Conflict prevention is a term which has gained much influence during the last decades. To prevent conflicts from occuring have both humanitarian and economic incentives as the cost for war are much greater than the cost of acting preventive. To act in this matter has been regarded a priority for the United Nations during several years, and the European Union have also expressed a wish of playing a more active part. The essay compares the actions taken by the international organisations in Macedonia, a country which headed toward a violent conflict. The UN acted through the mission UNPREDEP and the EU through the mission of Concordia.

Torstensson, Niklas (2012): Anledningar till olikheter mellan Svenska kommuners skolkvalitet (Causes behind the differences in Swedish municipality´s quality of school) Örebro University.This essay is an explorative case study that will compare four Swedish municipalities quality of local school system against the municipality ´s backgrounddata and a governing document: Skolplan. This study begins in a previous benchmarking study made by one of Sweden?s teachers unions Lärarförbundet. This is a statistical study that ranked the Swedish municipalities against each other?s according to their accomplishments in a number of areas related to their school systems.

Vi har i denna heuristiska fallstudie utgått från hypotesen att företag under vissa omständigheter har stora möjligheter att påverka stater genom en central beslutsfattare. Vi har utifrån denna hypotes valt att analysera beslutsprocessen i USA som föranledde Irakkriget. Vår ställda frågeställning är: På vilket sätt påverkade företag USA: s beslut att attackera Irak. När vi svarar på denna frågeställning visar vi genom att använda oss av Graham Allisons teori Governmental Politics hur företaget Halliburton genom Vicepresident Dick Cheney påverkat USA: s beslut att invadera Irak. Genom detta försvarar vi tankarna att företag är viktiga aktörer inom utrikespolitisk analys och att man för att tillfredsställande kunna analysera ämnet måste komma ner på individnivå.

This study investigated how we can understand St. Francis as environmentally conscious. The study also presents where those elements can be found in St. Francis own documents and from documents that describe St. Francis.

This thesis concerns the policy process of a proposed bill. The specific bill constitute a new penal law which is supposed to replace the old penal law from 1974.The questions asked considers what in the foregoing policy process that has proceeded, affected and also characterizes the proposed bill. In order to be able to produce a deep and reliable analysis to this question I use two different theories.The first theory being used consists of John W. Kingdons theory of ?multiple streams? which I use to answer the specific question ?what can be recognized to have proceeded and characterize the policy process that the penal law bill involve??.The second theory consists of Peter Santesson-Wilsons development of symbolic policy theories which is given a concrete form in the ?taxonomy of symbolic policy? which he presents.

The prospect of Turkish accession to the EU has sparked controversy in many of the member countries. It has highlighted the different ways in which European as well as Turkish identity is being defined in the debate, with some politicians seemingly trying to draw on old prejudices in order to make the case against membership. By utilising discourse analysis as advocated by Thomas Diez, this thesis seeks to explore the debates regarding the Turkish accession bid in the British House of Commons. Its purpose is to analyse how ?EU? and ?Turkey?, understood as contested concepts, gets described in different ways.

Uppsatsen är en jämförande kvantitativ pilotstudie om och hur Ungerns politiska kultur och postmaterialistiska värderingar har förändrats sedan staten blev medlem i EU.Syftet är att se om det har skett några förändringar i den politiska kulturen och om EU har varit en bidragande faktor för förändringen. Primärkällor jag har använt mig av är World Values Survey och European Social Survey, och sekundärkällor är sådana källor som har definierat politisk kultur, och förklarat hur EU fungerar. Resultatet jag har kommit fram till är att den politiska kulturen inte har förändrats i stor grad men det har skett förändringar i några värderingar som leder till postmodernismen. Medlemskapet i EU kan vara en faktor till att förändringarna har skett, men det är inte enbart det som har påverkat..

We live in a world where the resources are not equally divided and that is why charity work is needed. The United Nations Children?s Fund, UNICEF, is a global organization that works for children?s human rights around the world. But perhaps even charity work, which´s often glorified in the society, need to be looked at from different directions. Research about intercultural education, globalization and charity shows that even good deeds can end up reproducing the problem that was supposed to be solved in the first place.

Stark tro på en rättvis värld (BJW) har setts ha samband med en benägenhet att nedvärdera olycksdrabbade men även med positiva aspekter såsom stresshantering. Politiskt har BJW setts relaterad till högerorientering. Denna studie kombinerar relationen mellan BJW och politik med fokusering på attribuering av orsaker till arbetslöshet vilket tidigare förbisetts. Elever (n = 63) från gymnasium och högskola tog ställning till föreslagna orsaker till arbetslöshet och besvarade bakgrundsfrågor inklusive politisk hemvist och två olika BJW-skalor: dels en cynisk inställning till andras misslyckanden (deserved misfortune, DM), dels en förmåga att glädjas över andras framgång (deserved good fortune, DGF). DM och DM för deltagare med lågt DGF uppvisade samband med högerpolitisk orientering, vilket även korrelerade positivt med intern attribution.

The aim of this paper is to examine how teachers experience their possibilities to develop democratic teaching in high school and how they reflect upon their position of power within the teaching situation. Four professional high school teachers have been interviewed for the study. The theoretical perspective of the study is an intersectional view on power and a view on democratic teaching which is partly built on the high school curriculum, but mainly defined by deliberative conversations, anti-oppressive education and norm-critical education. The result of the study is focused on three themes, which were shown in the analysis of the interviews. These themes are: choices of teaching content,  authority of the teacher and democratic teaching.

During the last two decades, the elementary, - secondary-, and upper secondary schools of especially Europe and USA have gone through a change. From being formed in the post war time and, in Europe, very influenced by the ideas of social democracy, the school today has more and more come under the influences of neo liberalism, entrepreneurship and the political and economical situations during the late 1980´s.This undergraduate work brings up the changed discourses of education and knowledge in relation to the traditional free school system for adults in Sweden, the popular education, and especially in relation to folk high schools (folkhögskolor). By using, first and foremost, the idea of Norman Faircloughs critical discourse analysis (CDA) the rules and documents concerning the folk high schools are analyzed. The purpose of the paper is to identify and recognize the movement in the discourse to reach an understanding about the political situation for folk high schools in Sweden. In the end you can see that it is possible to define a similar development in discourse surrounding the popular education, as has been in the case with the elementary, - secondary-, and upper secondary schools..

Women are subordinate of men in the society, this is visible both in work places and private lives. Equality between the sexes is daily discussed in politics and the private sphere. As this is a hot topic which is debated within many areas, one of those is film production, we chose to write this essay about how the view of women has changed in movies over time. If equality doesn?t exist within the film media, then it will be hard to change the society?s point of view.

Aid effectiveness is a reoccuring theme in the social sciences. Maybe rightfully so, as development is slow in many parts of the developing world. Core literature on the matter seems to suggest that aid effectiveness is contingent on recipients? level of corruption. Assuming this to be true, I examine the EU?s disbursements of Official Development Assistance over the past decade by running regressions: is there a relationship between the level of aid received, and a country?s level of corruption? As the EU is one of the largest donors of foreign aid globally, and has the power to shape the global foreign aid agenda, this question puts to the test whether the EU is leading the way, or rather is an obstacle in front.

The present state of politics in contemporary Venezuela portrays a country of polarization, a chase for power and accusations of authoritarian and even undemocratic rule. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to examine the democracy in Venezuela, in order to clarify the sometimes vauge perception of the political situation. By applying the theories of polyarchical democracy put forth by Robert Dahl, one of the most highly regarded theorists on the subject, accordingly the discussion will therefore follow a theoretical framework. Dahl requires seven nstitutions to be guaranteed in a democracy, amongst them the possibility to vote, run for public office and the practise of freedom of speech. Measuring Dahl's levels of institutions in Venezuela, it is made clear that the level of democracy vary in different areas.

This thesis is an attempt to shed light on how the authors of the Swedish Government Official Report, SoU 1999:83, speak about how the globalization affects democracy. The method used is critical discourse analysis and ideological analysis, with the main emphasis on the former. The results of the analysis are then interpreted with central parts of Jürgen Habermas? The theory of communicative action. One of the main conclusions is that an absolute majority of the authors, talk about how the globalization affects democracy in terms of the economic market and the European union.