| 1. |
- Weissmann, Mikael, 1977-, et al.
(author)
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Sweden’s approach to China’s Belt and Road Initiative : Still a glass half-empty
- 2017
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In 2013 China’s President Xi Jinping launched the “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative, later renamed the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which involves China undertaking to make infrastructure investments worth billions of US dollars in the countries along the old Silk Road connecting China with Europe. While commonly seen as an infrastructure initiative aimed at strengthening the Chinese economy, it is also a political project with far-reaching strategic aims.This UI Brief outlines how China has approached the BRI with Sweden, how Sweden has responded and the perceptions of major Swedish stakeholders. It finds that Swedish officials are often highly cautious, maintaining a wait-and see policy. While also cautious, members of the business community are cautiously optimistic and have been more actively following BRI-related developments, seeking out avenues for potential business. The actual impact of BRI in Sweden, however, is so far very limited.The Brief concludes that Sweden’s approach to BRI has been too reactive and too passive. It argues that both the government and the business community need to engage more actively with the BRI in order to maximize its possible benefits. To this end, a national strategy is needed that includes the government and the business sector. Better coordination is also needed between government agencies and to link existing intra-governmental cooperation with the business community. Their importance cannot be overemphasized as the BRI is a political project, not an idealistic free-market endeavour.
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| 2. |
- Hammami, Feras, 1978, et al.
(author)
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Heritage and Urban Resistance: Exploring Identity Politics, Commons and Conflict
- 2017
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Urban resistances have erupted in several countries, disrupting everyday life and challenging urban policies and planning. This project looks at how heritage and resistance both as concepts and as empirical realities for people on the ground are fundamentally interdependent and today constitute multiple sites of conflict. The same sites, objects, and evidence of the past are often claimed by diverse community groups in ways that make everyday life a micro dynamics of negotiating identity, recognition and sense of place. How often-contradictory positions on heritage are entangled in policies for the management of contested heritage sites will be investigated in Palestine, Turkey, and Sweden
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| 3. |
- Plehwe, Dieter, et al.
(author)
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CSSN Research Report 2021:2: The Mises Network and Climate Policy
- 2021
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Think tanks have played a decisive role in the organised obstruction of climate action, denying, minimising, or derailing ambitious climate change mitigation. This research briefing reviews the case of the Ludwig von Mises Institutes and the Property and Freedom Society, a network of ultra-libertarian groups active around the world, which we refer to as the Mises Institute Network in the mobilisation and the dissemination of climate policy opposition discourse. We review the origins, the history, the global distribution and the climate-related output of 31 Mises Institutes between 2000 and 2021.
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| 4. |
- Rosales, Maria
(author)
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Minding the gap : the role of UK civil society in the European refugee crisis
- 2016
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The recent collapse of the Dublin system, a system meant to distribute responsibility towards asylum-seekers and refugees between EU Member States (MSs), has marked a new phase of the so-called European Refugee “Crisis”, where the inability of EU MS governments to address the situation in a unified and coherent manner ultimately harms those most in need of protection. Public discontent with EU and MS government responses to the crisis has led to strong citizen mobilisation in the form of civil society. This study focuses on the case of the UK and examines the role played by policy advocacy Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). The concept of Political Responsibility is used to establish the emergence of a Governance Gap in the UK’s response to the crisis, where the government finds itself unable to bridge a growing distance between its representation and responsible governance functions. Policy advocacy CSOs are found to be now minding this gap. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to study how CSOs react to the UK government’s response in terms of practice and discourse, and to highlight the consequences which language use can have on how we perceive and treat refugees and asylum-seekers in this context.
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| 7. |
- Aminga, Vane Moraa, et al.
(author)
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Climate-related Security Risks and the African Union
- 2020
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- There has been considerable attention on the conventional climate mitigation and adaptation debate in Africa, including the prominent efforts of the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change in global climate forums. However, there is little understanding of how the African Union (AU) is discussing and responding to the security implications of climate change.This Policy Brief outlines key strengths of the African Union’s response, such as a rapidly evolving discourse around climate security and efforts to improve collaboration and coordination among different parts of the institution. But also, key weaknesses in the discourse around AU policy responses, such as the lack of tangible policy operationalization as well as financial unpreparedness and limited member state accountability.The Policy Brief makes recommendations highlighting entry points for advancing the understanding and response to climate-related security risks within the AU, such as: (a) develop and institutionalize coordinated responses to climate-related security risks, (b) develop strong climate security leadership within the African Union, and (c) change the narrative to focus on shared problems and therefore shared solutions—multilateralism rather than nationalism.
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| 8. |
- Zapata Campos, María José, 1972, et al.
(author)
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Organising grassroots initiatives for a more inclusive governance: constructing the city from below
- 2019
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The project examines how grassroots organizations and networks providing urban critical services in informal settlements contribute to improve the quality of life of urban dwellers and to more inclusive forms of urban governance, constructing the city from below. The project is informed by the study of Kisumu’s informal settlements’ Resident Associations, the Water Delegated Management Model, and the Kisumu Waste Actors Network. The study adopted an action-research approach with researchers working with citizens, politicians, officers and entrepreneurs in all stages of the research process and used a combination of methods including document studies, ethnographic and participatory observations, visual ethnography, interviews, focus groups, social media analysis and stakeholder work- shops as well as participatory videotaping. The study discusses a) the institutionalization of grassroots organizations for the delivery of critical infrastructure and services and their need to gain, regain and maintain legitimacy; b) their flexible and nested structure facili- tating their resilience; c) their embeddedness in the communities’ knowledge and assets, and their role as social and institutional entrepreneurs to bridge informal settlements with city governance; d) the redefinition of the roles of the citizen, from passive into active agents, and its transformation into more autonomous and insurgent citizens; e) the blending of civic and material rationales and the construction of more fluid identities allowing citizens to draw pragmatically from a broader repertoire of roles and resources; f) and the creation of grassroots organizations as a collective process that emerge from different directions, with the ability to become gateways but also gatekeepers, or the top of the grass at their communities. It concludes with recommendations to informal settlements’ resident grass- roots organizations, public officers, NGOs, politicians, researchers and citizens in general, engaged in constructing a more inclusive city governance from below.
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| 9. |
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| 10. |
- Guzzini, Stefano, 1963-
(author)
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Theorizing International Relations : Lessons from Europe's periphery
- 2007
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Reports (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Many regional academic communities in International Relations find themselves as passive recipients of ideas and theories developed elsewhere. Shedding off the role of simple ‘ideas-taker’ and becoming an autonomous voice in International Relations, academic communities need to develop the conditions for independent theorising. This paper deals with the potential intellectual and institutional obstacles to autonomous theory formation. A first section argues that the primary obstacle lies within Western IR itself, namely the particularly damaging tradition which denies the very need for more theoretical reflection, at best some day-to-day adaptation of a truth we already know. This position comes in two often combined forms, stating either that IR knowledge is all in historical experience, not fancy theory, or that such theory has been developed long time ago and cannot be superseded (for the unchanging character of world politics). Only if the unfoundedness of this position is shown, can we really tackle the issue of proper IR theorising: ‘which theory?’ My second claim is that the peculiar confusion of IR theory with foreign policy paradigms (often wrapped into the infamous realism-idealism divide), and a topical approach to IR theorising are further obstacles to the understanding of the role and significance of IR theory. I argue that it neglects the constitutive function of theories and hence the value of a theoretical enterprise that assesses assumptions at the theoretical and meta-theoretical level, as well as a conceptual analysis which is self-reflective to the context, regional and historical, within which such concepts have been evolving. Finally, I address the institutional obstacles IR theorising can encounter. Those, or so I will argue, are at least of three kinds. Some obstacles have to do with the intellectual legitimacy of theoretical research in IR within the national academic division of labour, where IR is often relegated to an inferior position, its theory being handled by the ‘real’ subject-matters. Then, IR theorising, as all research, needs a certain material autonomy. Yet, since the type of theorising I stress in this paper is usually connected to basic research, a claim with little legitimacy in the social sciences, the obstacles are far higher. Finally, the way the field of expertise is organised in a country can contribute to undermine the social legitimacy of the theoretical expert which is looking long-term and might not come to sound-bite ready conclusions. And yet, as I will show in the conclusion, for moving out of the periphery, independent theorising is crucial.
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