10:05AM
Seif Qadhafi's PhD thesis from LSE
Issandr El AmraniA kind reader sent in a copy of the PhD thesis Seif al-Qadhafi, filed in September 2007 at the London School of Economics (whose former chancellor, Tony Giddens, was an advisor to his father). It's called "The Role Of Civil Society In The Democratisation Of Global Governance Institutions: From ‘Soft Power’ to Collective Decision-Making?"
Here's a somewhat relevant if stultifying passage, page 41:
Locke saw people as being able to live together in the state of nature under natural law, irrespective of the policies of the state. This self-sufficiency of society, outside the control of the state, was given weight by the growing power of the economic sphere which was considered part of civil society, not the state. The state is therefore constructed out of, and given legitimacy by, society, which also retains the authority to dissolve the government if it acted unjustly. Other writers continued with this distinction of civil society and government. The state kept its function of maintaining law and order that Hobbes had stressed, but was considered to be separate from society, and the relationship between the two of them was seen to be subject to laws that gained their legitimacy from society, not from the state. For example, Montesquieu saw the state as the governor and society as the governed, with civil law acting as the regulator of the relationship. The importance of law in regulating the way the state and society interacted was obvious to many writers who considered that a government that did not recognise the limitations of law would extend to become an over-reaching tyranny similar to that described by Hobbes in Leviathan.
Update: Ethan sent in this link to BoingBoing, which in turn links to documentation of plagiarism in the thesis.
Reader Comments (7)
Oh, the irony. Very fine in the abstract, but when the state in question is *my* daddy's state, well, to hell with civil society, right Seif?
429 Pages! How many ghost writers he must have used??
He also gave a speech at LSE last year. There is both an MP3 and a video of the talk up at the website (pretty embarrassing for the folks who introduced him, I'd say)
25 May 2010- #LSE lecture by Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam Video: http://j.mp/hiSLfo & scroll to 25May2010; mp3 at http://j.mp/g2ADBN
It's kind of pathetic that LSE took him on as a vanity candidate. Those kinds of people are so used to speechwriters that you know they aren't doing their own work. Seif Q also approached Fouad Ajami some years ago for help in "ghostwriting" a book and was naturally turned down.
David Held, Seif's unofficial advisor at the LSE (professor of Political science there I believe), wrote an embaracing piece in the Guardian about seeing Sayf al-Islam on his TV address and how "in turmoil" and how different he seemed from the Seif he knew. Unbelievable.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/21/saif-al-islam-gaddafi-turmoil
I happened to be at the LSE on the day of Gaddafi recent talk there - I didn't come to hear him - and saw Qadafi's Baltajiya beating up protestors who dared show up with placards about the prison massacre. Wearing very expensive suits and smelling like million dollar eau de cologne, these thugs yelled abuse and physically assaulted the protestors. LSE response was to cowardly close all doors to the building, and have their security guards running after the Baltajiya begging and promising them that the police has been called and they will take care of the demonstrators so could they please refrain from further violence. I saw it with my own eyes. Later the police arrived, and indeed the protestors were told to remain near the locked back door while everybody entered the building from the other side, so that there would be no chance for confrontation.Did Professor Held miss this sight? Does he really want to kid us that he didn't know who he was dealing with? LSE has been truly disgusting in all of this. So glad I didn't go to school there.
The LSE even took a large donation from Gaddafi for a special programme on "Civil Soceity" - I mean, why stop there? I'm sure they could get money for the Avigdor Lieberman endowment for mutliculturalism, the Heider scholarship for tolerance, the Berlusconi programme for gender studies, etc etc.
See their statement here
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2011/02/libya_funding.aspx
hahahahahahahaha...what a joke...lol
I will be everything I have that he did not write that, and has no idea it was ever in a paper with his name on it....it was probably simply plagiarized.