In 1946 the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) established the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women. The Commission holds two-week...Show moreIn 1946 the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) established the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to promote gender equality and the empowerment of women. The Commission holds two-week sessions every year during which UN Member States engage in a general debate and organize side-events with civil society organizations (UN Women, n.d. a). The participating civil society organizations typically hold liberal beliefs on human rights and adhere to the dominant beliefs of the CSW (Rincker et al. 2019, 3). It is therefore interesting to find that pro-life organizations have frequently hosted side-events at the CSW in the past. Especially the pro-life organization C-Fam which has hosted multiple side-events in the past decade in which they present their anti-abortion campaign (UN Women, n.d. b). Even more interesting is that pro-life organizations have actively been blocked from the CSW66 which was held in March of 2022 (Tuns 2022). This makes one wonder how pro-life organizations managed to get into the CSW and present their alternative view in the first place. Based on this puzzling observation this research aims to research the framing tactics of C-Fam. The research question is as follows: How did the Center for Family and Human Rights frame their anti-abortion campaign to align with the Commission on the Status of Women between 2014-2019? To gain better insight on the organization’s narratives, a constructivist and a rationalist approach will be embedded in the overarching model of framing theory and then traced throughout the corresponding campaigns via a thematic content-analysis.Show less
The European Union (EU) has a substantially more united foreign policy than any other international organisation. Said expansive joint foreign policy has developed in an inhospitable setting where...Show moreThe European Union (EU) has a substantially more united foreign policy than any other international organisation. Said expansive joint foreign policy has developed in an inhospitable setting where its members hold widely different interests and perspectives on joint foreign policy. Given states’ tendency to jealously guard sovereignty over their foreign policy, how the EU’s foreign policy structures and instruments have been aggregated remains unclear. This paper addresses this via the question “Through what mechanism did the EU aggregate its foreign policy between 2014 and 2021?” and applies a modified ‘Failing Forward’ framework where foreign policy is aggregated via a process of problem-solving by problem-making resulting in an iterative institutionalisation causal mechanism. To analyse whether this mechanism is present, this study adopts a theory-testing process-tracing research method on the development of EU foreign policy structures and instruments from 2014 to 2021. It argues that the aggregation of the EU’s foreign policy relies on iterative intergovernmental and neofunctional processes establishing an integrative causal feedback loop. Examining how the EU aggregates foreign policy is valuable to both EU policymakers and actors within other international organisations seeking greater unison in their foreign policy and contributes to research on international integration in intergovernmental settings.Show less
