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The decision by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to leave Ecowas reflects the bloc’s failure to address security and humanitarian issues in the subregion. It is also a result of people losing faith in Ecowas’ leadership after years of complacency and inconsistency in championing its democratic principles. Pragmatic dialogue with the member states currently run by military regimes will be crucial if regional collaboration is to be revived. And defending democratic values will be crucial if civilian rule and popular trust are to be restored.

This thesis examines portrayals of misogynistic incel violence and its implications for understandings of misogyny, violence and security. To do so it asks the question of what meaning is ascribed to misogynistic incel violence, and how? Rather than investigating misogynistic incels’ own stories of their violence, this thesis turns to public portrayals of misogynistic incel violence, i.e. within news media and at policy-making levels, to explore how these portrayals affect understandings of wider gendered violence and what the potential implications may be to understandings of security, threat and national identity. This thesis thus investigates the manner in which misogynistic incel violence is politicised and securitised, or not. With that it examines how understandings of this gendered violence are both reliant on and reproductive of certain power dynamics in broader society. The papers that form this thesis identify particular narratives (such as isolated loners, boys being left behind and a backlash against feminism) and show how these work to obscure the misogyny at the heart of misogynistic incel violence. Two of the papers address portrayals of misogynistic violence in the US, the third turns to Sweden to investigate how an assumed gender-equal context may impact the portrayal of explicitly gendered violence. These qualitative studies draw on data from interviews and document analysis in order to provide an in-depth analysis of the portrayals of misogynistic incel violence. Ultimately, the papers argue that such portrayals perpetuate the conditions that make misogyny possible. Rather than recognising the structural nature of misogyny, the portrayal of misogynistic incel violence focuses on the stories of the individual perpetrators. Misogynistic incel violence is thus contained and exceptionalised. This thesis shows what is at stake when misogynistic violence is not recognised for what it is.

The European Union (EU) is known to have considerable market power, which flows from the size of the single market and its sophisticated regulatory capacity. However, relatively little is known about how, when and why the EU uses its market power and what its power projection signifies for our understanding of EU external action. This thesis explores the EU’s techniques for leveraging market power, as well as the factors that drive or constrain its active use of such power. It finds that the EU’s projection of market power is highly regulatory in nature, and often shaped by factors associated with the EU’s internal integration in specific policy areas such as environmental sustainability and digital markets. The thesis proposes that in these areas, competing networks of EU policy entrepreneurs can leverage a variety of structural and contextual factors, such as stringent EU laws, sophisticated EU regulatory capacity, societal fear of negative externalities and highly developed international regimes, to promote their preferred uses of market power. Based on these findings, the thesis argues that EU market power has limited transferability across sectors and is unlikely to be leveraged in geopolitical games or to propel the EU to become a true geopolitical player. Nonetheless, in a context where geopoliticization enhances the friction between the EU’s internal market and external market regimes, the EU can be expected to step up the use of market power to externalize European regulatory regimes in specific sectors in order to protect the integrity of the internal market and achieve international market integration on its own terms.

Turning a blind eye to the complexity of insecurities in Africa, peacebuilding discourses and practices on the continent have been too much focused on military interventions in regions like the Sahel, notably Mali. This paper critiques prevalent conceptualizations and practices, highlighting their shortcomings in effectively addressing the specific regional realities of the continent. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of African contexts, emphasizing the need to incorporate local perspectives and traditional governance structures into peacebuilding efforts. Additionally, it critiques the dominance of Western methods and perspectives in peacebuilding policies and advocates for greater recognition of African agency in defining and addressing security challenges. Overall, the paper recommends a hybrid and inclusive approach to peacebuilding that integrates indigenous knowledge and local capacities alongside international frameworks., Contents: Foreword [by Peter Wallensteen] -- Introduction -- Ake, post-colonial knowledge generation and peacebuilding -- Has peacebuilding become a wicked problem? -- Mali's slippery slope to collapse -- Positionality and reflexivity in peacebuilding? -- Regionally adaptive hybridity as a holistic, context-specific peacebuilding framework? -- The shift to 'regional peacebuilding' -- Conclusion -- Bibliography

From a gender perspective, three main lessons can be learnt from the general election. First, gender issues are on the rise, a fact shown not least by the appointment of the first-ever women running mate for one of the two main presidential candidates. Second, although the ratios of women representatives at all levels are slowly but steadily increasing, the gender quota is just window dressing, which the parties blatantly ignore or work around by nominating women candidates to top-up lists. Third, violence against women in politics poses a serious threat to women’s political inclusion and citizenship.

The five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council have a lot of power – thanks largely to their right of veto, but also on account of other advantages. To curb the imbalance in power and strengthen their position, the ten elected (E10), non-permanent members should collaborate more and share their experiences – both among themselves and with the next group of E10 states waiting to replace them. One of the best means of gaining influence is to work with civil society. There are different ways of doing this, and many have shown themselves to be constructive in advancing the agenda for women, peace and security (WPS).

According to the Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, the percentage of attacks on higher education is higher in Africa than in any other region. And with Covid lockdowns, the academic freedom at African universities has been challenged even further. Given the strong links between academic freedom and democracy, organisations working with democratic development in Africa should take action to support and protect scholars at risk.

Apart from being a humanitarian tragedy, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also emerged as an exogenous shock to global food supply chains, with severe consequences for many African countries in particular. Four months into the invasion, we can see three main threats to food security in Africa: a disruption to energy markets and shipping routes; a shortage of fertilizers; and the negative ‘third-party’ effects of sanctions imposed on and by Russia.

The aim of the thesis is to understand how international educational processes and practices enable the formation of student dispositions related to Europe and the EU labour market. The College of Europe, located in Bruges, Belgium, is a postgraduate independent private institution. It is a board­ing school with approximately 350 students representing around 50 nationalities. It was created in the aftermath of the Second World War by European federalists and has a political mission of contributing to European integration. The method consisted of ethnographic fieldwork combining participant observations with semi-structured interviews (27 with students and 11 with the school administration). I mainly interviewed students from Scandinavian and Central and Eastern Euro­pean Countries. In addition, informal interviews were conducted with faculty, students, school administration, alumni, and EU officials. Contextual information and data were collected from the school website, school brochures between 1953–2017, the Student Yearbook, and students LinkedIn profiles. Departing from Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, I constructed the College of Europe as a social space in the intersections of various fields at the national, European, and global level. Rather than making a field analysis of the school, the intersection across fields was used as an ana­lytical prism when making sense of what was taking place within the school. To grasp the structure of such a space I investigated the distribution of different assets and resources that the students possess before arriving in Bruges as well as accumulated during the school year. The College of Europe is a social space positioned towards the EU and Europe yet where the national is continuously present. It is aiming to contribute to European integration through the formation of EU-professionals for both the public and the private sector. It is a social space where the objective is to overcome national barriers and acquire a European o

This chapter analyses refugee integration and psychological health in light of the macro-level conditions of post- 2015 policy changes.

This chapter analyses refugee integration and psychological health in light of the macro-level conditions of post- 2015 policy changes.

This volume takes up the challenge of providing a comparative understanding of migration regimes and practices and their consequences for political systems and the people who have fled their homelands due to conflict, war and poverty between 2011 and 2020. Empirically, the chapters included in this volume are based on the research conducted in 11 countries (Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland, Germany, the UK and Sweden) within the framework of the Horizon 2020 RESPOND project (2017–2021), funded by the European Commission.

Under what conditions does food insecurity lead to urban unrest? This dissertation contributes to the burgeoning literature on this topic by introducing a multifaceted conceptualization of experienced food insecurity, and by developing a context-specific framework for food-related unrest. It investigates the effect of experienced food insecurity on citizens’ willingness to participate in unrest, and how a favourable structural context in the form of organizational networks moderates this relationship. By going beyond aggregate food insecurity proxies and direct effects, the dissertation makes theoretical and empirical contributions to existing knowledge. The thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four independent essays. Essay I reviews the literature on food insecurity and social upheaval, identifies main research gaps, and provides suggestions for future research. Focusing on urban Africa between 1990 to 2014, Essay II examines the moderating role of societal organizations on urban unrest when food prices increase. It finds that the manifestations of food-related unrest are contingent on the level of state repression of societal organizations. Essay III and IV use unique survey data of residents in Johannesburg, South Africa. Essay III applies a vignette experiment to investigate the assumption that food is an especially potent driver for people’s willingness to engage in unrest. The results indicate a higher willingness to engage in unrest when presented with a scenario of increasing living expenses, but this effect does not appear to be stronger for the price of food. Essay IV conceptualizes experienced food insecurity on the individual level, and finds that food insecurity increases unrest participation, where some types of organizational networks act as catalysts in this relationship. Taken together, the dissertation furthers our understanding of the relationship between food insecurity and social upheaval, suggesting that both food-related grievances and, Fel serie i tryckt bok /Wrong series in the printed bookCorrect series and series number:Report / Department of Peace and Conflict Research (ISSN 0566-8808), no. 125

This chapter looks at the implementation of interna- tional protection policies (especially asylum procedures and refugee protec- tion) in the EU as well as in non-EU countries and underline four findings that are evident across country cases: 1) a highly restrictive and complex legal framework; 2) the proliferation and fragmentation of forms of protec- tion and asylum procedures; 3) the ambiguous role of multiple actors; and 4) the failure of the hotspot approach and the Dublin Regulation.

This chapter de- constructs the prevalent myth of German exceptionalism by embedding it in a wider picture of asylum politics in Germany. They argue that the almost unanimous framing of the large-scale arrival of refugees in Europe in 2015– 2016 as the ‘European refugee crisis’ set the ground for a humanitarian ap- proach to governance under ‘emergency’ conditions.

This chapter explores border management and ex- ternal migration control policy in Italy between 2011 and 2018 by tracing the role of narratives in the policy-making process.

This chapter revisits bordering policies and analyses the ‘summer of migration’ of 2015 as a watershed moment for border management and migration control in the Eu- ropean Union.

This chapter shows how the refugee emergency has revealed that the European refugee regime provides inadequate protection for refugees from a normative perspective.

This chapter shows how contestation over migration has influenced discursive constructions of ‘Europe’ in mainstream politics and media., Respond

This chapter presents the various degrees of refugee agency in three areas—the journey, civic participation, and health— and seeks to answer the question of the extent to which refugees exhibit agency against a backdrop of unfavourable external structural conditionings.

This chapter offers a compara-tive legal analysis of migration governance across countries, highlighting trends and similarities, as well as differences and relevant inconsistencies in the response to mass migration.

Focusing on reception policies, practices and responses in several RESPOND countries, this chapter assesses similarities and differences among different cases by bringing the recurring themes to the fore.

This chapter offers an overview of Turkey’s responses to refugee immi- gration between 2011 and 2018 with a specific emphasis on the policy fields of border management, protection, reception, and integration.

This chapter critically discusses the grid of legislation, policies, discourses, practices, institutions, and actors that shape the governance of movements and configure borders from the global to the local scale by focusing on the Greek island of Lesvos.

This chapter offer an overview of the integration of asylum seekers and refugees in Poland.

Based on an analysis of the Austrian legal framework regulating immigrant integration as well as a thematic analysis of interviews with affected individ- uals, this chapter provides a critical reading on how multicultural policies have given way to an assimilationist paradigm through the expansion of civic integration programmes.

Through a comparative analysis of the housing market in Germany and Austria, this shapter shows how access to housing is a crucial factor for the structural integration of refugees.

Welfare policies have long been met with both scorn and support among voters. Yet, studies reveal that in the presence of declining economic conditions the division between those that support and those that oppose welfare policies appears to diminish. The reason for this, it has been argued, is that the public reconsider their opinions on the welfare state during economic downturns because worsening economic conditions amplify personal economic risk and indiscriminate harm inflicted on the general population. This dissertation evaluates if and to what degree the Great Recession impacted public attitudes in Sweden toward policies involving unemployment insurance, taxation and immigration. Using the crisis as a case study provides the added advantage of quasi-experimental conditions, which reduces the influence of confounding factors, allowing for stronger causal identification than what has been available in previous research. In addition, to better understand the inner workings of attitude formation, I also explore which motives, selfish or non-selfish are responsible for the process of change in attitudes. First, evaluating the public’s appetite for increasing unemployment insurance benefits, Essay I reveals that the public became overall more supportive of this policy following the onset of the economic crisis. Digging deeper into these results, statistical analyses show that the primary driving force behind this change are lower income individuals, and not individuals belonging to higher income groups. The finding indicates that the increased support for this policy is primarily driven by selfish interests. Essay II follows with a broader focus on both selfish and non-selfish motives by comparing two separate surveys to evaluate if attitudes changed toward forced migrants (refugees) and unforced migrants (non-refugee immigrants), as a result of the crisis. No statistically significant relationship is found between the crisis and overall support for reducing refug

How can democratic theory address contemporary problems of alienation? Today, alienation manifests itself primarily in processes of precarization and deprofessionalization. When the subject’s work security or professional autonomy is undermined, her relations – not only to others, but also to herself – can become inhibited. This dissertation argues that while alienation poses a serious problem in today’s democracies, it is a form of social suffering that is particularly difficult for democratic theory – preoccupied by the political – to address. In this dissertation, I seek to address alienation in a radical and open way by taking agonistic democracy as my starting point. Indeed, I assume that a suitable theory of alienation should satisfy two general criteria. On the one hand, it should be radical, engaging with the suffering that people experience in a way that encourages them to contest it. On the other hand, it should be open, avoiding the pitfalls of determinism, human essentialism and the ideal of harmony, all of which risk breeding authoritarianism. In this respect, agonistic democracy seems like the best theory to address alienation. The theory is characterized by its emphasis on transformative social struggle as well as its concern with avoiding what it sees as the authoritarian pitfalls of traditional socialism. However, while agonistic democracy, preoccupied with the struggle against social marginalization, should be able to address alienation, it cannot. This, I argue, is not merely due to the historical conditions from which it emerges – marked by a turn away from traditional socialist concepts towards a focus on antagonism – but also due to a deeper tension in the theory itself. In its attempts to remain both radical and open, agonistic democracy comes to rely on a subject who is flexible, strong and conflict-seeking. For this reason, it fails to include those who cannot thrive in social disorder, those who are left alienated. I therefore seek to ref

Whether and under what conditions foreigners should be granted access to welfare benefits has been debated for as long as public welfare systems have existed. In contrast, research on the actual social protection of immigrants is still comparatively scarce in the welfare state literature. The dissertation contributes to an emerging body of research which addresses this ‘migrant gap’. It does so by introducing a new analytical lens. Rather than studying how immigrants gain access to formal social rights upon entry, it investigates how actual social benefits are distributed in relation to migrant-specific characteristics such as country of birth and length of residency. This perspective helps uncover how general welfare conditionalities – such as work-, membership and conduct-testing – affect the distribution of social protection in relation to cross-border migration without targeting the formal rights of immigrants specifically. In its examination of the relationship between welfare conditionality, migration and social protection, this thesis focuses on the provision of unemployment benefits in Western Europe welfare states in particular. Three independent empirical studies are conducted, using statistical analyses with administrative data. Their findings indicate that general work-related welfare conditionalities produce large gaps in benefit receipt between immigrants and native-born residents, particularly in countries that have so far been portrayed as comparatively inclusive in the welfare state literature. For disciplinary measures such as benefit sanctions, in contrast, immigrants are found to be less negatively affected. As a whole then, the dissertation demonstrates that the social protection of immigrants turns out to be much more complex as soon as we study the actual distribution of benefits inside and across countries with established welfare systems.

A new book, Gendered Institutions and Women’s Political Representation in Africa calls for a focus on institutional barriers to women in politics – formal and informal – as an introduction of isolated formal gender equality reforms have provided mixed results. Despite this, African countries without quotas are still looking towards these reforms as the main model for promoting political empowerment. This policy note argues that these need to be combined with a regendering of institutions working against more women in politics and suggests steps towards an African feminist institutionalism for women in politics.

Climate change is a global threat that requires policy action on all levels of governance. The 2015 Paris Agreement opened a new era of governance, entailing a shift away from the top-down approach embodied by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It relies instead mainly on voluntary climate pledges, which are meant to be ratcheted up through a process of assessment and review. This allows international organizations and country and local governments much more flexibility in deciding their own level of climate ambition, as well as their own methods for achieving it. I identify some significant variations in policy-making that are not explained by the “usual suspects” of material capacities and organizational capabilities. In keeping with the multi-level nature of modern climate governance, I examine the determinants of climate policies on the international, national, and local levels. I do so with the help of quantitative methods applied to survey results from high-income and middle-income countries, and to data on political institutions and physical vulnerability. With this dissertation, I contribute to the literature by identifying a number of key determinants of climate mitigation policy on different levels of climate governance. First, in a study of international climate finance, I ascertain that different organizational arrangements in the bureaucratic area determine the selection of developing countries, as well as the amount of funding allocated to them by developed countries. Second, in a comparison of domestic and international climate policies, I establish that countries which have adopted more ambitious climate policies domestically are also more likely to furnish greater amounts of international climate finance. Third, in a review of national climate policies, I show that extreme weather events do not impel governments to increase climate action in countries without strong democratic institutions. Fourth, in an examination of local climate policies, I find that it i

Consensus is not something that just happens in the foreign policy domain when political actors seemingly agree on a policy. Rather, in this dissertation I demonstrate that actors construct consensus through the framing of policy as they highlight and downplay certain elements. Interestingly, for consensus to emerge, the attraction of political support is not always necessary; sometimes it is enough to not mobilize opposition. In the Swedish context a “foreign policy line” [utrikespolitisk linje] captures the prevailing consensus view and embraces a particular understanding of foreign policy in the national interest, historically conditioned and elevated above party politics. Based on archival records and 55 interviews, this dissertation explores and analyzes the political process in which a domestic foreign policy consensus was constructed for the entry, expansion and exit of the Swedish military contributions to Afghanistan in the early 2000s. Advocates and opponents frame their preferred policy with the intention of aligning it with a dominating perception of the continuity of Swedish foreign policy to gain wider acceptance. In the case of military contributions to Afghanistan, distancing themselves from sensitive issues such as the US warfare and framing policy so it resembled traditional Swedish foreign policy was a way for advocates to suppress political conflict within the political left and rally support behind the respective government's proposition. Afghanistan was a defining military operation at a pivotal time for Swedish foreign policy. The results therefore have wider implications for our understanding of the domestic politics of Swedish foreign policy, providing an important view of how a general reorientation following the Cold War was managed. In addition to conceptualizing the “foreign policy line” this study contributes theoretically with two frame alignment strategies, which actors employ when faced with an unfavorable context to avoid negative c

The ruling RHDP's victory in legislative elections in March 2021 has tightened incumbent President Alassane Ouattara's grip on political power in Côte d'Ivoire. Though Ouattara has taken a conciliatory stance towards the opposition since his re-election, his control of political institutions, low voter turnout, electoral violence and the president’s international status heighten the risk of further democratic backsliding in Côte d'Ivoire.

This thesis contributes to the literature on economic voting, especially the subfield of the electoral impact in relation to wealth. The thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four independent research articles based on data from Sweden. Based on the first article, I find that the support for right-wing parties decreases in areas where voters are heavily invested in financial assets when there is a large amount of volatility in the world markets. Such patterns suggest that voters are responsive to financial risks. Through the second study, I illustrate that voters are sensitive to changes in monetary policies as well. More precisely, I show that voters tend to reward governments for decreases in interest rates. With the third study, I investigate the interplay of markets in a more direct way, estimating the effect of unemployment on voting in relation to household wealth. I find that the Swedish left-wing parties gain electoral advantage when the unemployment rates rise in less wealthy areas but that they lose support where voters are comparatively well-off. Finally, based on the fourth study, I investigate whether wealth has an impact on how voters behave with individual level data. The findings in this study suggest that wealthy citizens vote for right-wing parties to a grater extent. However, the estimated effect is small.

This report focuses on experiences, situation, integration and attitudes of Syrian forced migrants in Turkey in 2019. It describes results RESPOND’s quantitative study of adult migrants from the Syrian Arab Republic who have left their country of origin in 2011 or later, and have sought protection in Turkey no later than 2017. The 789 interviews were conducted in four Turkish cities: Istanbul (234 interviews), Şanliurfa (205 interviews), Izmir (199 interviews) and Batman (151 interviews) between June and October 2019. The study used convenience sampling in each of the selected cities.

This report is part of the RESPOND Project’s Work Package 6 (WP6), titled ‘Conflicting Europeanisation’, which focuses on the internal and external dynamics of the European Union’s (EU) migration and asylum policy. In this framework, WP6 examines how the recent migration crisis has affected the future of European integration. It analyses the main parameters of divergence in migration governance and explores how these could impinge on the future course that EU integration takes. The report notes that migration and asylum policy have risen to the top of the EU’s externalisation agenda. It is also contextually linked to the broader institutionalisation of the EU, becoming a state-like system with the intention to demarcate clear external borders, as well as a sharper distinction between the domestic and foreign policy fields. Differentiated integration comes into play as a compromise method to balance the Member States’ differentiated national interests and preferences. The report proceeds as follows: First, it provides a brief discussion on the conceptual part. It reviews the main instruments for the cooperation with third countries adopted by the EU to tackle the multiple dimensions of the migration phenomenon and control. Then, it focuses on Turkey as a case study for examining the usage of the external form of differentiated and wraps this up by linking the whole discussion with the Europeanisation debate. Finally, the conclusion contributes to the debate on the configuration and impact of EU cooperation with third countries in migration and proposes a set of concrete recommendations for further action.

Based on the meta-analysis of thematic country and comparative reports produced in the EU Horizon 2020 RESPOND project, this report seeks to revisit multilevel governance as a theoretical framework in comparative migration research. Focusing on the period of 2011-2018 where the governance of migration has been very much affected by the ‘crisis’ climax, we question the adaptability of multilevel governance in describing main patterns in governance, their drivers and consequences. The report problematizes the generalized notions of local, nationalist, centralist turn in migration management, instead offering more nuanced understanding that highlights the dynamism and tensions within spatial and temporal axes.Firstly, we propose that when migration is managed through and in a crisis, such as in mass migration or protracted refugee situations, actors at multilevel governance settings choose from a repertoire of possible and available actions, including strict non-admission, deterrence, restriction, ad hoc or welcoming responses.Second, we contend that four characteristics have increasingly marked the inscription of ‘crisis’ in the multilevel governance of migration, including: 1) complicated and fragmented legal systems, 2) multiplicity of actors, 3) re-nationalisation and restrictiveness and 4) increased complexity and uncertainty.Lastly, we conclude that multilevel governance in and through crisis inevitably leads to temporary governance models that become visible through policy convergence in strengthening restrictive measures, sophistication of remote controls, eradication of the norms and rights-based procedures of the refugee regime. The temporality of these governance modes runs the risk of governance failure and gridlocks in developing common solutions (for example, the EU’s internal solidarity crisis or problems in relocation quotas).