The aim of this thesis is to investigate two questions which naturally arise in the context of the classification of algebraic varieties.
The first project concerns the structure of Mori fibre spaces: these objects naturally appear in the birational classification of higher dimensional varieties and the minimal model program. We ask which Fano varieties can appear as a fibre of a Mori fibre space and introduce the notion of fibre-likeness to study this property. This turns out to be a rather restrictive condition: in order to detect this property, we obtain two criteria (one sufficient and one necessary), which turn into a characterisation in the rigid case. Many applications are discussed and the basis for the classification of fibre-like Fano varieties is presented.
In the second part of the thesis, an effective version of Matsusaka’s theorem for arbitrary smooth algebraic surfaces in positive characteristic is provided: this gives an effective bound on the multiple which makes an ample line bundle D very ample. A careful study of pathological surfaces is presented here in order to bypass the classical cohomological approach. As a consequence, we obtain a Kawamata-Viehweg-type vanishing theorem for arbitrary smooth algebraic surfaces in positive characteristic.