| 1. |
- Hasic, Tigran, 1969-
(författare)
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Reconstruction planning in post-conflict zones : Bosnia and Herzegovina and the international community
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The history of mankind has been plagued by an almost continuous chain of various armed conflicts - local, regional, national and global - that have caused horrendous damage to the social and physical fabric of cities. The tragedy of millions deprived by war still continues. This study sets out to understand the nature of reconstruction after war in the light of recent armed conflicts. It attempts to catalogue and discuss the tasks involved in the process of reconstruction planning by establishing a conceptual framework of the main issues in the reconstruction process. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina is examined in detail and on the whole acts as the leit-motif of the whole dissertation and positions reconstruction in the broader context of sustainable development. The study is organized into two parts that constitute the doctoral aggregate dissertation – a combining of papers with an introductory monograph. In this case the introductory monograph is an extended one and there are six papers that follow. Both sections can be read on their own merits but also constitute one entity.The rebuilding of war-devastated countries and communities can be seen as a series of nonintegrated activities carried out (and often imposed) by international agencies and governments, serving political and other agendas. The result is that calamities of war are often accompanied by the calamities of reconstruction without any regard to sustainable development. The body of knowledge related to post-conflict reconstruction lacks a strong and cohesive theory. In order to better understand the process of reconstruction we present a qualitative inquiry based on the Grounded Theory Method developed originally by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967). This approach utilizes a complex conceptualization with empirical evidence to produce theoretical structure. The results of process have evolved into the development of a conceptual model, called SCOPE (Sustainable Communities in Post-conflict Environments).This study proposes both a structure within which to examine post-conflict reconstruction and provides an implementation method. We propose to use the SCOPE model as a set of strategy, policy and program recommendations to assist the international community and all relevant decision-makers to ensure that the destruction and carnage of war does not have to be followed by a disaster of post-conflict reconstruction. We also offer to provide a new foundation and paradigm on post-conflict reconstruction, which incorporates and integrates a number of approaches into a multidisciplinary and systems thinking manner in order to better understand the complexity and dependencies of issues at hand. We believe that such a systems approach could better be able to incorporate the complexities involved and would offer much better results than the approaches currently in use.The final section of this study returns to the fact that although it is probably impossible to produce universal answers, we desperately need to find commonalities amongst different postconflict reconstruction settings in order to better deal with the reconstruction planning in a more dynamic, proactive, and sustainable manner.
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| 2. |
- Gustafsson, Mariana S., 1978-
(författare)
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Reassembling Local E-Government : A study of actors’ translations of digitalisation in public administration
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The digitalisation of society decidedly affects public administration. Swedish public administration has long worked with information technologies for an effective and improved management of public services. But new and increased use of information technologies in society poses new challenges. New demands on information security are increasing, while accessibility and transparency are important priorities in policies on digitalisation in public services. However, the central government’s ambitions and expectations with regard to digitalisation face a slow and hesitant implementation in local governments. There are important differences between municipalities in priorities, local needs, and implementation mechanisms in connection with e-government. In this thesis, I argue there is a need to reconsider the role of governance mechanisms in e-government. There is a need to understand local translations of national policies and technological developments in relation to the goals of more effective and legitimate public administration. The main purpose of this thesis is to analyse tensions that emerge in the implementation of egovernment in local public administration. On the basis of a constructivist and interpretivist approach, I have undertaken two empirical studies. One focuses on municipal administration of education in Linköping. The other focuses on a governance network on digitalisation policy in Östergötland. The studies are presented in four papers. The issues addressed in the papers are further analysed with a focus on four fields of tension, using network governance theory and translation theory. This shows that the implementation of e-government in local public administration is a tension-laden process. The four fields of tension relate to: different logics and dilemmas for adoption and implementation; concerns and ambiguities in a context of unclear organisational and institutional arrangements; concerns and resistance from professional users; and a reassessment of the meaning of security as a reference for the interpretation of information security. I contend that established managerial and evolutionary models of e-government leave important process-related aspects out of the analysis of change in public administration. The contribution of this thesis lies in its description and analysis of the four identified fields of tension. One significant implication of my analysis is that reassembling current governance mechanisms in local public administration is crucial.
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| 3. |
- Philipson Isaac, Sarah, 1990
(författare)
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Temporal Dispossession: The Politics of Asylum and the Remaking of Racial Capitalism in and Beyond the Borders of the Swedish Welfare State
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis sets out from the post-2015 Swedish asylum legislation, which made Sweden’s asylum policy among the most restrictive in the EU. The most decisive changes were the shift from permanent to temporary residence permits as the standard protection provided, along with the increasingly blurred lines between migration regimes and labour market policies. With temporary residence permits as the new norm, time and labour market productivity are central to the distribution of vulnerability and life chances, as labour market participation functions as the only means of qualifying for permanent residence. The policy shift can be seen as an institutionalization of temporality and deportability, as it carries the inherent risk of deportation if residence permits are not reissued upon renewal. Against this background, this thesis draws on temporal enactments of dispossession and racial capitalism as a theoretical framework to analyse how the control of time results in different forms of dispossession – a feature that is closely tied to the selection logics of late racial capitalism, namely: differentiation, devaluation, and competition. Although dispossession has been conceptualized as a mechanism of authoritative control over the spatial, emotional, and relational aspects of (neo)colonized subjects’ lives, research often fails to recognize the significance of time and temporality in understanding this process. Here, I seek to bridge this gap. Furthermore, where migration studies have been critiqued for perpetuating methodological nationalism, temporal dispossession foregrounds time as central to the distribution of rights to make visible how the control of time is an experience shared across multiple positions – citizens and non-citizens alike. While this directs our attention to the continuum of temporal control, those positioned as migrants are often experiencing the most acute effects of the temporal restrictions that affect access to rights. The thesis builds on four years of ethnographical engagements with interlocutors who sought asylum between 2015 and 2017, and interviews with street-level bureaucrats, from the Swedish Migration Agency, NGOs, asylum lawyers, to the Swedish Public Employment Service. Consequently, engaging with the interlocutors’ experiences through the theoretical lens of temporal dispossession is a means of centring time not only within the workings of racial capitalism, but also on how border regimes work to sustain racial capitalism and how labour market exploitation is exacerbated by the legal liminality the interlocutors inhabit. Chapter 5, on temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy, examines the temporal dimensions of the Migration Agency’s New Public Management (NPM) procedures as they assess asylum applications. It traces the enforced deceleration, interrupted by pockets of acceleration, that obscures the interlocutors from frames of intelligibility in the asylum process. Here, temporal dispossession consists of preventing those seeking asylum from making progress in their cases, using temporal means of discarding their need for protection and relegating them to a different pace of time as compared to the surrounding society, effectively positioning them as untrustworthy and thus as undeserving asylum subjects. Chapter 6 investigates ‘islands of dispossession’ where time and space merge in the analysis of the body as the most intimate scale of such islands, asylum camps and make-shift camps as the national scale, and enforcement archipelagos as the global scale. Together, these tease out the role of temporal dispossession in carceral geographies and the role of border regimes in sustaining racial capitalism. The chapter also engages with how interlocutors redefine and resist the spaces of the camp through community formations. The final analytical chapter on the workings of temporal dispossession in the labour market (Chapter 7) examines the productivity of time in the production of surplus, cheap, and disposable labour forces, where labour market participation constitutes the only means of securing permanent protection. This is examined through the interlocutors’ experiences navigating the informal labour market, ‘fast track’ labour market programmes, and their attempts to ‘switch’ tracks from asylum to labour market migration to secure their futures and reduce the pervasive threat of deportability. Taken together, the thesis seeks to contribute to research on how dispossession operates in and through the border regime, specifically through its temporal configurations, and how the latter is weaponised to dispossess people of their life chances. The thesis further seeks to contribute to research on the political economy of borders in the Nordic context by examining the operation of racial capitalism through the welfare state, where labour market exploitation is exacerbated by the precarity produced through its migration bureaucracies.
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| 4. |
- Upadhyaya, Prabhat
(författare)
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National Appropriateness of International Climate Policy Frameworks in India, Brazil, and South Africa
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How does the international climate policy frameworks influence the domestic institutional responses to climate mitigation in emerging economies? And how, in turn, do domestic institutions and politics in emerging economies influence the fate of international climate policy frameworks? The thesis provides answers to these questions by studying domestic engagements with Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions in three emerging economies – India, Brazil, and South Africa. The thesis specifically studies how these engagements were influenced by the domestic institutional context provided by national climate policy, norms, and institutional capacity in the three countries. Drawing upon the variations in the engagements with nationally appropriate mitigation actions, made visible by use of the policy cycle as a heuristic device, the thesis informs the implementation of another nascent, yet prevalent, international climate policy framework – Nationally Determined Contributions. The thesis identifies how engagements with nationally appropriate mitigation actions varied in India, Brazil, and South Africa in agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, implementation, and evaluation. In cases where international support is considered crucial for taking mitigation actions, external factors such as lack of clarity on definitional aspects and availability of international support can hamper the prospects of such frameworks at the agenda-setting and policy formulation stages. Efforts to engage with these frameworks under this uncertainty are held back by non-decisions, overriding national climate policy, as well as by uneven inter-ministerial coordination. The thesis argues that successful implementation of upcoming Nationally Determined Contributions will be influenced by a country’s ability to align them with its national climate policy, localization of the transnational norms, and the extent to which efforts to enhance institutional capacity for coordinating the implementation of national climate policy are made. In sum, the effective implementation of International Climate Policy Frameworks will be dependent on the willingness of the state to provide oversight and coordination, and clarity on the availability of international support.
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| 5. |
- Rodríguez Morales, Jorge Ernesto, 1974-
(författare)
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The political economy of adaptation pathways to climate change : An historical institutional approach
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- While there is a growing recognition of the need for societies to adapt to climate change, adaptation governance often falls short and can even worsen existing vulnerabilities. This problem is exacerbated by the deep connection between climate change and economic system governance. It underscores the importance of gaining a better understanding of how economic governance influences adaptation pathways. However, this intricate interplay remains relatively unexplored in the realms of both global governance and climate adaptation research.This thesis seeks to address this gap in the existing literature by adopting a historical political economy approach. This approach helps us comprehend how adaptation is governed within the context of historically formed 'glocalized' regimes and sheds light on why adaptation pathways may inadvertently exacerbate vulnerabilities. The research considers how vulnerabilities and adaptation pathways are deeply embedded in glocalized regimes and how historical processes constrain transformative changes while explaining instances of maladaptation. The thesis explores the argument empirically by relying on extensive fieldwork material and document analysis in three Latin American countries: Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay. These countries have economies heavily reliant on extractive sectors like mining and agriculture, which play pivotal roles in their economic histories and are associated with local vulnerabilities and socio-environmental impacts.The results suggest that climate responses are not exogenous to the glocalized capitalist regimes but adaptation pathways are, in fact, driven by extractive capitalism. Furthermore, the results show how dominant scientific frames are deployed in both the production of knowledge and the adaptation responses to climate impacts and vulnerabilities. These responses tend to marginalize discussions about the transformative changes necessary for tackling climate change and vulnerabilities under the influence of extractive capitalism. By revealing and analyzing these structural dynamics, this thesis contributes significantly to climate adaptation and global governance scholarship.
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| 6. |
- Tängh Wrangel, Claes, 1980-
(författare)
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The Use of Hope : Biopolitics of Security During the Obama Presidency
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Through a compilation of four research articles, this PhD thesis investigates ‘hope’ as a biopolitical technology. It interrogates the use of hope by the United States security apparatus, on the one hand, to pre-empt processes of radicalisation and, on the other hand, to prepare the subject of security to cope with permanent insecurity. The dissertation analyses the security dis- course of the Obama Administrations 2009 – 2016, paying particular atten- tion to strategic narratives of hope across three principal domains of US secu- rity: diplomacy, development and military. The thesis thereby renders visible a set of ambiguous relations between hope and insecurity in US foreign poli- cy during the Obama period: between hate and hope in the domain of (public) diplomacy; between despair and hope in the domain of development; and between fear and hope in the military domain. To analyse the respective strategic narratives, the thesis employs a theoretical framework drawn from Giorgio Agamben’s theory of biopolitics, through which hope appears as a means of governing the future, a technology employed to regulate processes of subjectification. The dissertation’s theoretical ambition is to question a central assumption undergirding important critique of the post-9/11 biopoliti- cal condition: namely that practices of security are inherently at odds with hope, operating through discourses and practices of fear and suffering to reduce the capacity to hope within the global populace. By analysing the appropriation of hope by US security discourse, the thesis explores how prac- tices of security works through hope to achieve security. US security dis- course achieves this by means of constituting a particular form of hopeful life: an individualised and resilient form of neoliberal life who is called to embody an indistinction between fear, despair, hate and hope.
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| 7. |
- Higham, Ian, 1989-
(författare)
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Explaining Early Adoption : National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Diffusion of innovations theory concerns the process by which innovations are communicated through the members of a social system. Previous research has shed significant light on how public policies diffuse across governments over time, but there is little understanding of why they diffuse. The answer may lie in the motivations of early adopters. When governments are the first to adopt policy innovations, they lack knowledge about the political, economic, and other costs of adopting the policy. Given the potential risks, it is not obvious why a government would want to be the first to adopt a policy innovation. This thesis investigates the question of what explains early adoption of policy innovations. It contributes to the international relations literature on policy diffusion by proposing a theoretical framework for studying early adoption that consists of four motivations: 1) Normative – the government adopts a policy because of a normative position on a particular objective; 2) Reputation – the government seeks to improve its image or garner legitimacy in the international community; 3) Competition – the government seeks to gain a competitive edge on other states in “races to the top”; and 4) Domestic lock-in – the government adopts a policy to “tie the hands” of future national governments.The thesis has an empirical focus on public policies for regulating corporations on human rights issues: National Action Plans on business and human rights (NAPs). These plans are national governments’ strategies for implementing the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), a set of global policy norms that provide guidance for states and corporations on addressing the human rights impacts of business. As this field is largely neglected by political scientists, the thesis makes an additional empirical contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary literature on business and human rights. The theoretical framework is applied in a two-step, mixed-methods research design that includes a global mapping of NAPs and hypothesis testing. The thesis then presents three sets of comparative case studies: Colombia/Ecuador, United States/Canada, and France/Sweden. In the first four case studies, the theoretical framework is used to compare early adopters and laggards. In the final case study chapter, two early adopters are compared to determine whether there is potential to explain variation within the adopter category.The findings lead to several conclusions. First, normative commitment can provide a strong motivation for early adoption, and domestic actors are particularly important for shaping a government’s normative preferences. Second, governments with concerns about their international reputations are more likely to be early adopters, especially if reputation gains are linked to a reward. Third, governments act strategically to trigger races to the top, especially when they are more economically powerful. They thus adopt particular styles of regulation early to influence the style of regulation adopted elsewhere. Fourth, the desire to lock a policy in place domestically is an especially powerful motivation for early adoption, although it is not essential. Governments may seek to lock policies in place both in advance of imminent political loss and in the wake of domestic political strife. Finally, interactions between these motivations may give them more explanatory power and may explain the relative stringency of the policy adopted. Reputational concerns and the desire to lock policies in place are especially mutually reinforcing.
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| 8. |
- Åkebo, Malin, 1982-
(författare)
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The Politics of Ceasefires : On Ceasefire Agreements and Peace Processes in Aceh and Sri Lanka
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent decades we have seen an increase in peace processes aimed at solving armed conflicts through peaceful means. The often fragile characteristics of such processes and the settlements that they produce underline the essential importance of improving our understanding of the dynamics at play in transitions from war to peace. This thesis aims to contribute to this overarching objective by analysing ceasefire agreements in relation to peace processes in two protracted intrastate armed conflicts: Aceh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. In the scholarly literature, ceasefire agreements are often assumed to create momentum due to their ability to pave the way to a peaceful solution. At the same time, it has also been suggested that ceasefires can influence conflict dynamics in negative ways. Although there are many unanswered questions about ceasefire agreements in contemporary peace processes, few studies have been devoted to systematic and in-depth analysis of how ceasefire agreements can be characterized and analysed in relation to peace processes in protracted intrastate conflicts. This thesis, which is based on written documents and on interviews conducted during four research trips to the region, contributes to filling this research gap by presenting comparative case studies of Aceh and Sri Lanka. The point of departure in the study is a process-oriented, conflict dynamics approach and a view that war-to-peace transitions require changes in the conflicting parties’ attitudes, behaviours and relationships. I analyse and compare ceasefire agreements by looking at their initiation, form and content, and by examining their implementation and the unfolding of the processes. I identify six key factors in the literature that can influence the conflicting parties’ attitudes, behaviours and relationships. I then use these factors to analyse ceasefire agreements in relation to the dynamics of the broader peace processes. In this thesis I show how these key factors – including issues of recognition, trust, whether the parties’ claims are met, international involvement, contextual changes and intra-party dynamics – have mattered. I also show that context is important for understanding how and why they have mattered. The results suggest that ceasefire agreements can facilitate war-topeace transitions; however, it also illuminates challenges and the risk that such agreements can be counter-productive in the context of intrastate conflicts. The study also shows that ceasefire agreements have a historical legacy, as illustrated by their impact on subsequent interactions and agreements, and it underlines the symbolic politics of ceasefires in asymmetrical intrastate conflicts. The thesis ends with a number of propositions, among others that ceasefire agreements tend to become more comprehensive over time and that power struggles and developments within the conflicting parties are important for understanding ceasefire agreements in relation to contemporary peace processes.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Brenner, Björn
(författare)
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ISLAMIST GOVERNANCE HAMAS STYLE: Readings from the Palestinian experiment in Islamic democracy
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study investigates how the Palestinian Islamists in Hamas came to govern following their success in the 2006 parliamentary elections. The study poses the overarching research question: How can Hamas's governance in the Gaza Strip between 2006 and 2012 be characterised and understood? Hamas has attracted particular research interest, partly due to its seemingly contradictory conduct, and partly due to the fact that this was the first case of Islamists in the Arab world to ascend to power by democratic means. On the one hand, Hamas has led an armed struggle against Israel. On the other hand, Hamas has participated in electoral processes in a peaceful and democratic fashion. As a result of this, the case of Hamas relates to two scholarly debates in particular - the nature of Islamism and the nature of Hamas. There is also a strong extra-scientific relevance to the study, as Hamas remains a powerful force in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. How Hamas is dealt with will have repercussions on when and in what shape the pending Palestinian state will materialise. The study addresses the research question by focusing on how the new government perceived and reacted to three key challenges to its exercise of power: relating to the political system and the main opposition party; countering violent radicalisation and local splinter groups; and re-establishing societal order and reforming the legal system. The study finds that the Hamas government lacked the necessary organisation, knowledge and experience to carry out its duties. It also finds that the government perceived itself to be subjected to an imminent threat of being overthrown. The study shows that while the Hamas government was far from fulfilling the democratic promises it had set out in its reform programme, it did not proceed to change the political system into any Islamic theocracy governed by sharia. As the analysis concludes, Hamas's governance could be characterised neither as singularly authoritarian and Islamic, nor as merely democratic and secular. Rather, Islamist governance Hamas style has been a blurred combination of all these traits together, firmly guided by a far-reaching ideological pragmatism and a continuously perceived necessity for further power consolidation.
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