Permission is herewith granted to university to circulate and to have copied for non-commercial purposes, at its discretion, the above title upon the request of individuals or institutions. This page has been deliberately left blank iv Acknowledgements I would like to convey my heartfelt thanks to Prof. Antonio De Maio, with whom I was privileged to work. I express him gratitude for providing m...

The end of the Cold War ushered the world into a new sphere of democratic governance. Citizens in developing countries began actively contributing to the democratic process by demanding probity and accountability within existing governance structures. The efforts by responding to the challenges of the new ‘wave’ of democratisation in the late 1980s by embracing democracy assistance as a core pr...

____________________________________________________________________________ A quickening, if still somewhat quiet, shift in the balance of practical power from men to machines is now well underway. In more and more application areas, and more and more completely, decision authority is being removed from human functionaries and reassigned to computer-centered constructs. Such constructs will he...

Drawing upon a body of research on the evolution of creativity, this paper proposes a theory of how, when, and why the forward-thinking story-telling abilities of humans evolved, culminating in the visionary abilities of science fiction writers. The ability to recursively chain thoughts together evolved approximately two million years ago. Language abilities, and the ability to shift between di...