| 1. |
- Hammarstedt, Anna, 1988-
(författare)
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The Governance of Missing Asylum-Seekers in Sweden : Managing "Missingness" Through Different Technologies of Power
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- For a highly controlled and comprehensive welfare state such as Sweden, one can assume that incorporating populations into a system of bureaucratic management (and keeping them there) is paramount to its overall functioning. Either subjects are incorporated into the system and thereby managed, or subjects are expelled from the system and no longer managed. However, as the Swedish asylum regime has attempted to exert "control" over migration by tightening its asylum policies and practices, it has also admitted that stricter asylum policies and practices will lead to more asylum-seekers with failed claims going missing. Hence, the Swedish asylum regime appears to be paradoxically partaking in the (in)direct creation and facilitation of a space that I call missingness: a space of inbetweeness that disrupts the overall governing logic of being fully present or absent within a bureaucratic system. This thesis aims to examine the governance of missingness within the asylum regime in Sweden. Examining the discourses produced through interviews with state employees who manage the asylum-seeking process, it explores how state employees at three key institutions struggle to deal with the uncertainty and ambiguity of missingness. By adopting a Foucauldian perspective on power, the governance of missingness is analyzed in relation to different technologies of power. This thesis finds that different states of missingness are governed in a multitude of ways, through technologies of disciplinary power, biopower, and pastoral power.
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| 2. |
- Fasakin, Akinbode, 1983-
(författare)
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Subaltern Securitization : The Use of Protest and Violence in Postcolonial Nigeria
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Securitization theory (ST) makes an insightful and significant contribution to security studies. Through the use of discursive speech act, ST provides an innovative strategy for understanding the application of security’s distinctive character and dynamics to any issue in order to make it a security issue. Valuable as the theory is to security studies, the subaltern appear missing in existing securitization analyses. Even when the subaltern are examined, for instance in critiques of classical ST, they are conceived and presented as passive, lacking agency, voice, and power, and suffering from security silence problem. ST’s reliance on discursive speech act and focus on state political elite prevent it from capturing the subaltern and subaltern securitization process. Furthermore, while existing ST and critiques of securitization studies offer some direction regarding how the subaltern actors may securitize threats to their security, these perspectives are incidental and grossly underdeveloped.In order to resolve this problem, the current study takes a novel approach to securitization studies by investigating how subaltern actors engage in securitizing discourses and practices. By combining the Fanonian decolonial theory of emancipatory violence, where the nature of the (post)colonial context becomes visible with the theoretical insights of ST, the study shows that the subaltern are able to securitize using protest and violence. The subaltern use protest and violence to show their perception and identification of security threats, mobilize the subaltern audience, and challenge and confront the threatening subject – often times, the subaltern’s significant audience – to ensure that action is taken on issues concerning subaltern security. In addition to discourse, therefore, protest and violence serve as the subaltern’s instruments of political communication used by the subaltern to move issues beyond normal to the point of extraordinary politics. Consequently, protest and violence can force audiences – including the common people and the political elite – to imagine threats to subaltern security, typically perceived but sometimes real, and accept subaltern securitization moves, and where possible take actions that may amount to an alteration or a change in the order of things. Such change may either be in favour of subaltern’s perception of security or not.To uncover the essential dynamics of subaltern securitization, this study synthesizes a version of decolonial theory with elements of existing ST and focuses on the subaltern actors from below the state in Nigeria, a non-Western, postcolonial context. The results reveal that subaltern securitization is possible when members of the subaltern successfully mobilize themselves to collectively identify (real or perceived) threat to their security and in so doing challenging and confronting the threat. This makes their security concerns an issue of priority. The study concludes that desirable as subaltern securitization may be, especially to the subaltern, there is a tendency for subaltern securitization to obfuscate the danger that may lurk around subaltern’s attempts to securitize certain issues.
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| 3. |
- 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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| 4. |
- Bengtsson, Louise, 1986-
(författare)
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Health security in the European Union : Agents, practices and materialities of securitization
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over the past two decades, the notion of ‘health security’ has emerged as a central tenet of European Union (EU) public health policy. This PhD thesis examines the rise and implications of health security cooperation, associated with an imperative to fight ‘bioterrorist attacks’, pandemics and other natural or man-made events. The study is composed of an introductory chapter as well as five related but self-contained papers, based on participant observation and 52 in-depth interviews at the European Commission as well as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). More specifically, the thesis as a whole explores how security perspectives mattered in different ways for the rise and implications of health security cooperation in the EU. Unlike previous studies which have tended to focus on normative aspects and overarching global dynamics, the thesis examines drivers, contradictions and tensions in a particular, highly institutionalized context. In order to answer a set of empirically motivated questions, the papers draw on various understandings of securitization in critical security studies. The over-all findings cast light on the emergence of a new way of understanding health problems as rapidly emerging, and often external, ‘cross-border threats to health’. The latter may include major infectious disease outbreaks, but also deliberate or accidental release of chemical or biological substances, natural disasters or any other unknown event assumed to threaten not only public health but society as a whole. In the search for potential crises, these are to be rapidly detected and contained rather than prevented in line with traditional public health policy. Partly arising from political speech acts after September 11 as well as bureaucratic practices carving out a role for the EU in public health, these new priorities have also been shaped by EU-specific digital surveillance tools, information sharing platforms and methodologies for managing risk. The findings also point to forms of reflexivity and instances of contestation within the EU institutions themselves, especially in relation to migrant health. As a whole, the thesis thus contributes empirically to a better understanding of how both health and security have come to be pursued within the EU institutions. Theoretically it highlights how approaches to securitization, drawn from partially different scholarly traditions, can be employed as empirically sensitive analytical tools and thereby add to a better understanding of the full prism of securitization processes.
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| 5. |
- Winkler, Stephanie Christine, 1989-
(författare)
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Conceptual Politics in Practice : How Soft Power Changed the World
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Concepts are a key feature of academic research and international politics. Despite the fact that interpreting, classifying and communicating the world through concepts has far-reaching social and political consequences, their various roles and complex dynamics remain poorly understood in International Relations (IR). Instead of disregarding concepts, conflating them with other cognitive terms such as norms, or obsessing about their ability to scientifically capture reality, this dissertation builds on the emerging field of critical concept studies (CSS), which understands concepts as open and contestable interpretive devices that observers use to make sense of the world, often to steer political thought and action. In line with CSS, this dissertation refers to these political struggles as “conceptual politics”—the ways in which actors coin, use, promote, revisit and fight over concepts in anticipation of performative effects—and argues that it constitutes a key facet of politics.The field of CSS is mainly theoretically oriented, and few empirical studies address conceptual politics in practice. The purpose of this study is to further the field of CSS by expanding the notion of conceptual politics. It does so first by developing three issues that previous research presumes are important but does not investigate empirically: the dynamics of feedback loops, or interaction effects between interpretations of the world and the world; reification, the treatment of concepts as if they were real rather than human-made interpretive devices; and travel, the movement of concepts across time, levels and space. Next, the dissertation develops an analytical framework capable of tracing conceptual politics empirically. The dissertation seeks to answer the following key questions: How can we study conceptual politics? How do feedback loops, reification and travel shape conceptual politics? What are the consequences of conceptual politics for world politics?Taking an abductive approach, an analytical framework is developed as a “thinking tool” to trace conceptual politics in practice. Based on a case study design and interpretivist process-tracing, the soft power concept—the ability to affect others through attraction—is subjected to a critical concept analysis of its travel from the US to Japan and China and back to the US again. Although soft power has emerged as a key concern in IR and international politics, the concept and its consequences remain poorly understood. This dissertation finds that the soft power concept has become part and parcel of various political struggles over the “correct” interpretation of reality and the way to act on it. The findings reveal the importance of: continuous efforts to ensure soft power’s position in IR; the concept’s common treatment as if it was real; the interaction effects between its various roles (e.g. social fact and interpretive, foreign policy and socialising tool), which have shaped how “power” and “power shifts” are understood and acted on in international politics; and the emergence of new translations and discrete sites of conceptual politics that rely on, exploit, challenge or even ignore the original concept.From the analysis, a more complete picture of conceptual politics emerges that underscores many dynamics and effects that would otherwise be missed, and advances our understanding of the role of concepts and the consequences of conceptual politics in IR.
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| 6. |
- Yennie Lindgren, Wrenn, 1985-
(författare)
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Japanese Foreign Policy Repertoires : Contests, Promotions and Practices of Legitimation
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Over the past decade, Japan has reformed its foreign and security posture at a pace not witnessed since the first decades of the postwar period. The second Abe Shinzo government (2012–2020) established new national security institutions and laws, reinterpreted the legal foundation for its alliances, revised the development aid charter, removed bans on weapon exports, and aligned explicit security, economic and development policies in broad initiatives across the Indo-Pacific region. Taken together, these moves represent a significant expansion of the boundaries of Japanese foreign policy. How has this been possible? Situated in the field of international relations (IR), with a focus on identity and how repertoires can contribute to our understanding of global interactions, this research provides a rich empirical investigation into the expansion of Japanese foreign policy by revealing the intricacies of the language and practice of policy legitimation. Theoretically, this research draws inspiration from the literature on repertoires. While the repertoire concept stems from the sociological study of social movements, applied to an IR context it allows us to study the reflexive use of and tinkering with the instruments available for the conduct of foreign policy. Actors are constrained by the instruments (economic, military, diplomatic, cultural) available to them, but can also develop and recombine them to effect change over time. To better grasp changes in Japanese foreign policymaking over the past decade, this thesis employs discourse and practice analysis to investigate the tension between national identity, the decision-making processes behind the inclusion of certain instruments in Japan’s foreign policy, the legitimation of policy changes, and the actual, daily execution of foreign policy instruments. To address the question of how instruments in policy repertoires are legitimated, promoted and enacted, the thesis analyzes three aspects of contemporary Japanese foreign policy—public contests, public promotions and on-the-ground practices—and considers specific foreign policy instruments (long-range cruise missiles and official development assistance) and various sites of practice (the Japanese parliament, development cooperation festivals and Myanmar). The thesis comprises an introductory chapter and four related articles with independent research inquiries. As a whole, it demonstrates that delving into the detail of foreign policy legitimation through the study of repertoires can bring to the fore new knowledge about the conduct of foreign policy and advance our understanding of the foreign policy expansions of one of the most prominent states in a region of central importance to international politics. Specifically, it finds that dominant narratives about Japan as a foreign policy actor provide a necessary foundation for unorthodox policy proposals. The analysis finds both path dependency and innovation in Japan’s foreign policy repertoire. Its findings lend evidence to scholarship on foreign policy, legitimation and identity, as well as to the debate on the expansion of Japanese foreign policy, and are of relevance to both scholars and foreign policy practitioners.
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| 7. |
- Backman, Sarah, 1992-
(författare)
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Making Sense of Large-scale Cyber Incidents : International Cybersecurity Beyond Threat-based Security Perspectives
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Large-scale cyber incidents have figured prominently in securitizing speech acts over the last decade. This thesis demonstrates how conceptualizations of cybersecurity as a public security problem connects to and shapes cybersecurity governance in national and international settings. It explores how theoretical lenses drawn from the securitization, riskification, crisis and socio-technical systems literatures can improve our understanding of the phenomena of large-scale cyber incidents, and how such incidents are interpreted by key actors. The thesis includes four articles comprising case studies which utilize in-depth interviews, text analysis and discourse analysis. The findings reveal a steady development towards an increasingly threat-based security logic in both national and international cyber policy settings. The case studies also highlight the volatile nature of malware proliferation, the tendency of collateral damage from directed cyberattacks, the transboundary characteristics of large-scale cyber incidents, and the central role of civil contingencies actors and the private sector in cybersecurity governance. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the increasing securitization and militarization of cyberspace. Overall, this thesis contributes to our understanding of how cybersecurity is constructed as a security problem in theory and practice, and it employs analytical approaches which facilitate the exploration of international cybersecurity along more than just traditional ‘hard’ security lines.
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| 8. |
- Håkansson, Calle, 1994-
(författare)
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The New Role of the European Commission in the EU’s Security and Defence Architecture : entrepreneurship, crisis and integration
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In recent years, the European Union (EU) has strengthened its foreign, security and defence policy in a remarkable way. Several new supranational security and defence initiatives have been launched and implemented, which have given the European Commission a new and central role in European security and defence policy. These swift developments are puzzling, since foreign policy and security and defence policy have long been understood as the ‘last bastions of sovereignty’ for EU member states and have thus been regarded as the least-likely cases for supranational integration. This thesis shows how the Commission has been the central driver behind these changes; it does so by conducting three focused case studies/articles to explore and explain the evolution of a new and enhanced role for the European Commission in EU security and defence cooperation during the period 2014–2023. By researching the establishment of the European Defence Fund, the EU Military Mobility project and the new policies and initiatives developed after Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022, this dissertation analyses new competences for the European Commission within EU security and defence policy. This dissertation conceptually and analytically builds on diverse strands of integration literature, drawing on neofunctionalism, the Commission’s policy entrepreneurship and agenda setting, and crisis pressure to retrace in detail these three important empirical processes. The main contribution of this dissertation is to show how the European Commission’s initiatives and strategies have been indispensable in the strengthening of EU integration within security and defence.This thesis consists of an introduction outlining the overall research agenda and three stand-alone articles: Håkansson, C. 2021. The European Commission’s new role in EU security and defence cooperation: The case of the European Defence Fund, European Security, Vol. 30:4, 589-608.Håkansson, C. 2023a. The strengthened role of the European Union in defence: The case of the Military Mobility project, Defence Studies, Vol. 23:3, 436–456. Håkansson, C. 2023b. The Ukraine war and the emergence of the European commission as a geopolitical actor, Journal of European Integration, 1-21.
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| 9. |
- Jakobsson, Elin, 1983-
(författare)
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Norm Acceptance in the International Community : A study of disaster risk reduction and climate-induced migration
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Different kinds of normative claims and statements of “oughtness” infuse the international political environment. But why do some proposed norms become accepted by the international community while others do not? This thesis investigates this central question using two normatively charged international issues as vehicles for explanation.One issue reflects the norm to reduce disaster risk. The other issue concerns the normative question of asylum rights for climate-induced migrants. While climate-induced migration attracted much attention in the years 2007-2008, the norm acceptance process was stymied and stalled before it had a chance to gain broad acceptance in the international community. Disaster Risk Reduction reached a different outcome. After norm entrepreneurs had a difficult time in gaining traction for the issue, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami had an immense impact on the norm’s development, which led to the international community agreeing to the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction in 2015. The norm proposition to reduce disaster risk has thus reached a broad and high level of acceptance. This thesis uses a norm theoretical lens to understand these contrasting outcomes. In doing so, it shows that there are key components missing from conventional explanations of norm success and failure. Most importantly, the lack of attention to contingencies and to windows of opportunity that contingencies may open up.An analytical framework is developed to account for contingent factors in norm evolution, and the relevance of these components is evaluated by using the two cases in question as plausibility probes. The framework takes the key variables from traditional approaches (agency, the norm itself and framing), adds two more recent suggestions (venue and resistance) and, most importantly, adds the component of contingencies (including windows of opportunity). The detailed empirical investigations draw on a rich, and in some parts unique, material of official texts, practitioner interviews and secondary literature. This thesis thus contributes to existing research on norms and provides future researchers with an enhanced tool for explaining norm emergence.The case study on disaster risk reduction provided an example of how a natural catastrophe which coincided with an already planned and prepared international summit on the subject interacted to propel disaster risk reduction to the top of the political agenda and toward norm acceptance. The case concerning international protection for climate-induced migrants showed how three particular moments in time had promising potential to advance the norm toward greater acceptance but largely failed because there were no solutions to act on, because no viable window opened to drive further attention and acceptance or because there was a “negative window”. The analysis conducted according to the framework shows how events must be actively connected to a specific norm proposition and how they must be aligned with other factors that determine the success of a norm, defined in this study as norm acceptance.Against this background, this study argues that contingencies, and a theorization of windows of opportunity, should always be included in explanatory tools on norm acceptance. Important explanatory aspects might otherwise be missed.
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| 10. |
- Stiglund, Jonatan, 1989-
(författare)
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Shifting Dangers in the Shape of Threats and Risks : The Discourse of Swedish Security Policy, 1979-2020
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Modern societies have become increasingly preoccupied with the identification and preemption of risk, represented as future possibilities of harm. The study demonstrates how the concept of risk has influenced the contemporary Swedish security discourse and what it means to construct security following a risk logic. Previous research has highlighted both the continuing influence of traditional threat-based security and the increasing influence of risk thinking and preemptive security as primarily separate areas of study. This dissertation examines both perspectives in an integrated approach in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning and implications for security policy constructed according to two coexisting logics. This study shows that the Swedish security discourse has been shaped by varying degrees of both threat and risk logics for the past four decades. The dissertation constructs an analytical framework that makes it possible to identify these logics empirically. The analysis allows us not only to uncover the influence of risk and threat logics but also to see the wider implications of the ways in which they are represented and related to one another. In contrast to concrete and identifiable threats, a risk logic constructs security problems as spatially complex, without concrete form or a specific place from which emanate. Risks are also, by this definition, future-oriented and lack concrete form in the situation in which they are constructed. The dissertation shows that both security logics have had varying degrees of influence on Swedish security policy and analyzes three sets of implications that flow from how security issues are constructed: the constitution of security policy as a policy area, responsibility and accountability, and the power relationship between government and citizens.The varying security logics produce a discourse on security with different societal implications, where the concept of risk entails increased complexity and less clarity than the threat logic, which has historically been more influential. Identifying and analyzing the influence of both logics therefore provides a new and more complete understanding of the meaning of modern security policy and its consequences. The analytical framework identifies influences on threat and risk logics according to how they are constructed following four dimensions of danger construction: space, time, agency and manageability. Methodologically, the dissertation uses a discourse-analytical text analysis as an organizing tool for sorting and processing the empirical material. In combination with the theoretically derived analytical categories, the theoretically generated political implications show the meaning of the security discourse in a new light, both empirically and theoretically. The dissertation examines shifts in the meaning of how security and dangers are constructed and shows how this is linked to significant political implications for the policy area, accountability and power. The overall findings reveal that risk has become a key aspect of how security policy is constructed and enacted but also that it has not replaced the threat logic. Rather, they coexist in a dynamic that produces varying discourses and policies over time. This dissertation demonstrates the necessity of understanding both approaches in parallel in order to attain a more complete understanding of current security policy and its implications.
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