Participating in peace support operations has been and remains a significant part of the Swedish defense and security politics. Since the end of the Cold War, the Swedish national defence has been more and more dismantled, in favor of international peace support operations which have become an increasingly important task for the Swedish defence. Why then, is Sweden so engaged in conflicts so far from home? Using two classic theories of international politics, realism and liberalism, this study aims to shed light on arguments from the Swedish parliament on why it is important for Sweden to participate in international peace support operations. After analyzing arguments of the Social Democrat Party, the Moderate Party, the Green Party and the Liberal Party concerning three different peace support operations which Sweden has participated in, the result shows that although both realism and liberalism are influencing the parties? argumentation, liberalism is the theory which is used more often.

AbstractTitle: Foreign news coverage. Does the media influence the action in international crises? (Utrikesbevakning. Påverkar media agerandet i internationella kriser?)Number of pages: 39Author: Charlotta AndréssonTutor: Professor Lowe HedmanCourse: Media and Communication Studies CUniversity: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.Date of submission: 2007-01-03, autumn term of 2006Purpose/AimThe purpose of the essay is partly to examine if foreign news coverage influence the political agenda setting and the incentives of the public?s willingness to give charity for humanitarian crises.

The ambition of this paper is to study the construction of the categorization between ?us? and ?them? in a religious minority, represented by Jehovah?s Witnesses and a nationalist political party, represented by the Swedish Democrats. This will be done by a discursive psychology analysis of their official publications on each group?s website. By a deductive study using Henri Tajfel?s Social Identity Theory trying to disclose the psychological processes; social categorization, social identity, social comparison and psychological distinctiveness.

The question of direct citizen participation in politics and administration is a contestable one. Its proponents claim that it has positive consequences even for the more "traditional", representative democracy, since participation leads to an increased political knowledge and increased political interest, and thus creates a revitalised democracy. Critical voices have however been raised to the validity of this claim. Critics have also pointed out direct participation as problematic, because it leads to problems of political inequality: a difference of political influence between ? on the one hand, the citizens participating directly and those that restrict their political participation to voting, and ? on the one the other hand ? between the institutions, for example schools, that employ, and don?t employ this method of direct citizen influence.In this essay, these two points of criticisms are tested in the context of user-boards in elementary and secondary schools.

This Masters Thesis is about the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs and the arms length principle. The principle is used to explain the separation of power between two parts with a common interest. The main purpose is to elucidate if, and if so in what way, the arms length principle can be used to explain the relation between the National Council for Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Education and Culture, i.e. the Swedish government, but also to examine the structures of power and relations within the Council. In the thesis we show that in the field of cultural policy the content of the arm lengths principle varies due to the many interpretations of the meaning.

The purpose of this thesis is to clarify the grounds upon which an arbitration clause may be binding in the new relationship between the parties after a transfer of rights and/or obligations. The issue is not regulated by law but instead it has been left to the Supreme Court to regulate. In the Emja-case the Swedish Supreme Court left guidance on the issue. The Supreme Court stated that a third party purchaser of a right where the contract includes an arbitration clause shall be bound by the clause. The arbitration clause is only binding to the remaining part of the initial agreement if no special circumstances exist. The binding effect was justified by the reason that a situation where the purchaser but not the remaining part should be bound to the clause was not sought after and the principle through the 27 § of the Swedish debt instruments act..

An inquiry into the post-war European aesthetic and political landscape should take the international organization Unesco?s colour reproductions and travelling exhibitions of paintings into consideration. In these, the organization implements André Malraux? idea of the ?imaginary museum? as a framework for a future cosmopolitical, aesthetic (and utopian) community. During the late 1940?s, the Swedish government also discusses the need for raising an ?aesthetic awareness? amongst their citizens as a consequence to a poor knowledge in the fine arts.

The aim of this thesis is to study why Swedish authorities do organizational changes. Two organizations are analyzed; The Swedish Tax Agency (Skatteverket) and the National Statistics Office of Sweden (Statistiska centralbyrån). A qualitative method, consisting mainly of interviews with key officials, is employed to study two aspects of organizational change: first, the main reasons for changing the organization and, second, how the process that preceded the actual change was carried out. Furthermore, two different theoretical perspectives are used to construct a basis for the analysis. One of the perspectives assumes a social constructivist approach, while the other is rationalistic inspired.

This thesis examines political consumerism as a political tool for change. Consumers' attitudes and behaviour towards political consumerism is of special interest. The method used is a questionnaire with 59 participating students. Their answers are analysed both quantitatively and, to a lesser degree, qualitatively. The theoretical framework consists of Fishbein and Ajzen's theory of reasoned action and previously published research of essence.The consumers in this study generally rank corporate social responsibility (CSR) as important.

AbstractWith this c-composition, I am trying to give a view over what has happened in the political area and the issues that concerns environmental aid. My analyze starts in the 60-ies when the environmental debate took of. It continues trough the 70-ies, 80-ies and ends in 1994 with the report that considers the UN-conference in Rio de Janeiro 1992, ?Sustainable Aid? and what the results of the more and more important issue ?sustainable development? has offered the Swedish government ant there work with environmental aid.The question issue is: At what time in history, did the Swedisch government start to addrsess environmental aid? How did the environmental aid come to be addressed and developed in the political area from the Brundtlandreport ?Our common future? from 1987 to the UN-conference in Rio de Janeiro 1992?The result is that the environment is getting more and more important in the political arena as the knowledge about the escalating crises with the environmental problems are being taken more seriously. The problems with the environment has to be considered together with the rest of the aid- and developing questions like economy and the struggle to reduce poverty in the world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine witch factors lays behind political decisions when reforming upper secondary school. Three major factors are used: political, economical and structural. These factors become visible by comparing the school reforms 1965 and the coming one in 2009. An analytical scheme is used to find the factors in the primary information. The study is based both political inquiries and on debate articles from newspapers and political papers.The results show that two factors are more visible than the third, and that is the ideological and structural.

During the last few years the countries in the African continent have experienced an enormous increase in female politicians on a national level. Rwanda is even the country with the highest number of female politicians in its parliament in the world. Despite this development in Africa, the quantitative research on women's political representation in the world has not yet paid attention to the situation there. Some of the surveys that have been done have even excluded countries that do not fit the homogeneous pattern ? which is precisely the problem with African countries ? for it to be possible to explain the situation with existing theories.The intention of this paper is therefore to, with all of the 53 African countries included in the study, examine whether the already existing explanatory factors regarding women's political representation also can be applied to an African context to explain the situation there.

In the beginning of 2002 a new kind of debate started inside the Swedish trade unions that also were published in the newspapers. The debate was about if the Swedish trade unionshould organize the undocumented workforce or not. In this thesis I will deal with this issue and also investigate what kind of solutions the trade unions in Sweden use on this newphenomenon, a phenomenon that recently have become a social and political problem during the last years. This is a new subject within political science and there is limited research made before. Because of that, this thesis will be empirical, inductive and exploring by its nature.

The aim of this thesis is to study how Denmark and the Danish people has been represented in the Swedish press and which images of them that appears. For this purpose I make use of discourse analysis and discourse theory. By analysing three cases were the debate about the Danish migration policy has been scrutinized in Swedish newspapers I seek to discover different ways of looking at the world. The study concentrates on the descriptions made by journalists and others who contribute to the debate in the media. The results show an image of the Danes as a people reluctant to foreigners and restrictive in their politics.

The present memorandum outlines the structure, theoretical starting points and disposition of a thesis about the activities of Finnish immigrants in a Swedish local community, more specifically their political integration. The intention is to study the municipality of Katrineholm in the years 1944 to 1991.Previous research about the actorship of immigrants in spheres such as politics, labour unions, immigrant associations, educational associations and mass-education, as well as churches and religion, is presented to give an overview of possible areas connected to political integration that can be studied. The overview of previous research also covers local immigrant politics.The intended theoretical starting points for the proposed thesis are political economy and hegemony. The latter is intended to be investigated through its expression in the social relations class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and generation. It is suggested in this memorandum that hegemonies and social relations within a local political economy can be operationalised fruitfully in a study of political integration.