This study examines the European Union’s 2018 Cyber Defense Policy Framework in an attempt to uncover how the issue of cybersecurity is framed in the 2018 CDPF and how that is problematic for the proposed solutions. 

The theoretical framework of this research is based on the Copenhagen School’s Securitization theory (Buzan et al., 1998) and Baldwin’s (1997) constructivist account of the concept of security. The study further incorporates Laura Fichtner’s (2018) theoretical as well as analytic approach. 

By employing a qualitative content methodology, the single embedded critical case study divides the analysis into four main categories, which were derived from the theoretical propositions. These categories are 1) referent object; 2) securitizing actors; 3) threats; and 4) responses. The findings of the research support the view that cyberspace is examined as a militarized domain. Even though there are two referent objects, EU citizens and critical infrastructures, the proposed solutions are primarily in the hands of military actors. 

The study confirms previous research on cybersecurity and Securitization, where scholars claim that precisely the combination of referent objects allows policymakers to insert their position, which in this case is embodied by EU specialized military and police units who use this as a reason to navigate security in individual-collective and economic-political terms. 

Many normative theorists want to contribute to making the world a better place. In recent years, it has been suggested that to realise this ambition one must start with an adequate description of real-life practices. To determine what should be done, however, one must also fundamentally criticise existing moral beliefs. The method of reflective equilibrium offers a way of doing both. Yet, its practical usefulness has been doubted and it has been largely ignored in the recent practical turn of normative theorising. This paper offers a complementary methodology to the method of reflective equilibrium, referred to as Rawlsian constructivism, which brings forth its practical merits. With the support of Rawlsian constructivism, the method of reflective equilibrium becomes a tool for public reasoning about practical problems which aims to facilitate shared solutions. The process of reflective scrutiny is used, not in the search of moral truth, but rather to highlight what stands in the way of solutions to problems agents face in different domains of social life. The practical value lies in scrutinising reasons for action that are taken for granted, explicating new rationales for action and highlighting neglected points of agreement. The paper exemplifies this approach with a process of justifying individual obligations to combat climate change. Normative theorists who share the practical agenda have correctly noted the importance of bottom-up investigations of subject domains. This paper argues that the next step should be to utilise this version of the method of reflective equilibrium to explore the potential for morally progressive solutions to these problems.

This thesis explores how ontological security shapes Ukrainian memory politics in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the Russian invasion's effect on ontological security. Despite their interdependence, ontological security and memory politics are seldomly studied together. Ukrainian memory politics, particularly in the post-Soviet era and after the implementation of the 2015 decommunization laws, have attracted European scholarly attention, as the Russo-Ukrainian (Memory) war has impacted Self and Identity on multiple levels. Furthermore, the thesis highlights the role of memory political measures in creating securitized unitary narratives, emphasizing the significance of memory for stability of Self. While unpopular at first, the decommunization laws emerged from the conflict and enhanced ontological security by solidifying a common Identity.

This study investigates the legal and ethical challenges posed by cyber warfare in the ongoing Russian-Ukraine war. Cyber warfare represents a transition from traditional conflict dynamics, impacting civilian populations and national security without direct physical confrontations. The significance of this research is the inadequacy of current legal norms that govern the rapidly evolving techniques of cyber-attacks which challenge established norms of International Humanitarian Law. Hence, the research question explores how cyber warfare challenges existing legal and ethical norms for civilian protection, and what the broader implications are for the regulation of modern conflicts. Through a qualitative case study approach, the thesis analyses three cases of Russian cyber-attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure: the 2015 attack on the Ukrainian power grid, the 2023 cyber-attack on Kyivstar, and the 2022 Asylum Ambuscade. In the simplified legal framework by Hoffman and Rumsey, these cases were analysed using the Tallinn Manual, and Mary Kaldor’s New Wars theory to highlight the challenges and violations of IHL. The findings conclude that the IHL framework is insufficient for the unique challenges of cyber warfare. Moreover, the study addresses for the revaluation and updating of international legal norms to keep up with the constant development of cyber warfare. In all, this thesis showcases the need for enhanced legal standards that can safeguard civilian populations and maintain international security, contributing to the fields of international law and conflict resolution. 

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of ability, desire and opportunity on the individual's intention to be self-employed. Design/methodology/approach The authors created a database from Swedish national registers consisting of all individuals residing in Sweden sometime during the period 1997-2010 and selected all 333,001 full sibling pairs, 12,810 maternal half sibling pairs and 15,944 paternal half sibling pairs. Three types of entrepreneurs were defined based on information from the Swedish Tax Register. The authors divided the intention to be self-employed into ability and desire and defined ability as a genetic factor and desire as a common family factor. A classical twin model was used to separate the variance of the outcome variables into genetic, common and unshared environmental factors. Findings The study demonstrates that the influence from opportunity on the intention to be self-employed is generally strong and that all factors, ability, desire and opportunity, differ, both in size and content, for the three outcomes of entrepreneurs. Originality/value The authors divide self-employment into three distinct company types, which enables a sophisticated additive genetic analysis of the ability, desire and opportunity to be self-employed. The authors contribute to the understanding of why individuals become self-employed by examining the influences from internal and external factors of family on the intentions of self-employment.

This thesis adopts a state-centric perspective to analyze the onset of armed conflict and civil war in Ethiopia. The ongoing conflict in Ethiopia serves as a single instrumental case study. Despite a large body of research on explanations of civil war, there is no consensus on factors and their salience that are generalizable and applicable to civil war occurrences as it is difficult to encapsulate the myriad dynamics at play. This case study focuses on Ethiopia because of the recent onset of civil war and its rare governance structure of ethnic federalism. The thesis focuses on how the state´s structural arrangement has impacted the politicization of ethnicity and (perceived) ethnic-based inequality and how the recent political transitions relate to this. The analysis concludes that ethnic federalism brought long-term ramifications and has resulted in inter-group animosity. It has accentuated mono-identities and government practices have contributed to ethnic fragmentation and ethnic tensions because of resulting horizontal inequalities. The political transition in the past years has failed to alleviate these tensions as repressive state practices, ethnic-based demands and mobilization as well as ethnic-based politics continue.

This thesis addresses the ethical implications of NATO securitizing Russia without being in direct warfare,seeking to contribute to the debate of the integration of ethics into IR. This thesis contributes to that argument by integrating ethical dimensions of normative character through Floyd's Just Security Theory (JST) within the framework of social constructivism to develop new theoretical insights. The research is structured around theresearch question exploring how NATO's identity construction undergoes changes due to the tense relationship withRussia. The formation of identity plays a crucial role in threat construction. The findings from Rousseau andGarcia- Retamero's Threat Assessment, revealed through NATO Annual Reports, confirm the fluidity of NATO's identity construction and its designation of Russia as a threat. The second portion of the research question suggestthat attributing a threat status to another actor in the international system has significant ethical implications, necessitating ethical considerations in the securitization process and its influence on security discourse. The thesis findings support the need for ethical considerations, while acknowledging that these considerations aresubject to critique based on the chosen theoretical framework. It emphasizes the need for ethical considerations in the securitization process, and by extension in IR; and argues for the moral justifiability of NATO's securitization of Russia.

A significant part of contemporary social ontology has been focused on understanding forms of collective intentionality. It is suggested in this paper that the contested nature of some institutional matters makes this kind of approach problematic, and instead an alternative approach is developed, one that is oriented towards a micro-level analysis of the institutional constraints that we face in everyday life and which can make sense of how there can be institutional facts that are deeply contested and yet still real. The model is applied to two main examples, sexism and racism, and it is argued that on this approach it can make sense to understand both of them as institutions in our societies.

Analytic social ontology has been dominated by approaches where institutions tend to come out paradigmatically as being relatively harmonious and mutually beneficial. This can however raise worries about such models potentially playing an ideological role in conceptualizing certain politically charged features of our societies as marginal phenomena or not even being institutional matters at all. This article seeks to develop a nonideal theory of institutions, which neither assumes that institutions are beneficial or oppressive, and where ideology is understood as a structuring and stabilizing phenomenon that helps maintain specific distributions of rights and duties by conferring perceived legitimacy onto them.

Many contemporary defenders of paternalist interventions favor a version of paternalism focused on how people often choose the wrong means given their own ends. This idea is typically justified by empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics. To the extent that paternalist interventions can then target the promotion of goals that can be said to be our own, such interventions are prima facie less problematic. One version of this argument starts from the idea that it is meaningful to ascribe to us preferences that we would have if were fully rational, informed and in control over our actions. It is argued here, however, that the very body of empirical results that means paternalists typically rely on also undermines this idea as a robust enough notion. A more modest approach to paternalist interventions, on which such policies are understood as enmeshed with welfare-state policies promoting certain primary goods, is then proposed instead.

Some contemporary paternalists argue in favor of government interventions based on how experimental psychologists and behavioral economists have found that our behavior often diverges from what would be predicted by rational-choice models. In this article it is argued that these findings can, more specifically, be used to identify decisional trouble spots where paternalist interventions may be legitimate. It is further argued that since the epistemic legitimacy of government paternalism ultimately rests on centralized decision-making having a comparative advantage, it also depends on the possibility of such interventions being governed by an ideal of evidence-based policy-making. The article asks how stringently this requirement should be understood, and to what extent government can legitimately engage in what might be called experimental policy-making of a paternalistic character.

In considering patriarchy as potentially institutional and as a characteristic also of contemporary Western societies, a fundamental issue concerns how to make sense of largely informal institutions to begin with. Traditional accounts of institutions have often focused on formalized ones. It is argued here, however, that the principal idea behind one commonly accepted conception of institutions can be developed in a way that better facilitates an explication of informal institutions. When applied to the phenomenon of patriarchy, such an approach can then also allow us to ontologically make sense of gray areas and hierarchies of authority, as well as the intersectionality of social positions.

In recent years, several political theorists have argued that reasonable principles of justice are practice-dependent. In this paper it is suggested that we can distinguish between at least two main models for doing practice-dependent theorizing about justice, interpretivism and constructivism, and that they can be understood as based in two different conceptions of practices. It is then argued that the reliance on the notion of participants that characterizes interpretivism disables this approach from adequately addressing certain matters of justice and that a better way of developing the idea of practice-dependence can be found in a constructivism that starts from the Rawlsian idea of overlapping consensus, but which shifts the focus of that approach from societies to a more open-ended category of domains, and which understands the parties to a possible overlapping consensus as stakeholders in a certain set of interconnected practices.

Some recent arguments for paternalist government interventions have been based in empirical results in psychology and behavioral economics that would seem to show that adult human beings are far removed from the ideals of rationality presupposed by much of philosophical and economic theory. In this paper it is argued that we need to move to a different conception of human decision-making competence than the one that lies behind that common line of philosophical and economic thinking, and which actually still lies in the background of some of these recent approaches to paternalist interventions. An alternative picture of human decision-making competence is outlined and four criteria for identifying areas where paternalist interventions have a basic moral and political legitimacy are then identified on the basis of this picture.

Liberal political theory is often understood as being underpinned by an individualistic social ontology, and it is sometimes objected that this type of ontology makes it difficult to address injustices that involve social groups and informal forms of privilege. It is argued here that, to the extent that liberals do fail to properly address such structural injustices, the main problem can instead be understood to lie with a rules-centric understanding of institutions – one which is actually out of line with a proper ontological individualism. If institutions are instead understood as distributions of right and duties, held by individuals, it becomes much more straightforward to identify institutional privilege in terms of inequalities in those distributions. The relevant rights and duties can be explicated in terms of informal Hohfeldian incidents and it is argued that patterned distributions of such incidents can come to exist, and be maintained, through how we develop a largely intuitive sense of where our interpersonal boundaries run and form social expectations about which kinds of behaviour will typically receive pushback in some form.

This paper discusses the relation between medical ethics and general moral theory, the argument being that medical ethics is best seen as independent from general moral theory. According to this independence thesis, here explicated in terms of what is called a disunitarian stance, the very idea of applied ethics, which is often seen as underlying medical ethics (as well as many other more specific fields of ethics), is misguided. We should instead think of medical ethics as a domain-specific ethical inquiry among other domain-specific ethical inquiries. On this alternative kind of picture, such ethical inquiries should start with looking at the particularities of the domain under consideration and then proceed from there. Some possible consequences of this idea for medical ethics are then identified and discussed.

This essay aims to find a link between NATO policy in Europe from 2014-2022 to Russia’sdecision to invade Ukraine in February 2022. A process tracing methodology is used in conjunction with an offensive realist framework to demonstrate NATO’s role in influencing Russian defense policy. The investigation finds US global hegemony dictates NATOambitions, leading the Alliance to adopt aggressive policy in Eastern Europe. In turn, Russia identifies NATO as a threat in its military doctrine and proceeds to strengthen its defensive capabilities. Putin outlines Russia’s need for a buffer zone between it and NATO, a prime target for such a place being Ukraine. A failure by both parties to accommodate each others interests leaves Russia with a convincing rationale to seek military force in securing a more favorable defensive position.

In 2015, Europe experienced the arrival of an unprecedented number of migrants and refugees. This sparked a crisis, as the European states struggled to cope with the influx. Moreover, tensions in the European Union arose due to the disproportionate burden faced by some states, therefore arguably leading to some countries securitising the issue. This thesis seeks to investigate how and to what degrees socio-political conditions and political leadership roles impacted the securitisation of the 2015 refugee crisis in Hungary and Sweden. The assessment of these questions was approached by this paper through the employment of a comparative study analysis and a qualitative content analysis of speeches held by the Hungarian and Swedish prime ministers. Additionally, this paper utilises a theoretical framework, based upon Finnemore and Sikkink’s social constructivism and the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory. This paper argues that socio-political conditions and leadership roles, embodied by the prime ministers of Hungary and Sweden, significantly impacted the securitisation processes of the 2015 refugee crisis. Furthermore, political leadership roles are interconnected to socio-political conditions via the securitisation of political issues in the following way: socio-cultural aspects, paired with political interests, inform the political leaders that shape how and through which articulation securitisation occurs. 

The Keffiyeh, a traditional headdress, holds symbolic significance for Palestinians in their struggle for freedom against the occupation, yet its utilization in the fashion industry has drawn criticism for its exploitative nature and disregard for its cultural importance to Palestinians. Hence, this thesis examines Palestinians' perceptions of the use of the Keffiyeh in the fashion industry and the significance of this garment for their cultural identity. It is based on semi-structured interviews with five Palestinian women who were born in Palestine and in Europe. This paper draws upon cultural appropriation as a foundational element in the academic background, while utilizing cultural identity as a theoretical framework. The results of the analysis demonstrate that the Keffiyeh plays an important role in the cultural identity of the interviewed Palestinians’ and that its use in the fashion industry is viewed as an appropriation of their culture. By situating this paper within the current body of research on cultural identity and cultural appropriation, it aims to provide valuable insights into the importance of the Keffiyeh for Palestinian identity through an examination of the Palestinian perspective, thereby contributing to existing scholarly discourse.

With a starting point in the Together: Building a Shared Community strategy (T:BUC) published in 2013 by the Government of Northern Ireland’s Executive Office, this study examines two of the strategy’s Key Priorities: Our Shared Community and Our Safe Community, in order to analyze contemporary peacebuilding efforts carried out by the Northern Irish government. The study is guided by the research question: Why might the strategic aims such as removing all interface barriers by 2023 in the T:BUC fail in their attempts to build peace? To answer this question, the thesis takes a qualitative methodological approach relying on both primary and secondary data and Carol Bacchi’s method of ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be’ approach to poststructural policy analysis. This methodological approach is accompanied by Audra Mitchell’s theoretical framework of plural world-building. The study finds that the T:BUC strategy problematizes the interface barriers in Belfast, the usage of symbols such as flags, as well as the division of communities within Northern Ireland - all concepts that in this thesis are argued as important ‘threatworks’ and ‘world-building’ means of the conflicting communities in order to avoid violence. The thesis concludes that by interfering with these types of world-building means, the Northern Irish government risks inducing ‘radical violence’ to these ethno-national groups and perhaps provoking escalating violence amongst them.

Amidst a complex and fragmented legal framework governing international waters, OSPAR, aregional environmental agreement, grapples with challenges in its Marine Protected Area(MPA) Governance, leaving marine ecosystems vulnerable. However, after nearly two decadesof negotiations, the "Treaty for Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction" (BBNJ Treaty) hasemerged as a pivotal milestone. Designed to address existing gaps in the legal framework, theBBNJ Treaty aims to safeguard international waters, combat environmental degradation,climate change, and biodiversity loss. This thesis examines the potential influence of the BBNJTreaty on the effectiveness of OSPAR's MPA Governance in areas beyond nationaljurisdiction, assessing whether it successfully addresses the current challenges posed by thecurrent framework. Using qualitative content analysis and Stokke's taxonomy of regimeinterplay, the study analyzes provisions promoting cooperation, knowledge-sharing, and globalprinciples. The study highlights how the BBNJ Treaty could bolster marine conservation effortsin international waters while also addressing its limitations. Conclusively, the effectiveness ofthe Treaty ultimately depends on the willingness of Parties and OSPAR members to cooperateand implement its provisions. Thus, the real impact of the BBNJ Treaty will unfold as eventsprogress.

As a result of the refugee reception crisis in 2015 the advocacy for increasing resettlement numbers in the overall refugee protection framework has gained momentum, as has research on resettlement to the EU. While the UNHCR purports resettlement as a durable solution for the international protection of refugees, resettlement programmes to the European Union are seen as a pillar of the external dimension of the EU’s asylum and migration policies and management. This paper presents and discusses the literature regarding the value transmissions taking place within these programmes. It reviews literature on the European resettlement process – ranging from the selection of refugees to be resettled, the information and training they receive prior to travelling to their new country of residence, their reception upon arrival, their placement and dispersal in the receiving state, as well as programs of private and community sponsorship. The literature shows that even if resettlement can be considered an external dimension of European migration policy, this process does not end at the border. Rather, resettlement entails particular forms of reception, placement and dispersal as well as integration practices that refugees are confronted with once they arrive in their resettlement country. These practices should thus be understood in the context of the resettlement regime as a whole.

In this paper we map out where and how values (here understood as ideas about how something should be) and norms (expectations or rules that are socially enforced) are transmitted within this regime. ‘Value transmission’ is here understood in a broad sense, taking into account the values that are directly transmitted through information and education programmes, as well as those informing practices and actors’ decisions. Identifying how norms and values figure in the resettlement regime aid us in further understanding decision making processes, policy making, and the on-the-ground work of practitioners that influence refugees’ lives. An important finding in this literature review is that vulnerability is a central notion in international refugee protection, and even more so in resettlement. Ideas and practices regarding vulnerability are, throughout the resettlement regime, in continuous tension with those of security, integration, and of refugees’ own agency. The literature review and our discussion serve as a point of departure for developing further investigations into the external dimension of value transmission, which in turn can add insights into the role of norms and values in the making and un-making of (external) boundaries/borders.

This thesis explores the experiences of belonging and waiting of young Hazara refugees from Afghanistan living in Sweden under temporary residence permits. The study aims to investigate the experiences of social and political belonging of young Hazara refugees with temporary residence permits, focusing on their experiences of waiting for permanent legal decisions in the context of their asylum process. The case study utilises a transformative worldview and delves into the young Hazara's narratives of social and political belonging amidst prolonged legal uncertainty through semi-structured interviews with four young Hazara refugees, aged 18-22, who arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and have lived in Sweden since 2015. It focuses on themes such as the importance of Home, social networks, and the impact of legal liminality. It further explores the refugee's worry about deportation, challenges in pursuing education, experiences of waiting, and aspirations for the future. The findings highlight the experiences of legal uncertainty and its impact on their social and political belonging. Further research is needed on social and political belonging and waiting in the context of temporary border control. This can help improve policies for young Hazaras with temporary residency permits and other disadvantaged groups.

As a Marxist contribution to research on the concept of religious diaspora, this paper seeks to explore whether Muslims can be understood as a nationally oppressed people with an economic basis for organising collectively as a group. Drawing from a Marxist analysis of religion and national struggle, the paper seeks to explore the concept of an ethnicity formation premised on religious affiliation, namely that of the Muslim Ummah, and its organisational potential within a national struggle paradigm. Utilising the Hegelian Marxist concept of Aufhebung, or dialectical return, the study resituates the parameters of anti-colonial struggle beyond nation to the transnational arena, recapturing the economic basis of the Ummah and enabling an understanding of its contemporary emergence within and alongside national struggle mobilisations at both localised and transnational levels.

Business and human rights is a recurrent discussion and the literature shows that it is a common research topic. However, when it comes to Banking and human rights the academic works drop considerably. The purpose of this paper is first, measure the degree of detail and depth of the analyzed annual reports regarding the information relevant to human rights and second, check if the non-financial information or sustainability reporting of the selected banks have changed overtime. To try to answer those questions the paper makes use of a qualitative and quantitative content analysis that are based on a relevant theoretical framework for each of the questions. An extensive background on sustainability reporting is provided in order to have a linear narrative. 

The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has been in a constant state of development since its conception in 1999, however the 2015 European refugee crisis demonstrated the need for several adjustments to be made. Since then, engagement between the European Union and Member States over what the future of this system could look like has increased. This thesis builds on existing Europeanisation and de-Europeanisation research by operationalising these concepts to use as lenses through which to view the EU’s engagement with the Swedish state over the sovereignty and responsibility and border management aspects of the CEAS following the peak of the 2015 refugee crisis. Employing data in the form of policy documents and speech transcripts from the Swedish Ministry of Justice and the EU, this thesis conducts a qualitative content analysis to examine the discourse between the two actors and determine whether or not dynamics of Europeanisation or de-Europeanisation can be identified. The results of this study conclude that dynamics of Europeanisation can be identified in the engagement between the Swedish Ministry of Justice and the EU over the solidarity and responsibility aspect of the CEAS while dynamics of de-Europeanisation can be identified in relation to discourse surrounding border management. 

Leaning on the framework of Critical Race and Whiteness Theory, this qualitative study draws on semi-structured interviews with second-generation Mexican Americans and White Americans to offer a yet untaken perspective on the fragmented nature of identity. It also sheds light on the ways racism and interracial relationships shape individuals’ notions of race and privilege. The study’s findings indicate that Mexicans perceive themselves as a distinct racial group situated in a “third space,” marked by a dialectic between externally ascribed and internally attributed racial identity categories. White individuals use color and power-evasion strategies to avoid cognizance of their own racial identities. However, their interracial relationships provide a meaningful premise altering the ways they perceive notions of race and White privilege. Shifts in White individuals’ perspectives occur in relation to heightened race consciousness, acknowledging White privilege, and racial inequality and includes behavioral changes resulting from their interactions with their significant others.

Since the early 2000s, Chinese metropolises have been emerging as hubs for the national and global economy. They attract increasing numbers of foreigners with diverse socio-economic and educational backgrounds who tend to immigrate independently of the Chinese initiatives focused on "foreign talents". Our analysis contributes to the understanding of these migrants' integration into the labour market. Through a Bourdieusian capital lens, this article unpacks the access to the labour market and occupational positions of Swiss and Swedish migrant professionals in mainland China. Differentiated by how they can capitalize upon their educational, occupational, social and cultural resources in this specific context, the article distinguishes between three categories: corporarate expatriates, local hires and entrepreneurs and concludes with policy recommendations to stabilize their residence conditions.

As well as impinging upon issues of law and governance, astrobiology is also bound up with questions concerning who we are and where we come from, worldview questions of a more existential and philosophical sort. The questions that it seeks to tackle have, for centuries, been central to the humanities and to social science disciplines. 

The paper starts from the observation that research on immigrants’ integration trajectories needs detailed information, both objective and attitudinal, and ideally longitudinal. This study uses the cases of Denmark and Sweden – whose registers produce detailed records about all natives’ and immigrants’ lives in their host countries – in order to, first, review existing research on immigrants and their integration and, second, discuss the way in which register data are used, their caveats and their potential. The study finds that, in Denmark and Sweden, registers provide systematic objective data which are fully available to researchers and have the potential to help in the collection of high-quality subjective data. However, the population registers have some traits which may impact on the representativeness of the samples. The authors argue that, if researchers are aware of the caveats, registers can be used to obtain representative samples of immigrants, and register data can be complemented with survey-based attitudinal data, thus opening up new research opportunities for testing propositions on integration theories.

In 2021 NATO addressed climate change individually for the first time in official public discourse at its highest level. Although climate change is addressed at the unit level, at the sub-systemic level official, formalized engagement with climate change by security actors is recent. The transnational issue of climate change requires a prioritized, collective response which makes securitization appealing, however there is caution concerning securitization to avoid a state-centric response that militarizes engagement with the issue and excludes other alternatives. NATO as the largest military alliance, a collective representation of the West and Annex I and II parties to the UNFCCC plays a significant role in this regard. The thesis’ purpose is to provide an exploratory starting point into NATO’s official engagement with climate change and security by using securitization theory to inform discourse analysis examining discourses stemming from the NAC and Secretary General. The analysis finds that NATO addresses climate change as a threat-magnifier instead of a threat, avoiding securitization but approaching the issue from a pre-dominantly military logic of threat nonetheless. The securitization framework additionally facilitates discussion of a possible future direction of Western security politics by discussing three future factors of climate change and security.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate how social movements such as Ni Una Menos have used political opportunities and mobilisation structures to grow. Moreover, as I researcher I am interested in building an understanding of how social movements impact women's empowerment and agency. Femicide, which is defined as the murder of women due to their gender, has been a major problem in Argentina for a long time and the high rates of femicide crimes have caused concern and frustration among the population. This study intends to uncover the political opportunities and mobilisation efforts the NUM movement has utilised to combat femicide as well as to examine how the Ni Una Menos movement has contributed to the empowerment and agency of women in Argentina. The study does this by drawing from political process theory as well as feminist theory. 

The data used for the study was collected through five semi-structured interviews that were conducted in Buenos Aries, Argentina from November 2023 to January 2024. A content analysis was utilised to analyse the data. At the time of the founding of the NUM, the results indicate that the mobilisation strategies utilised have existed in the country long before the founding of the NUM. Furthermore, in terms of agency and empowerment, the results show that feminist social movements have had a positive effect on these two aspects for women in Argentina. Lastly, this research contributes to a deeper knowledge of femicide in Argentina and offers insights for policy intervention and social change initiatives aimed at preventing femicide. 

In this paper, I study how a new law (the Convention on the Rights of the Child) is implemented in Lomma municipality. I investigate how the new law has been implemented in the municipality and how my informants experience their room of maneuver to carry out the changes required to implement the law in their business. Methodological tools used are interviews with four informants. The analysis is guided by Lundquist's theory of implementation as well as Lipsky's theory of room of maneuver. 

The study results in that the implementation of the law has mainly taken place through the appointment of a working group with responsibility for the implementation. After that nothing more significant has happened in the implementation process. The informants have a room for maneuver, but are strongly influenced by management and the policy framework. Therefore, it will be difficult for the informants to fully implement the law in the business.

It is not possible to draw generalizing conclusions based on the results because it is a specific case that is being analyzed, but similar studies with other municipalities in focus are examples of future research areas.

The aim of the thesis is to contribute to a growing understanding on how Venezuelan refugees are being constructed by the Brazilian media during the ongoing refugee crisis in South America and the main discourses related to them. The fact that South-South migration has so far been understudied and the relevant and fast-escalating displacement of people from Venezuela are the motivations for this study. The theoretical framework consists of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA and the theoretical concepts of stereotypes and othering. Twenty-one articles about Venezuelan refugees, published between 2016 and 2021, were analyzed. The findings of the thesis show that Venezuelans were mainly associated with negative aspects, entailing two sub discourses: in the first one, they were constructed as the origin of diseases at the borders and associated with violence and tension, and in the second one they were constructed as exploited, underemployed and poorly integrated into the formal labor market. 

This article explores how Venezuelan refugees have been constructed by the Brazilian media during the ongoing refugee crisis in South America. The fact that South-South migration has so far been understudied and the relevant and fast-escalating displacement of people from Venezuela were the motivations for this study. Twenty-one articles about Venezuelan refugees published between 2016 and 2021 by three mainstream, conservative newspapers were analyzed. The theoretical framework consisted of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis and the theoretical concepts of stereotypes and otherness, from a decolonial perspective. The findings revealed that Venezuelans were mainly associated with negative aspects, comprehending two sub discourses: in the first one, they were constructed as the origin of diseases at the borders and associated with violence and societal tension, and in the second one they were constructed as exploited, underemployed and poorly integrated into the formal labor market. The findings contribute to increasing the understanding of the South-South migration phenomena by detailing the representation of Venezuelan refugees in the Brazilian media and the main discourses related to them.

This thesis is a qualitative study that seeks to investigate how refugees were represented in the tabloid newspaper Aftonbladet’s reports before and after the 2015 refugee crisis. The aim of the study is to find out if the representation of immigration in Aftonbladet changed after the 2015 refugee crisis and what differences and changes we can see in the media representation of the refugees before and after the crisis. The data used in the paper is comprised of articles from January 2014 and January 2018. The study is done in the light of Stuart Hall’s three representational approaches of reflective, intentional and constructionist to explore the discourse of immigration and scrutinize the periodic differences of such a representation. The findings of this paper indicate that the representation of refugees and immigration has more of a reflective tone to it during the pre-crisis phase and later when the crisis dies down the representation of immigration gets a more constructive nature; and even more wilful.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka möteskulturen i en medelstor svensk kommun. Med möteskultur åsyftas den rådande mötesmiljön i organisationen. Studien baseras på en enfallsstudie av kommunen och analyserar hur möteskulturen ser ut samt hur den skiljer sig mellan chefer och personal. Studiens insamlade material består huvudsakligen av genomförda intervjuer med tjänstepersoner samt tidigare forskning och relevanta teorier. För att analysera kommunens möteskultur har organisationsteori om formella och informella normer samt nyinstitutionalismen applicerats på det insamlade materialet från samtalsintervjuerna. Resultatet visar att kommunen har en utbredd möteskultur, det vill säga att mötesmiljön i organisationen präglas av många möten samt att denna möteskultur skiljer sig mellan chefer och personal. Utifrån intervjuerna går det att se en markant skillnad mellan personalen respektive cheferna vad gäller mötestid och mötesbokningar. Det finns även en skillnad i tjänstepersonernas inställning till möten utifrån huruvida de har en mötespolicy eller inte. Mot bakgrund av detta är slutsatsen att möteskulturen i kommunen kan förbättras och att det finns etablerade metoder för detta i delar av kommunen som fler bör ta efter. 

When managing the reception and relocation of refugees within the EU, it is unsurprising that negotiating common policy and burden-sharing schemes are complex, contentious tasks (Thielemann 2003; Naurin 2015). Indeed, the individual geographic, political and economic positioning of member states are reflected in larger power dynamics within the EU, further complicating resolution on solidarity initiatives in asylum policy (Duarte and Pascariu 2017, Basile and Olmastroni 2020, Bauböck 2018). Within this thesis, I argue that these power dynamics are evidenced along EU core and periphery lines (i.e., states with external borders and those with primarily internal borders) and within negotiation discourses (Jäntti and Klasche 2021; Zaun 2018). By conducting a critical discourse analysis (CDA) with statements from the French and Greek national parliaments, as well the EU Commission statement, this project is able to pursue a comparative analysis of discursive approaches and highlight differences in discourses and power positionings. This, in turn, can also help us to examine why standstills in asylum policy negotiation proceedings persist. The structure of this thesis is in line with previous research which has examined how power and agency of member states is constructed through linguistic framing (Mainwaring 2014), and literature investigating complications that emerge with common immigration policy within the EU and the supranationally (Omelaniuk 2012, Hampshire 2013, Bauböck 2018).

I den här avhandlingen studeras styrning av välfärdssamverkan, med focus på betydelsen av kunskap i styrning. I offentlig verksamhet – och i välfärd i synnerhet – är samverkan mellan myndigheter, kommunala förvaltningar och välfärdsprofessionella ett återkommande sätt att hantera olika problem som de traditionella offentliga institutionerna anses oförmögna att lösa. Genom att studera ett specifikt fall av välfärdssamverkan, med fokus på barn och unga, är syftet med den här avhandlingen att utforska hur samverkan styrs. Med en explorativ ansats – baserad på etnografisk metodologi och en Foucauldiansk syn på styrning – fokuserar studien på styrningspraktiker bortom formella styrinstrument och relationer. Avhandlingen skildrar praktiker som styr genom olika typer av kunskap och för att beskriva den här formen av styrning används begreppet kunskapsregimer. Utifrån en fallstudie bestående av huvudsakligen observationer och intervjuer visas hur olika typer av kunskaper kommer till uttryck inom samverkan. Genom en regim baserad på expertkunskap involveras forskare – som utvärderare och föreläsare – för att delge sin vetenskapliga kunskap. Genom en regim baserad på standardiserad kunskap tillämpas icke-personbunden och universell kunskap, såsom evidensbaserade verktyg och managementmodeller. Genom en regim baserad på lokal kunskap så tillämpas icke-artikulerad kunskap som olika professionella grupper besitter – en kunskap som ofta framstår som avvikande gentemot mer etablerade kunskapstyper. Olika typer av kunskap styr välfärdssamverkan genom de praktiker där de gestaltas och kommer till uttryck. En viktig slutsats och argument i avhandlingen är att mångfalden av kunskap och relationerna mellan olika typer av kunskap behöver beaktas i studier av välfärdssamverkan och inom offentlig sektor mer generellt. Studien visar hur olika kunskapsregimer existerar samtidigt och att olika kunskapstyper förekommer sida vid sida inom en och samma organisation och även inom samma samverkansprojekt. Genom att beskriva och analysera betydelsen av kunskap i styrningen av välfärdssamverkan innebär studien ett bidrag till forskning om välfärd och hur välfärden organiseras och styrs. Avhandlingen är också ett bidrag till forskning om relationen mellan kunskap och politik och betydelsen av kunskap i offentlig förvaltning i bred bemärkelse.

In recent decades, we have witnessed an increasing use of projects and similar temporary modes of organising in the public sector of nations in Europe and around the world. While for some this is a welcome development which unlocks entrepreneurial zeal and renders public services more flexible and accountable, others argue that this seeks to depoliticise policy initiatives, rendering them increasingly technocratic, and that the project organisations formed in this process offer fragmented and unsustainable short-term solutions to long-term problems.

This volume sets out to address public sector projectification by drawing together research from a range of academic fields to develop a critical and theoretically-informed understanding of the causes, nature, and consequences of the projectification of the public sector. This book includes 13 chapters and is organised into three parts. The first part centres on the politics of projectification, specifically the role of projects in de-politicisation, often accomplished by rendering the political “technical”. The chapters in the second part all relate to the reframing of the relationship between the centre and periphery, or between policy making and implementation, and the role of temporality in reshaping this relation. The third and final part brings a focus upon the tools, techniques, and agents through which public sector projectification is assembled, constructed, and performed.