contingency of its governance model. While Syriza was punished for challenging austerity, the EU internalised many of the grievances central to Brexit, a move that may reflect a broader hesitation in how the union engages with political dissent. Ultimately, the study exposes the limits of technocratic governance and argues for a renewed, critical engagement with EU politics that foregrounds contingency, conflict, and democratic openness. Description: Ph.D.(Melit.)

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z