Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered a renewed enlargement momentum in the European Union (EU), replacing years of ‘enlargement fatigue’ with the recognition of four new candidates and...Show moreRussia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 triggered a renewed enlargement momentum in the European Union (EU), replacing years of ‘enlargement fatigue’ with the recognition of four new candidates and five new negotiating states in under two years. Yet, the unprecedented speed of progress in the accession processes of candidates like Ukraine, paired with their stagnant and often declining democratic and rule-of-law performance, raises questions about the extent to which the Union may be sacrificing such values in the face of a novel geopolitical struggle vis-a-vis Russia. Exploring the cases of Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina, this study conducts a qualitative frame analysis to determine the extent to which the EU’s framing of challenges to democracy and the rule of law in candidate states has softened since Russia’s invasion, despite declining democratic/rule of law levels in both countries. The study also compares the two cases to determine whether states perceived as under direct threat of Russian aggression - and hence are more geopolitically significant - are more likely to be framed softly. The findings indicate that such a shift in framing is manifest, but notably more pronounced in directly threatened states. This hints at a flawed EU accession process, contradicting core, treaty-derived European values and the Copenhagen Criteria, while threatening the Union’s democratic credibility and institutional robustness.Show less
While crises accumulate in the developing countries, major donors decrease their aid budget. Consequently, understanding determinants of aid effectiveness is crucial to improving health around the...Show moreWhile crises accumulate in the developing countries, major donors decrease their aid budget. Consequently, understanding determinants of aid effectiveness is crucial to improving health around the World. Previous research has put forward the positive influence of democratic regimes on health improvements. Nonetheless, little is known about the role of recipients' political regimes on the success of aid project implementation. This paper seeks to clarify this relationship by answering the question “What is the effect of regime type on the effective implementation of project-aid targeted to health?”. The study focuses on the World Bank projects in the health sector in Africa. An OLS approach is chosen to investigate democratic mechanisms, data is retrieved through the Independent Evaluation Group and Freedom House. The results show a positive but weak non-significant effect of democracy on aid effectiveness. Hence, findings do not provide evidence that democracies are better at implementing health aid projects. Using a larger sample is recommended for future studies.Show less
Post-foundational political thought, based on the recognition of necessary contingency of all political arrangements has been widely employed as both an analytical tool as well as a vehicle for...Show morePost-foundational political thought, based on the recognition of necessary contingency of all political arrangements has been widely employed as both an analytical tool as well as a vehicle for critique in light of several diagnoses of the abysmal future of contemporary democracies. Nonetheless, there is reason to belief that the efficacy of post-foundationalism is compromised through a deficit in the articulation of normative critique, and in the actualisation and operationalisation of critique revealing the contingency of the political, i.e., ethico-political critique. This thesis sets out to fulfil two endeavours: first, identify the possibility of articulating ethico-political critique within a paradigm of post-foundationalism through relational practices in social ontology, and second, apply this paradigm as an analytical tool onto one of the most prominent diagnoses of contemporary democracy’s decline, Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberal de-democratisation. Through this, this thesis argues that the site of ethico-political critique in post-foundationalism may be found in relational resistance practices within the ontic dimension of the social which reveal the contingency of both ontic and ontological arrangements in both the social and the political. Thus, such practices could serve as a first step in articulating a scheme of critique against neoliberal de-democratisation which, according to Brown, currently fails due to the absence of alternative world-views.Show less
“How have the democracies of Hungary and Czech Republic developed differently over the past ten years?” Focused on the reasons for democratic backsliding in these EU member states.
What should the foundations of a legitimately demarcated demos be? How can we enable the demarcation of a demos around these values? These questions about the boundary problem have been central to...Show moreWhat should the foundations of a legitimately demarcated demos be? How can we enable the demarcation of a demos around these values? These questions about the boundary problem have been central to the discussion. Thusfar, the focus has been on the inclusion of the people who have a right to participate in the decision-making process of a demos. However, this is not without concern. This thesis explores existing theories and the concerns with these theories from a deliberative democrat’s perspective. I conclude that there is a problem with the democratic foundations of these theories. Therefore, rather than focussing primarily on inclusion, I prioritise the democratic values that are the foundation of a legitimately demarcated demos. I then proceed to suggest a language-centred approach, the principle of Linguistic Unity. The linguistic dimension has yet been overlooked in solutions to the boundary problem. Whereas it does serve a purpose in the protection and realisation of democratic values. Language ultimately brings individuals together in a political community. Agreeing on a common language upon entering a demos might thus be a reasonable condition to add to the discussion on the boundary problem.Show less
Taiwan’s flourishing economy together with its values, such as human rights and democracy, increase Taiwan’s international visibility and question Taiwan’s inability to join the UN, especially...Show moreTaiwan’s flourishing economy together with its values, such as human rights and democracy, increase Taiwan’s international visibility and question Taiwan’s inability to join the UN, especially since they share the same values. The PRC’s open disapproval of Taiwan’s independence as well as its power and influence hinders the UN from accepting Taiwan as a new member state. This thesis aims to research how the dynamics between the US and China within the structure of the UN affect Taiwan’s bid to become an internationally recognised state as well as how Taiwan tries to influence this process from outside the UN. Qualitative research together with a historical case study analysis and a conducted interview display that both the US and China use soft power as political strategies to gain more influence within the UN for their objectives, such as the support or opposition of Taiwan’s entry into the international community. Similarly, Taiwan also uses soft power to gain more allies and to increase its eligibility to enter the UN. Moreover, this thesis finds that divergent understandings of human rights divide the UN regarding their position on Taiwan’s official status and affect the decision-making process regarding Taiwan’s independence.Show less
There are few issues as contentious in modern South Korea as reform of the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office, the country’s highest investigative authority. Over the past several years, feuds over the...Show moreThere are few issues as contentious in modern South Korea as reform of the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office, the country’s highest investigative authority. Over the past several years, feuds over the direction of the prosecution have at times completely dominated political discourse. President Moon Jae-in has spent a considerable amount of political capital on prosecution reform (kŏmch'al kaehyŏk) since his election in 2017, and bitter battles on multiple fronts erupted over the president’s drive to remove power from the prosecution and shift it to different institutions. The cornerstone of these reforms finally passed the legislature in 2020 after decades of effort from civic groups and politicians. High-profile debates over the future of the prosecution elevated former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl to a top presidential contender, despite never having held elected office. This thesis takes the following as its central question – why has prosecution reform become associated with the South Korean democratization and the political fault lines that emerged in its wake? It is an attempt to interrogate the motivations behind this quest for reform and situate it as part of a political and historical era – that is, the continued and contentious legacy of democratization and the transition to a more open civil society in the 1980s and 1990. This investigation will begin with a summary and analysis of the particular roles and responsibilities of the South Korean prosecution, as well as a brief overview of some of the existing literature. The first chapter will cover the prosecution’s history under Japanese rule, the American occupation, and the South Korean governments that followed the end of American rule in 1948. The institution’s historical formation is important to understanding the way the prosecution has been viewed by reformers in more recent years. The second chapter concerns the methods by which the prosecution was deployed during authoritarian rule, conflicts between the prosecution and legal activist groups, and the institutional continuity the prosecutor’s office displayed after the transition to democracy in 1987. The third chapter explores the ways through which the issue of prosecutorial reform has been framed, debated, in the context of changes in South Korean governance and society from the 1990s onward. The final chapter briefly discusses the successful implementation of reforms under the Moon Jae-in administration. This research draws on primary sources including newspaper archives from databases such as Naver News Library and the Korea Integrated Newspaper Database System, government and court case records, and documents from the civic organizations that first proposed sweeping changes to the country’s prosecution. This thesis is part history and part histography, as it charts the way the prosecution’s past has been interpreted to reorder its present powers. Ultimately, it is my hope that this investigation will shed a light on how an issue that has an enduring impact on modern South Korean politics came to be theorized and discussed as representing an unfinished legacy of democratization.Show less
The evolution of Athenian discourses revolving around pederasty is being studied from a political angle, through the contextualization of said discourses into the political and social milieu of...Show moreThe evolution of Athenian discourses revolving around pederasty is being studied from a political angle, through the contextualization of said discourses into the political and social milieu of Athens, from the archaic to the classical period (7th- 4th c. B.C.), with an aim at understanding both the discourses themselves, as well as their thematic evolution, as products and constructs of the political realities of the polis.Show less
Bachelor thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (BSc)
open access
When a person or an institution has the ability to act upon what they believe is the best possible situation - or at least a relatively good set of circumstances - through changing real-life...Show moreWhen a person or an institution has the ability to act upon what they believe is the best possible situation - or at least a relatively good set of circumstances - through changing real-life livelihoods, they engage with the politics of desirability. That means that they are positioned within the political playing field of actors with different degrees of power to act upon what they believe is desirable. This thesis is an attempt to discover truths about the political relationship between government - and the act of governance - and those whom are influenced yet not fully involved with the processes that influence them. The analysis builds upon two types of cases: one concerns general descriptions of regimes’ governance, rationales, techniques and ideologies; and the other concerns government responses to contestations to its governance. Each case is shortly analysed in regards to the concept of desirability. After presentations and short discussions of the cases, I present two different dimensions of critiques on government’s dealing with the matter of desirability: contingent issues, that can be found explicitly in the cases, but can vary amongst regimes; and inherent limits, which are present, by definition, in every attempt at governance from outside. The latter critiques come down to problematising the core asset of government in the political realm of desirability. That core asset is its position of power, in which it is able to act upon its own conception of ‘what is desirable’ without involving conceptions and lived experience of the people most influenced by the government action; but also in which it cannot overcome its limits - deriving straight from the asset - to do justice to the open-ended, ethical question of desirability.Show less
This thesis sets itself within this broader theoretical debate of discussing the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It investigates how capitalism has been able to gain unrivaled power...Show moreThis thesis sets itself within this broader theoretical debate of discussing the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It investigates how capitalism has been able to gain unrivaled power within the global political economy, particularly over democracy, through further developing the separation between what is determined as the 'political' and the 'economic'. Furthermore, it concentrates on the implications of the significant structural changes caused by capitalism and its role in shaping the digitalization of our societies. In the process, the paper analyzes Shoshanna Zuboff's understanding of surveillance capitalism because it is the needed contemporary analytical assessment of how big tech and its surveillance operations produce various adverse outcomes in the global political economy. It primarily focuses on how surveillance capitalists utilize the ideology and mechanisms of capitalism while undermining democracy and increasing epistemological and material inequalities. In its many forms, surveillance capitalism undermines democracy and human rights and creates unequal power structures within our societies. These adverse developments are possible because of the specific historical conditions that allowed surveillance capitalism to thrive and become normative behavior. Existing political and economic structures enabled surveillance capitalists like Google, Facebook, and Amazon to become dominant hegemonic forces in the global political economy. These corporations undemocratically extract data from individuals' lives by coercing users to accept their terms and conditions, which can take days to fully understand the implications on their human rights, privacy, and freedoms (Zuboff, 2019). Surveillance capitalists then capitalize on their data by selling it for profit, using it to improve their services, or utilizing it to predict and manipulate future behavior in collaboration with other market actors (Zuboff, 2019). This represents the commodification of human behavior, personal information and digital social interactions. How actors like Google have been able to extract, commodify (or profit from) and manipulate individuals' behavior has severe implications for the individual human rights and foundational principles and values of democracy. All of this depicts a pattern of subordinating human behavior to the logic of capitalist markets for profit while putting at risk the freedom, autonomy, and self-determination of citizens in the market, politics, and everyday life. Democratic countries have enabled and undermined Google and other corporations that create unequal power structures and succeed in exploiting citizens. This thesis identifies and analyses how the United States and Germany have attempted to address Google's intrusive big data operations. Particularly, it focuses on how they have both undermined and protected democracy by addressing surveillance capitalism and its adverse outcomes.Show less
Since the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the strive for gender equality and female empowerment has gained momentum. Yet, how to achieve gender equality and female empowerment...Show moreSince the 1995 Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the strive for gender equality and female empowerment has gained momentum. Yet, how to achieve gender equality and female empowerment remains debated – especially in the realm of politics. African countries are increasingly resorting to electoral gender quotas to reach higher female representation in national legislatures. While scholars have analysed the effect of political regime structure on female representation, they have not accounted for the effects of gender quotas. Thus, this thesis assesses the impact of political regime structure on gender quotas in empowering women by comparing authoritarian Rwanda and democratic Senegal. Female empowerment is measured through an in-depth analysis of descriptive, substantive and symbolic female representation. The paper finds that women in both Rwanda and Senegal have become increasingly empowered as a result of gender quotas.Show less
My analysis provides little support for the claim that Instagram’s algorithm is exploited in an attempt to increase the exposure to RNQs’ content/narratives or instill users with a fake sense of...Show moreMy analysis provides little support for the claim that Instagram’s algorithm is exploited in an attempt to increase the exposure to RNQs’ content/narratives or instill users with a fake sense of organic support, by employing bots to amplify their messages and enlarge their following. Although at first glance, it appears like bots make up a substantial amount of their followers, compared to other established media, their number is not significant, but rather a representation of the overall inauthentic bot population on the SMP. Among the inspected outlets, only the Italian outlet “ilGiornale” exhibited abnormal metrics throughout all steps of the analysis and is therefore considered to benefit from CP methods. Since this RNQ has not uploaded any content to Instagram since May 2019 and only has 16 posts in total, an increased exposure to their content is considered to be no threat to democratic deliberation. Rather, even without CP, it is an emerging right-wing media ecosystem that poses an increasing challenge to EU democracy. These findings, however, should be taken cautiously, as in the course of the empirical chapter, it becomes obvious that qualitative bot-detection models were designed for Twitter or Facebook and do not adequately take the platform-specifics of Instagram into account. Hence, the number of bots and subsequently the number of RNQ accounts that benefit from CP might actually be higher than this analysis suggests.Show less
People's political participation in Eastern (and Central Europe) have been influenced by their relative communist past, as well as the transitional period, which brought created a worse socio...Show morePeople's political participation in Eastern (and Central Europe) have been influenced by their relative communist past, as well as the transitional period, which brought created a worse socio-economic situation.Show less
Much research claims that the levels of democracy and corruption together influence ‘Internationalism’, ‘Policy Regulation’ and ‘Participatory Engagement’, which are the main determinants of...Show moreMuch research claims that the levels of democracy and corruption together influence ‘Internationalism’, ‘Policy Regulation’ and ‘Participatory Engagement’, which are the main determinants of national commitment to environmental degradation. This thesis, therefore, focuses on how corruption and democracy in the above mentioned three pillars affect the levels of national commitment to air pollution reduction. More specifically, this thesis takes into consideration ‘Internationalism’, ‘Policy Regulation’, and ‘Participatory Engagement’ to reveal the extent of governmental commitment to protecting the environment vis-a-vis air pollution in the form of GHG emissions in the Netherlands and Hungary since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.Show less
