The purpose of the current study is to present an interpretation of Eros and its demonical aspect as it is described in Plato?s dialogues Phaedrus and The Symposium as well as to attempt to throw some light over the question in which way the erotic as such influences Plato?s notion of how to pursue philosophy. In the first part of the essay an account is given of the Platonic Eros as a unifying element and as striving for being. I defend the position that in the context of the interpreted dialogues philosophy is thought of as an erotic enterprise which takes place as a coming closer to the object of love. This coming closer takes place as remembering in Phaedrus and as creating in beauty in The Symposium.

The findings in this case study are mainly based on material collected during a field trip with a fellow student to Laos in February-March 2005, which was sponsored by Sida through a Minor Field Study scholarship. The original interest was to study a political aid project (Governance and Administrative Reform Project Luang Prabang, GPAR LP) in a country like Laos with very complex preconditions such as one-party polity. In Laos my interest in evaluation of political aid grew mainly because I found out that the two donors in the project, Sida and the UNDP, had reached different conclusions in their respective evaluations of the project.The main interest in this thesis has been to study how donors have evaluated a political aid project. The study shows that Sida and UNDP used, what in the literature usually is referred to as, Conventional evaluation as methodology when they conducted their evaluations of GPAR LP. The study also shows that the main reason for the different points of view that are expressed in the evaluations depend on a lack of dialogue and consensus, regarding for the project crucial concepts, rather than choice of evaluation methodology.

Modern democracies rest on a foundation of values essential to their prosperity. Two of those values are freedom of speech and political equality. To many, these values appear to coexist effortlessly. However, what this thesis aims to expose are some of the problems that quickly arise when attempts to interpret the values fail.The thesis investigates a specific US Supreme Court ruling called Citizens United. The ruling enabled corporations and unions to use their own treasuries for unlimited independent political expenditures.

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.

Idag är det inte helt ovanligt att tala om datorer som att de förstår eller på ett eller annat sätt lever sitt eget liv. Idén om att datorer kanske kan tänka och vara medvetna har sina rötter i det arbete som Alan Turing utförde under 1900-talets första hälft. Han brukar anses ha lagt grunden till det som idag kallas artificiell intelligens (AI) (Preston, 2002). Man började fundera över om datorer kunde ha egenskaper som kan likställas med människors mentala tillstånd och därför användas för att förklara dessa. Ett sådant påstående förs fram i en teori kallad ?datorfunktionalism?.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate why the two Swedish municipalities of Frykerud and Östmark were the only municipalities in Värmland that were forcibly merged by the state during the ?Municipality block reform? of 1971, and whether local identities played a role in the resistance against this reform.     The study is designed as a comparative case study and builds on both history and political science to analyze the topic from a broader perspective. Based on the research situation three theoretical theses have been formulated, the durability of which will be tested in the analysis part of the essay.    The study notes that Frykeruds resistance against the ?Municipality block reform? started when the reform prevented a planned retirement home construction in the municipality. In the analytical part of the essay, the author discusses how the discontent can be interpreted as symptomatic of bourgeois centralization resistance, as well as being due to the fact that traditional, local self-government as a political subject was perceived as threatened.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the critique Richard Shusterman is raising towards Maurice Merleau-Pontys view on consciousness of bodily sensations and habit. Richard Shusterman critique towards Merleau-Ponty is found to have no other basis than Shusterman own subjective view on what the task of philosophy is..

This essay describes my work as a director in a specialized orientation within psychodrama, surrealistic psychodrama. Using the language and performance techniques of theater and under the guidance of a director, psychodrama creates an improvised narrative or story. The essay describes several dramas I have directed, reflecting on my actions and choices as a director and group leader. I examine whether my working method has allowed me to be spontaneous and creative, which I believe the example of "The dangerous bear" demonstrates. The process enabled me to establish trust and receptivity so that a newly constituted group dared to investigate conflicts in symbolic ways associated with illness and death.

This is a case study on the functioning of political parties and the aim was to explain ?how? and ?why? the Swedish social democratic party changed their policies in the Middle East politics. I wanted to explain this process of change by using Angelo Panebianco?s framework for the analysis of political parties. Angelo Panebianco´s hypothesis is that all parties must be viewed as organizations to understand their functions.

En befolkningspolicy signalerar mer än hur många barn en kvinna ska ha. Den visar hur staten ser på sina medborgare och vilka saker man värderar. Den iranska befolkningspolitiken har varit väldigt framgångsrik trots att den inte är i samklang med en traditionell syn på mödrar. Uppsatsen diskuterar vilken betydelse dessa två diskurseer har för statens förhållande till kvinnliga medborgare..

This master thesis is about one of the first female in the Swedish Parliament, Elisabeth Tamm (1880?1958), and her political articles in the magazine Tidevarvet. The aim of this study is to find similarities with Tamm?s political thoughts with the Ecofeministic theory. Due to women?s right to vote 1919 women citizenship was in a political debate.

The centre of attention in this essay is on public-private-partnerships in Swedish city planning. It discusses the phenomenon and tries to identify the problems and possibilities that may appear when private and public actors are trying to work together to plan new cities or parts of cities in a process with network structures. The main questions that is asked is ?what vision for the city can we se, and who's vision is it?? together with the question of where the actual power to make the city plan and the vision can be find. The soon-to-be-built area Ulriksdal in Stockholm were Peab AB and Solna Stad stands as main actors has been chosen to illustrate the possible problems and is analysed from different angles, but the writers intention is also to say something on the matter in general.

There is a clear difference between types of regions and forms of regionalization. This theoretical division can point out other division lines on different areas and levels, like the one of discourses. In this article is urged that regional political discourses may be divided in West and East European ones. To argue for West and East differences in regional discourse the article shows division lines both in the history of regionalization but also in ideologies. The regional policy of the EU is one example for today's regionalization as a West discourse and the Transylvanian in Rumania as an example for the East discourse.

AbstractEssay in political Science (c-level) by Karin Forsling, Spring 2007A school for the best interest of the child? - The Swedish School System according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.Supervisor: Stig MontinThe purpose of this essay is to investigate how the Swedish governments work with the im-plementation of this convention and what progress has been made. The inquiry of this study is to describe how the changing in the Swedish School System correspond to the national strat-egy for implementation of UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in Sweden and how the political protagonists.I have read some of the most relevant documents from the authorities and organisations work-ing with children?s rights in Sweden and papers and communications from the political pro-tagonists.Since UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was ratified by Sweden in 1990 the work for implementation has been quite successful but there are still lots to do. There are still some problems in School such as bullying, insulting, insecurity and lack of peaceful and harmoni-ous school environment.

The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze why or why not Swedish municipalities implement the gender equality policy ? ?right to work fulltime?. In order to understand this institutional change, the analysis is based on a theoretical framework consisting of two fields: political representation and feminist institutionalism. The study is divided into two empirical inquiries. The first part is based on a quantitative survey that describes the casual relationship between two independent variables; women´s political representation and party ideology, and the dependent variable; political decision about ?right to work fulltime?.