The overwhelming majority of the more than five and a half million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East without their civil documents. Particularly in a refugee context, it...Show moreThe overwhelming majority of the more than five and a half million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East without their civil documents. Particularly in a refugee context, it is crucial for the standard of living for Syrian refugees and eventual return to Syria to be adequately documented. Complex civil registration systems in the host countries, however, often prevent Syrian refugees from obtaining civil documentation, thereby expanding the problem of the lack and loss of civil documentation of Syrian refugees. This thesis examines the different civil registration systems and their consequences for Syrian refugees in Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon through an in-depth analysis focusing on legal status, marriage and birth registration. This thesis argues that the difference in implemented civil registration systems is determined by each host country’s social, political, and economic situation before and during the Syrian refugee influx and the extent to which the Syrian refugees have impacted the country, positively and negatively. In Turkey, the government has adopted a temporary protection regime, which includes refugee-sensitive civil registration systems. However, in Lebanon and to a lesser extent Jordan, Syrian refugees are still facing many challenges trying to obtain civil documentation due to the complex civil registration systems. As the eight years of hosting refugees has turned out more harmful than beneficial for the host countries, discussions on the return of Syrian refugees has increasingly become louder. However, a lot of change is still required to ensure that Syrian refugees are adequately documented.Show less
This thesis examines how British prime ministers have de-Europeanized the national identity through their discourse before and after the Brexit referendum – or in other words – how they turned away...Show moreThis thesis examines how British prime ministers have de-Europeanized the national identity through their discourse before and after the Brexit referendum – or in other words – how they turned away from the EU by using language. The research is conducted through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 25 speeches and statements by David Cameron and Theresa May. The timeframe begins when Cameron promised a referendum on EU membership in January 2013, and ends in October 2017, more than a year after the yes-vote. The analysis reveals that British discourse on common security threats was not gradually de-Europeanized, but internationalised by May by constructing the UK as ‘Global Britain’. Language on migrants from the EU to the UK was already de-Europeanized before the Brexit referendum, and did not change significantly after the referendum. In fact, it gradually normalised after Cameron’s General Election victory in 2015. This study also reveals that both prime ministers could ‘cherry pick’ identities, meaning that they could choose between constructing a national, European, or even global identity to their liking per policy area.Show less
Tanzania has for some reason always been an important partner in development cooperation for the Netherlands. The African country has always followed its own peculiar development path, being ruled...Show moreTanzania has for some reason always been an important partner in development cooperation for the Netherlands. The African country has always followed its own peculiar development path, being ruled by the same socialist president for over 20 years. Despite the fact that Tanzania was ruled as a one party state, for some reason the way the country was governed seemed to have had some sort of significant appeal to the Dutch ministry of Foreign Affairs. Did they try to work and cooperate alongside the Tanzanian government or did they let him continue his experiment as long as stability was ensured? Did the Dutch state care so much for Tanzania because they believed in Ujamaa, or at least parts of it? By combining these questions the thesis will show how Netherlands reacted to the economic effects of Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa policy.Show less
Grote culturele veranderingen brengen ook grote religieuse veranderingen. Dionysos groeide van een angstaanjagende natuurgod uit tot het middelpunt van sociale beschaving en persoonlijk genot. Wat...Show moreGrote culturele veranderingen brengen ook grote religieuse veranderingen. Dionysos groeide van een angstaanjagende natuurgod uit tot het middelpunt van sociale beschaving en persoonlijk genot. Wat zat hier achter?Show less
The European Union (EU) has played a vital role in the creation of the globalized world known today. Through the many challenges and setbacks the union has experienced the past decades it has...Show moreThe European Union (EU) has played a vital role in the creation of the globalized world known today. Through the many challenges and setbacks the union has experienced the past decades it has demonstrated how unification and cooperation has become increasingly important. This study argues how in this process of globalized consolidation solidarity plays a vital role. Communities such as the EU rely to a large extent on all its member states involved willing to be solidary. The aim of this study has been to find justification for demonstrating solidarity during the refugee crisis of 2015/2016. This has been done by examining Dutch media and interviewing Dutch government officials. Upon examination of the sources, it became clear that the failures of the most important EU asylum regulations were due to a lack of solidarity. The theory of intergovernmentalism demonstrated how states preferred applying their own national regulations instead of following the supra-national EU policies. By applying the theories of instrumental and normative solidarity this study was able to grasp an idea of what is vital to improve in order to increase solidarity in the union. Focusing on the self-interest of the member states within the union is vital in order to stimulate solidarity. The member state should be well informed of why it is beneficial to be part of the EU. In addition, the union should focus on further developing a European identity among its residents in order to improve the feeling of solidary.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
The Proto-Indo-European long vowels *ē and *ō occupy a remarkable position within the phonemic system. Although these vowels are phonemic, they are limited to very specific morphological categories...Show moreThe Proto-Indo-European long vowels *ē and *ō occupy a remarkable position within the phonemic system. Although these vowels are phonemic, they are limited to very specific morphological categories. This distribution has been explained by several theories, of which there are three which propose a phonetic origin for these long vowels and that nowadays find supported by various scholars, viz. Wackernagel’s lengthening in monosyllables, Szemerényi’s Law, and Kortlandt’s lengthening before word-final resonant. These three theories have in common that they derive the long vowels from their short counterparts *e and *o, whereas they differ from each other in the phonological environments under which the short vowels would have become long. It is, however, still controversial which theory is the most likely to be correct, since all theories have counterexamples. This thesis examines the question which of the three phonetic theories on the origin of the Proto-Indo-European lengthened grade can be proven correct or incorrect. This question will be addressed by discussing the evidence and counterevidence of the nominal system and comparing the counterexamples to the three theories. By attempting to provide alternative explanations for the counterevidence, as well as discussing the strengths and weaknesses of existing alternative explanations, it is possible to examine which theory or theories can be kept up and which one(s) must be rejected. It will be concluded, that monosyllabic lengthening probably works for the nominal system, that Kortlandt’s lengthening before word-final resonant can only work when it is reformulated(i.e. leaving out the nasals as a conditional factor), and that Szemerényi’s Law is best to be given up.Show less
Al jaren is er vanuit verschillende hoeken kritiek op het Nederlandse nieuwsecosysteem. Er verdwijnen titels en media hebben niet meer de capaciteit om nieuwsgebeurtenissen vanuit verschillende...Show moreAl jaren is er vanuit verschillende hoeken kritiek op het Nederlandse nieuwsecosysteem. Er verdwijnen titels en media hebben niet meer de capaciteit om nieuwsgebeurtenissen vanuit verschillende perspectieven te belichten. Dit blijkt des te meer in lokale nieuwsecosystemen. Dit is een gevaar voor de lokale democratie, omdat een divers nieuwsaanbod belangrijk is om iedere bevolkingsgroep een stem te geven. Verschillende organisaties en instituten richten zich daarom op het behoud van diversiteit in de media en stimuleren media die de diversiteit kunnen vergroten. In het terugbrengen van die diversiteit worden vaak alternatieve media als oplossing genoemd. Zij kunnen nieuwe perspectieven bieden en divers nieuws aanbieden. Daar is echter niet iedereen het over eens. Deze scriptie probeert een bijdrage te leveren aan dit debat door te onderzoeken of een medialandschap met meer alternatieve media ook een diverser nieuwsaanbod heeft. De onderzoeksvraag van deze scriptie is als volgt: ‘In welke mate staat het aandeel van alternatieve media binnen lokale medialandschappen in de grootste steden van Nederland in relatie tot de inhoudelijke diversiteit in deze landschappen?’. Deze scriptie vindt plaats binnen het kader van een onderzoek van het Stimuleringsfonds voor de Journalistiek naar de nieuwsecosystemen in de vier grote steden van Nederland. In dit vervolg worden data gebruikt die in drie steden, Amsterdam, Den Haag en Utrecht, verzameld zijn. Ten eerste wordt gezocht naar de steden met het minste en juist grootste aandeel van alternatieve media. Daarna worden deze steden vergeleken op het gebied van diversiteit aan de hand van vier indicatoren: genres, onderwerpen, bronnen en herkomst van online berichten. Tenslotte worden ook alternatieve media met traditionele media op deze punten vergeleken. Als maat voor diversiteit is de Herfindahl-Hirschman index gebruikt. De uitkomsten voor dit onderzoek worden geduid met behulp van een theoretisch kader dat bestaat uit theorieën over het democratisch belang van journalistieke diversiteit en theorieën die uitleggen wat media pluriformiteit en diversiteit zijn of zou moeten zijn. Ook de concepten traditionele/alternatieve media, gatekeeping en churnalism komen aan bod. Utrecht blijkt het grootste aandeel berichten van alternatieve media te hebben, Amsterdam juist het minste. De data wijzen uit dat het nieuwsaanbod in Utrecht echter niet diverser is. Slechts de diversiteit op het gebied van genres lijkt enigszins groter. Het grootste verschil blijkt uit de originaliteit van de berichten. Dit komt ook naar voren bij de vergelijken tussen de twee mediasoorten. Bijna een kwart van de berichten in Utrecht is niet origineel. In Amsterdam zijn alle berichten origineel. Alternatieve media lijken het nieuwsecosysteem niet diverser te maken. Dit onderzoek toont echter geen causaal verband aan. Vervolgonderzoek dat een causaal verband tussen de aanwezigheid van alternatieve media en de diversiteit van het nieuwsaanbod kan leggen is daarom gewenst.Show less
This thesis examines the relationship between pornography and post-Soviet nostalgia in post-2000 Russian cinema, analysing the extent to which the two phenomena are depicted and interact with one...Show moreThis thesis examines the relationship between pornography and post-Soviet nostalgia in post-2000 Russian cinema, analysing the extent to which the two phenomena are depicted and interact with one another. Through formal film analysis of three case studies, this thesis seeks to demonstrate that in addition to the multi-faceted depiction of post-Soviet nostalgia, sex has far from vanished from Russian film screens and often carries symbolic connotations.Show less
Although the period of colonial rule by the Netherlands and Portugal is a thing of the past, there is a plenitude of ‘overseas cultural heritage’ (OCH) around the world, referring to unmoveable...Show moreAlthough the period of colonial rule by the Netherlands and Portugal is a thing of the past, there is a plenitude of ‘overseas cultural heritage’ (OCH) around the world, referring to unmoveable heritage sites that were created under the colonial influence or former presence of nation states on a territory that is not part of these states today. Policy regarding OCH offers complex challenges and possibilities to present-day governments as the heritage is at the crossroads of the cultural and political involvement of both the former colonized and colonizer and thus bridges the colonial past into the current postcolonial reality. Nevertheless, research analysing and comparing OCH policy of former colonial powers at several levels of governance is rare. This thesis builds on, and adds to, the existing research by conducting a multidisciplinary (policy analysis and heritage definition analysis) and multilateral (bilateral and multilateral) comparative analysis of the OCH-policy of the Netherlands and Portugal. At core is the research question: what policy strategy have the Dutch and Portuguese governments developed concerning their OCH in the past century at both bilateral and multilateral level of governance, and to what extent are the policy strategies comparable? To answer this main research question, the thesis conducts a multidisciplinary analysis that combines a policy analysis of the OCH-policy of the Netherlands and Portugal at bilateral and multilateral level of governance at UNESCO, with the examination of the heritage definition at the heart of the existing policy, the latter by examining how the policy deals with the challenging commonality of OCH. The research enabled to map the differences and commonalities of the Dutch and Portuguese OCH-policy strategies.Show less
The main topic of this thesis is compliance with EU directives with a special focus on the issue of timely and correct transposition in the Netherlands. In a broader scope, the issue of...Show moreThe main topic of this thesis is compliance with EU directives with a special focus on the issue of timely and correct transposition in the Netherlands. In a broader scope, the issue of transposition has been extensively covered by the literature on compliance. However, this research adopts a new approach in which possible links between transposition performance and the degree of legal misfit are explored. Doing so, this thesis aims to answer the following research question: To what extent does legal misfit influence the transposition performance of the Netherlands? Based on the literature study the following hypothesis was introduced: The higher the degree of legal misfit the higher the impact on transposition performance. This hypothesis is tested through three directives of the Area of Freedom Security and Justice. This is done by conducting qualitative research that is based on a four-fold classification model that determines the degree of legal misfit of the directives based on the number and extent of the required amendments to the national legal framework. The findings of the analysis of the directives show no direct evidence that unambiguously support the hypothesis. As the hypothesis is rejected, it is concluded that legal misfit only influences the transposition performance of Member States to a limited extent and that the extent is hard to determine.Show less
This thesis focusses on the question: How has the Chinese propaganda department propagated stories in and outside of China through its new-type mainstream media since the 18th CCP Congress in 2012?...Show moreThis thesis focusses on the question: How has the Chinese propaganda department propagated stories in and outside of China through its new-type mainstream media since the 18th CCP Congress in 2012? The CPD endeavours to send a coherent message to different audiences in order to enhance China’s international image by applying a new media-management strategy that aims at telling better stories to the world about China. This thesis endeavours to identify the rationales of the CPD through an analysis of its structure and the aims of the new media-management strategy. As a case study, eight video clips will be analysed, interpreted and discussed alongside the academic research in order to draw conclusions. On the basis of the video clip analyses, the conclusion is that the CPD tells four different narratives at this moment: the Chinese Dream and rejuvenation discourse; the Belt and Road Initiative; China’s desire to pursue diversity and inclusivity for all in the international system; and using Xi Jinping as a popular idol. Moreover, this thesis shows that the clips fit in the longer tradition of Chinese political communication in the form of visual tifa.Show less
People in the host society usually decide the identity of immigrants by immigrant’s descent and race. However, such criteria of judgment easily lead to the “labeling” of immigrants as “non-natives”...Show morePeople in the host society usually decide the identity of immigrants by immigrant’s descent and race. However, such criteria of judgment easily lead to the “labeling” of immigrants as “non-natives” and “forever foreigner”. And this kind of label is quite often placed on Overseas Chinese. Actually, the process of Overseas Chinese integrating into the host society has similarities with the history of the fusion of Hu and Han nationalities in Chinese history. Thus by comparing to the history of Hu and Han nationalities, a new standard to decide the identity of Chinese immigrants has been brought by this paper. The criteria to judge the identity of Overseas Chinese should not be based on descent and race, but on their cultural identity. The purpose of the paper is to enhance understanding of the difficulty of integrating into the host society faced by Overseas Chinese and tries to make some suggestions which may help to improve the hard situation of Overseas Chinese.Show less
The focus of this thesis is on the role of the Dutch national identity in the perceptions and experiences of a wide array of Dutch Spainfighters, who volunteered to fight on the Republican side in...Show moreThe focus of this thesis is on the role of the Dutch national identity in the perceptions and experiences of a wide array of Dutch Spainfighters, who volunteered to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. It aims to understand how the volunteers dealt with the potential for clashes between the imagined communities of the Dutch nation-state and the border transcending, transnational appeal of their left-wing ideology. This thesis demonstrates that they felt loyalty both to the transnational community of left-wing and communist sympathizers, and the national Dutch community. It argues that the motivation of the Spainfighters is closely linked to their national identity, which they tried to construct in symbiosis with their transnational thoughts via the message of anti-fascism. As such, the thesis adds to the understanding of the phenomenon of foreign fighters. Next to the conscious building of national identity, national sentiments and practical culture played a considerable role in the daily reality of the Spainfighters, which is especially relevant if the rather mythical image of the International Brigades as a classic example of a transnational army is taken into account. As the case of the Dutch Spainfighters illustrates, the International Brigades provided space and even recognition for national identity as an organizing entity and as such functioned more as an ideologically motivated international army. For this reason, this thesis suggests that the fundaments of the supposedly transnational movement of support to the Spanish Republic may partly be built on national tensions and the resulting compromises. While studying transnational movements in the twentieth century, it therefore may be worth the effort to analyze the role of national identity, of national political culture.Show less
In 1910 Elia Volpi bought the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence. The antiquarian renovated the former merchant palazzo into an old Florentine home and filled it with artworks and furniture from the...Show moreIn 1910 Elia Volpi bought the Palazzo Davanzati in Florence. The antiquarian renovated the former merchant palazzo into an old Florentine home and filled it with artworks and furniture from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Question in this thesis is whether Volpi used sources to create his reconstruction of the medieval Renaissance interior and if he used sources, which kind of sources he used.Show less
Verbal irony has been a topic of study for several decades and conclusive answers to what it is and how language users correctly understand each other’s ironic expressions are difficult to provide....Show moreVerbal irony has been a topic of study for several decades and conclusive answers to what it is and how language users correctly understand each other’s ironic expressions are difficult to provide. Saying the opposite of what you actually mean does not seem the most effective way of communicating at first sight, but it has proven to be used over and over again without much misunderstanding. Several theories have been proposed in the past few decades that try to explain the concept of verbal irony (among others Grice 1975; Wilson & Sperber 1992; Giora 1997; Tobin & Israel 2012). Most theories on verbal irony share the idea that irony is best defined as an utterance with a literal evaluation that is implicitly opposite to its intended evaluation (Burgers & Van Mulken 2013: 184). According to Giora and others (see for example Giora, Drucker & Fein 2014), constructions (form-meaning pairs) can even be interpreted ironically by default, when the interpretation that springs to mind first is the ironic interpretation, whether presented in isolation or in a context biasing towards that ironic interpretation. This claim is based solely on experimental research with constructed examples (among others Giora et al. 2015; Giora, Givoni & Fein 2015; Giora et al. 2018). However, to support the claim of default ironic interpretation actual language data should be involved, but such corpus studies on ironic constructions are rare. This study builds on two previous studies investigating Dutch ironic constructions on Twitter (Walles 2016; Stevens 2018), and it extends the scope to ironic constructions in English. By comparing three corpora each containing 2,000 tweets with one of the three hashtags #irony, #not, and #sarcasm with a corpus containing 15,000 general English tweets, 30 words and 22 phrases appeared to occur significantly more often in the ironic tweets. These words and phrases were used to compile a new corpus, containing one hundred tweets for each word or phrase. An analysis of the tweets showed that only four were used ironically significantly more often, namely 'classy', 'I’m shocked', 'what a surprise', and 'yeah right'. Exploring the ironic meaning of these four constructions from a constructionist point of view is fruitful, since their ironic meaning can be better understood as these constructions are considered as one unit to which the ironic meaning is assigned. These constructions underwent subjectification: its ironic evaluation has become part of the conventional meaning of the construction and the usage of the construction is expanded to a wider range of communicative contexts in which it conveys an ironic attitude (Verhagen 2000). This gradual conventionalization of the ironic evaluation explains why certain constructions are used more frequently with an ironic intent than others: those constructions have progressed further in the conventionalization process and the ironic meaning has become more closely attached to the construction (Claridge 2011). Nevertheless, the four ironic constructions in the Twitter corpus could not be classified as default ironic constructions, as there are still cases in which they are used literally. The notion of default ironic interpretation is problematic, as the analysis of actual language data do not support the view that one particular construction is always and only used ironically.Show less
