I en tid då allt fler röster höjs angående FN:s ineffektivitet har vi valt att undersöka hur organisationen behandlar medlingsuppdrag i mellanstatliga konflikter. Utifrån den pågående konflikten på Cypern och kriget mellan Iran och Irak på 1980-talet ser vi hur FN som tredje part har agerat dels utifrån ett systemperspektiv och dels på medlingsnivå. De valda konflikterna grundar sig i liknande frågor om nationell identitet, etnicitet och gränsdragning. För att täcka flera problemområden använder vi oss av realism, socialkonstruktivistisk organisationsteori samt erkända medlingsteorier.Efter att ha analyserat konflikterna har vi sett att FN är i behov av reformer som stärker möjligheterna att medla fram lösningar i konflikter, då rådande omständigheter gör FN beroende av stöd från andra aktörer och egna medlemsländer..

När man hör Nepal dras tankar till Mount Everest, trekking och vackra vyer. Men politiskt är landet mycket instabilt, ett krig där över 12 000 människor förlorat sina liv har nyligen kommit till sitt slut. Det varade i tio år mellan åren 1996 och 2006. Dess mål var att förvandla världens sista hinduiska kungadöme till en republik, ett mål som nu blivit verklighet.Ansvarig för kriget är den nepalesiska maoistiska rörelsen och frågan som behandlas i denna uppsats är varför dessa maoister vann folkets stöd och inte den neoliberala staten.Detta sker i form av en fallstudie vars främsta uppgift är att syna rörelsens sociala framing samt landets politiska, sociala och ekonomiska situation..

Mass media is becoming more and more personalized and despite common ideas it could actually be a good thing. Instead of affecting the actual content of news coverage it might only have an effect on the way in which news are presented. Famous politicians more regularly become symbols and synonyms for their parties or for the government and are being used to create interest in the beginning of articles.Those are the results from a content analysis of the newspaper coverage of the Swedish parliamentary election in 1976 and 2006 in which the scientist categorized each article in one of four ideal types, counted quotes and analyzed whether personal names were interchangeable with party names without affecting the content. All three methods showing that it is the presentation, not the content, which has been personalized.At the same time, psychology-science tells us about the human brains associative learning processes, where memorizing becomes far more efficient when the information can be connected to an already known person. Increased personalization of news might therefore increase the political knowledge of the receivers..

I vår uppsats ställer vi oss frågan varför Turkiet, trots över 50 år av demokratiska institutioner bryter mot mänskliga rättigheter samt yttrande- och pressfriheter. Vi har använt oss av en modell som identifierar tre kärnområden viktiga för demokratisering: staten, globaliseringen och civilsamhället.Vår slutsats är Turkiet har en politisk kultur som inte gynnar konsolidering. Detta beror på flera olika faktorer. Transitionen från diktatur till valdemokrati innebar att strukturer etablerades som favoriserade eliter. För det andra finns det en omfattande partikularism i statsförvaltningen jämte det demokratiska systemet.

Region Skåne skapades för tio år sedan med ändamålet att förstärka den regionala demokratin. Den här uppsatsen syftar till att studera hur pass långt Region Skåne kommit i den demokratiska utvecklingen. Utifrån en normativ analys diskuteras de tre demokratiidealen, valdemokrati, deltagardemokrati och samtalsdemokrati, som alla bör ingå för att kunna göra en demokratisk bedömning. De tre demokratiidealen omsätts i mät- och undersökningsmetoder för att i uppsatsens empiriska del kunna studera Region Skånes demokrati. Utifrån de fastställda mät och undersökningsmetoderna dras slutsatsen att Region Skåne inte till fullo uppnår något av demokratiidealen, och att organisationen fortfarande innehar flera demokratiska brister som bör förbättras, detta trots att demokratin inom regionen utvecklas och att regionen sedan dess skapande fört med sig flera demokratiska fördelar..

AbstractThis essay analyse, from a normative perspective, what can be exspected of an etical asylum policy. The theorical base is derived from Gerard Delanty´s notion of civil cosmopolitism.The ethical outlook is based on utilitarianism. The questions this essay answers are:1) Which are the basic premises for an ethical asylum policy?2) Does the Swedish asylum policy forfill these premises?The study analyses in general terms the Swedish asylum policy. It analyses both the asylum law and the work of the executive authority.The analyse also includes a brief look at two asylum cases.

In Jaunuary 1995 Sweden became part of the European Union. Consequently Sweden agreed upon beeing part of a greater integration project with influences of federalism. However, many argue that the discourse that has been been dominant in Sweden is the discourse where we focus on the national state instead of the EU. In my essay I question whether the discourse about ?nationalstatslogiken? is found in the daily press in Sweden.

Sanningskommissioner inrättas för att dokumentera brott mot mänskliga rättigheter. På senare år har dessa blivit allt mer förekommande. Därför har detta fenomen väckt vår nyfikenhet. Vårt syfte med studien har varit att undersöka hur sanningskommissioner kan vara ett medel för ett land att gå vidare efter en konflikt samt vad som påverkar deras följder. Vår undersökning har en teoriutvecklande ambition där vi har utfört jämförande fallstudier av sanningskommissionerna i Argentina, Sydafrika och El Salvador.

Turkey has recieved recurring criticism on their disrespect of women and their rights and The European Union Commission and CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, are two examples of critics. However, during the last years Turkey has shown a number of improvments and positive developments. Two flagrant examples of the extended debate of the above mentioned scarcity is within the area of legislation and the large number of womenNGO´s.The aim of my thesis is to investigate which strategies womenorganizations in Turkey are using to affect the political agenda from a genderperspective; do they choose an international or a national strategi? The analysis is based on four womenNGO´s and their efforts of influence and effects on the political agenda and how they experience the link between themselves and the Turkish government. My findings suggest that a national strategy is chosen before an international strategy, but the choice seems to depend on specific goals of the organization and the national climate.

People are given better opportunities to participate in polity today. Democratic equality entails that all individuals are equal and therefore they should be included in the process of making the decisions. How can participation be defined and does it mean that having the possibility to participate means that people can influence the process of making the decisions in polity process?This paper focuses on participation and influence in polity and examine the relationship between having the possibility to participate and having the possibility to actually influence polity process on more local level. Therefore I have been examining the citizens? participation and influence in Helsingborg which is my case study.

The idea that I put forward in this thesis concerns the democratic system and the threat from discoursive impact on its core values. I focus my normative analysis on three of these democratic values: transparency, accountability and influence ? and what democratic problems the discoursive impact causes in conflict with them. I have used a critical discourse theory to define discourse and discoursive impact, by focusing on the process of discourse, rather than its nature. I deal with the political structure where I claim that the essential relation between citizen and politician is disrupted, due to lack of information and the imminent problems of the existing network society.

This thesis title starting from zero alludes to storstadssatsningen's democratic work being accomplished among immigrants in Malmö. My thesis examines which types of political participation storstadssatsningen were trying to increase. The goal was to turn the immigrants into political participants, but in many of the projects the democratic work had to focus on building a ground for democratic participation by bringing isolation to an end and teaching the Swedish language. This may have been the reason that there were not extensive forms of resources to put into projects actually raising the political awareness. Some of the projects can however be said to increase a very large number of types of political participation, both temporary and every day participation.

The purpose of this research is to analyze six children?s books from a gender perspective and thereby investigate in what way boys and girls respectively are portrayed in books.My general question is:How are boys and girls portrayed in children?s books?This question has been broken down into four minor questions:What type of clothes are the people wearing? Are people predominantly male or female? Have people specific attributes which are linked to their sex? Are people performing specific actions which are linked to their sex?In my research I have combined quantitative and qualitative methods and my theoretical framework has been gender.This study reveals a change in children's books with respect to how the different genders are portrayed. The progression is towards a more equal portrayal but despite this, patterns typical for the respective genders shine through..

AbstractThe purpose of this thesis is to analyse the basis of Russian diplomacy, and by doing that develop the analytical instruments available, in order to improve the comprehension between the parties in negotiations. Descriptions of the national characteristics of Soviet and Russian diplomacy are made by an analysis of memoairs and other examinations of their negotiating behaviour. To ensure the result of the characteristics two case studies of the non-nuclear proliferation negotiations are made, followed by a comparation between the Soviet and Russian diplomacy. From these results, I analyse the groundworks of russian diplomacy, using three theories about how ideology, national identity and prevailing self-image can affect the national negotiating behaviour. The results show that there have been changes in only some parts of the negotiating behaviour and that there is a need for all three theories to explain different parts of the complex system of Russian diplomacy which is based on the plurality of culture, ideology, language, ideology and history..

Bolivia is a multiethnic country where the indigenous people constitute the majority of the population. Despite two decades of attempts to take the democracy further is its foundation more volatile than ever. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to examine if exclusion is taken place in Bolivia from year 1982 until today and if so in which way political exclusion constitute problems of democracy in Bolivia. The answer depends on the understanding of democracy used in the analysis. In this thesis I use theories of process-, participation- and deliberative democracy.