The problem with narcotics is one of Sweden?s biggest social problems. Statistics shows thatthe number of narcotic related deaths and the numbers of heavy drug users are increasing. Thepresent narcotic policy has been questioned due to this increase. As a social worker you meetdrug users on a daily basis.

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.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the discourse on political exclusion in the official report Demokratiutredningen. It has been my ambition to relate the analysis of the report to a critical academic discourse on political exclusion and thereby make visible hidden norms and structures which functions to exclude certain individuals and groups from political participation.My paper point out that the report establishes a strong link between democracy and participation and that it, therefore, makes a strong case for a process of democratic inclusion. Though, in my study I suggest that that there is an unawareness of the importance of norms, hegemonic conceptions and structures and that inclusion, therefore, is unlikely to take place. Furthermore, I criticize the focus on deliberative democracy in the report. With insights offered by Mouffe in her argumentation on the necessity to acknowledge the dimension of antagonism present in all societies I underline that the focus on this democratic model is problematic.My conclusion is that the analysis presented in the report is insufficient if we want to create a democratic system characterized by equality..

This thesis intends to examine the role of the city, Dublin, in the Irish economic growth during the 1990s. It is a case study where Dublin is compared with current theories on post modern cities as growth machines and increasingly prominent actors in the global context. The study has an interdisciplinary approach but focuses on political science issues such as power distribution, global-local governance and local political organisation. It is a theory driven study that also intends to add aspects to the understanding of the cities of our time. I argue that Dublin has faced a lot of changes during the last decades in accordance with the post modern city.

The purpose of this essay was to investigate socialworker's perception of threats and violence in their daily work from the perspective of power. In order to obtain as clear and distinct responses as possible, I used qualitative interviews for this study. The respondents represent a "socialförvaltning" that handles financial assistance in a medium-sized city. This department was chosen because the socialworkers that handle financial assistance at this department have been identified by the media as particularly vulnerable. The study showed that verbal threats are commonplace but physical violence is rare.

This study examines which socially constructed threats and subjects of security existed during the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Stockholm 2010. With ideas of identity and difference as a starting point the theoretical framework is then developed with ideas from the new critical security studies including key subjects such as attributes, risk, imaging and visualisation. The study will be executed with the use of a discourse analysis approach using newspaper articles and chronicles as the principal empirical material. The analysis will then follow two separate themes. Firstly, the different threats and subjects of security will be deduced, and also, how these social constructions inevitably create each other and require each other to continue existing.

Vi har valt att titta på hur organiseringen påverkar sociala rörelse-organisationers fortlevnad. Medlemsantalet är vår operationalisering av fortlevnaden. Våra två fall är Amnesty International och Attac.För- och nackdelar med olika organisationssätt tydliggörs med hjälp av två organisatoriska idealmodeller som till stor del är varandras motsatser. Dessa är den vertikala modellen och den horisontella modellen.Dessa för- och nackdelar har vi ställt mot empirin. Vi har använt oss av litteratur, hemsidor och intervjuer för att få en bild av hur organisationerna ser ut.Trots att Attac är nätverksbaserad och Amnesty är mer vertikalt ordnad, har båda visat prov på flexibilitet och lyckats skapa delaktighet, vilket är positivt för organisationernas fortlevnad.

The Catholic Church launched several crusades during the medieval ages in order to regainthe holy lands and spread the word of God. Their main enemy, the Muslims had grownstronger and needed to be suppressed. This common enemy united Europe under the banner ofthe Catholic Church. In order to fund these crusades the church turned to the wealthyEuropean kings and lords and asked for funding. In return the kings received an indulgenceletter, and also greater respect from their subjects because of their new appreciation from thepope.

Participation is central to the concept of democracy. The role of the civic participation varies with different types of democracy, but a fundamental requirement is that the participation is free and equal. In spite of this, there are significant differences between possibilities to democratic participation in Sweden today.This essay seeks to understand how disability, historically and still today, is constructed as a social deviation from normality, and is constructed to Otherness.One way to regard freedom and equality is to examine the personal autonomy, the legth to wich a person decides her/his roles and activities in abcence of external limitations. Personal autonomy is theoretically central in deliberative and strong democracy, but should reasonobly be a demand for the fundamental definition of democracy.The explanation to why the lack of personal autonomy is accepted, is that the construction of Otherness results in that the persons are categorized and are given simplified characteristics, and are thereby not accepted as equivalent people.In the inteviews conducted, seven politicians contribute both whiteness, pathological discourses regarding disability and ideas of normality through discussing democracy, participation and disability. Simultaniously, they express interest and an awareness on the majority's power and symbolic violence on the minority..

In January 2007 the Öresund committy changed its statutes to become a more politically oriented lobby organization. This change can be interpreted as one part of a continuously evolving process where the Öresund region is emancipating itself from the national states in a multi-level European environment. By focusing on this latest development the thesis puts forward the importance of political institutions, as well as politicians and civil servants as actors in them, as crucial factors in the process where the region is gaining political power. The thesis shows how the political cross-border cooperation in the Öresund region is being institutionalized which affects its power relations to other levels in the multi-level system, predominantly the national states. In other words, there is a connection between power and institutionalization.The Öresund committee has by gaining better access to policymaking agendas on the national levels proven that the organizational change has already started to bear fruit.

This paper deals with Will Kymlicka's and Charles Taylor's theories of multiculturalism, and the criticism of these theories by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib. It also gives a brief background to the Swedish integration and minority policies and places them in relations to the academic discussion. Taylor advocates cultural survival to be a legitimate policy objective and Kymlicka argues that rights should be diversified in order to adapt to different needs of cultural minorities. The thesis aims to confront the theories with interviews of four persons who voluntarily or by profession work for the interest of minorities. The theories have been operationalized as questions and structured in four themes with the purpose of analyzing the interviews.

The purpose of this essay has been to examine how the city of Helsingborg´s prevention of alcohol and drug use among youths is laid out. It has been of special interest to examine the youth centers (after school programs) preventive work with youths and its effects on frequency of alcohol and narcotics use among youths.The people we have interviewed are all involved in the three organizations: the youth centers, schools, and social services. The results showed that the youth center staff does not think that they work actively preventive against alcohol and narcotics. On the other hand, the staff at the youth centers points out that just keeping the youths in the neighbourhood and making them involved in the activities at the youth center, is preventary work. The staff at the social services points out that it is not the facilities that is part of the preventive work but the activities and the skill of the staff that is improtant for the youths..

The purpose of this study was to examine how a local newspaper, Landskrona Posten, describes the youth that commit crimes. More specifically the aim was to see what kind of discourse the newspaper had about the young criminal and to see if that picture could create and confirm stereotypes. The theory and method used in the study is a discourse analysis. The study was based on nearly seventy articles that were published in Landskrona Posten in 2006. Three items were identified in the newspaper's description of the youth.

This thesis focuses on the problems involving immigrants and their voting behaviour in Sweden. We presuppose that immigrants vote in a far less extent than Swedish citizen according to general statistics. We try to explain and give solutions to this problem. To our help we use both integration theory focusing on multiculturalism and electoral participation theories.Starting off in these two theories, we have further analyzed a number of policies issued to solve the participation dilemma. The policies were issued in order to elevate the socio-economic standards, inform citizens and close the distance between voters and politicians.Our results show that what work best is long term ventures aiming at integrating immigrants to the Swedish society.

I denna uppsats undersöker författarna orsaker till och konsekvenser av beställar- utförarmodellernas införande genom att undersöka tre landsting och deras styrmodeller. Den teoretiska utgångspunkten hämtas från diskursanalysen, med bas i Laclau, Mouffes och Faircloughs diskursteori, samt principal- agentteorin. Med dessa verktyg utkristalliseras de element som kringgärdar beställar- utförarmodellen och intervjuresultat används för att se hur stort genomslag dessa har fått i undersökta landsting. Resultatet blir en identifikation av demokrati och effektivitet som centrala mål för modellens införande. Alltfler landsting har på senare tid modifierat beställar- utförarmodellen mot en kongruens mellan demokrati och effektivitet.