CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeiÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / Partido do Movimento DemocrÃtico Brasileiro (PMDB) criado em 1980, tem suas origens no Movimento DemocrÃtico Brasileiro (MDB), legenda que surgiu em 1966, em oposiÃÃo ao Regime Militar, instaurado no paÃs no perÃodo de 1964 a 1985. Sendo o responsÃvel pela luta em prol da redemocratizaÃÃo do Brasil, o PMDB Ã um dos mais importantes partidos polÃticos do paÃs, apesar de nÃo ter eleito nenhum Presidente da RepÃblica por meio do voto direto. O presente trabalho busca a trajetÃria e estratÃgia polÃtica do PMDB entre os anos de 1982 e 2010, levando em consideraÃÃo as seguintes variÃveis: sua origem, desempenho eleitoral e presenÃa de seus parlamentares nos governos. Mais especificamente, pretende compreender o lugar de tal legenda na dinÃmica partidÃria pÃs-redemocratizaÃÃo a partir da postura adotada pelo PMDB, o maior partido em nÃmero de cadeiras no Congresso Nacional, de se concentrar no Legislativo e na conquista de cargos no Governo Federal. / The Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), created in 1980, has its origin in the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), a political party formed in 1966 to oppose to the Military Government, which ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. Responsible for the struggle towards democracy in Brazil, PMDB is one of the most important political parties in the country, even though it hasnât elected any President through direct elections to this date. The current research seeks to understand the trajectory and the political strategy set forth by PMDB in the period of 1985 and 2010, taking into consideration the following aspects: its origins, its electoral performances and the presence of its politicians in various federal administrations. Furthermore, it intends to comprehend the place occupied by this political party within the post-redemocratization party dynamics, considering the attitude adopted by PMDB to focus on the legislative bodies and also on positions inside the federal administration.

Sport and sport participation is generally believed to positively contribute to society and individuals and have become important to welfare policy in the westernised world. Simultaneously, there has been an increased political and academic interest in turning sport policy, sport and sport participation into a relevant object of study and evaluation. The overall aim of this dissertation is to develop knowledge on contemporary sport policy and evaluation in relation to ideas about the social significance of sport and sport participation. The purpose is to critically examine how sport policy evaluations, their problematisations and solution proposals help to shape particular images of the good society, good sports and the ideal sport participant. Three research questions are posed: (1) Through what ways of thinking, speaking and knowing are societal and sport policy problems, goals and ideals defined? (2) Through what techniques, methods and strategies are solutions proposed to solve the problems and achieve desired goals and ideals? (3) How are different types of individual and collective (non-)soughtafter subjectivities anticipated and shaped? Drawing on the concept of governmentality, the study focuses on the governing of sport's and the sport participant's conduct, the political problematisations and rationalities regarding this conduct, and the strategies proposed to enhance this conduct. The governmental role of evaluation, knowledge production and scientific expertise is given specific attention. The gradual shifts in governmental rationalities and technologies, from a social form of governing to an advanced liberal form of governing, in the Swedish welfare state provide an overall framework of the study. Two kinds of empirical materials are analysed. First, final reports of sport political government Commissions of inquiries, published in the Swedish Government Official Reports (SOU) from 1922-2008, are analysed. Second, reports of sport political evaluations, published by the Swedish Research Council for Sport Science (CIF) from 2011-2015, are analysed. The analysis reported on in article 1 shows that citizens' 'good' and 'healthy' behaviour and bodies are a focus of problematisation throughout the studied period. In relation to this, sport is seen as an important tool and solution. Parallel to the increased critique of sport in contemporary times, a neo-liberal governmentality is embraced which in turn affects how 'problems' and 'solutions' are thought of in individualistic and rational ways. The analysis reported on in article 2 shows that the 2008 government Commission adopted two main 'problematics'. The democratic problematic concerned a commitment to issues of democracy and equality of opportunities and specified a particular problem of sport; sport excludes rather than includes. The health problematic concerned a commitment to issues of public health and physical activity and focused on a particular problem of the population: people are physically inactive and unhealthy. The argument being proposed in article 2 is that these two problematics construct the ‘problem’ of sport and the sport (non)participant in specific ways, drawing on particular forms of knowledge and discourse, with certain implications for the judgements made and the solutions proposed by the Commission. The analysis reported on in article 3 demonstrates three strategies of evaluation and governing: strategies of representation; deliberation; and reflexivity. The argument being proposed in article 3 is that these three strategies draw on different yet overlapping forms and methods of knowledge about sport participation and thereby also produce different (non-)sport participant subject positions. The analysis reported on in article 4 offers an alternative theoretical conceptualisation, based on governmentality, of the Swedish sports model and shows how sport policy, governing and power can be seen in the light of shifting forms of governmental rationality (i.e. governing from a social point of view to an advanced liberal way of governing). In conclusion, the analyses provided in the thesis as a whole suggest that processes of societal and political improvement in contemporary political governing of sport and sport participation, involves particular images of the good society, good sports and the ideal sport participant.

This thesis documents the genealogy of the development of Jakarta’s urban water supply infrastructure from 1873 (the inception of the first colonial water supply network) to the present. Using an analytical framework of governmentality, supplemented by insights from postcolonial studies and political ecology, the thesis explains the highly unequal patterns of water access in Jakarta as the product of (post)colonial governmentalities, whose relations of power are expressed not only through discursive categories and socio-economic relations, but also through material infrastructures and urban spaces. The thesis presents material from the colonial archives, Jakarta’s municipal archives, and the publications of international development agencies and engineering consultancy firms. This is combined with primary data derived from interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation of the implementation of current pro-poor water supply projects in Jakarta. This data is used to document how water supply is implicated in the discursive and material production of the city and its citizens, and to challenge conventional developmentalist and academic analyses of water supply access. Specifically, a conceptual triad of water, space, and populations – produced through, but also productive of government rationalities – is used to explain two apparent paradoxes: (1) the fragmentation of access in Jakarta despite a century of concerted attempts to develop a centralized system; and (2) the preferences of lower-income households for non-networked water supply, despite its higher cost per unit volume. This analysis hinges on an elucidation of the relationships between urban governance and urban infrastructure, which documents the interrelated process of differentiation of types of water supply, water use practices, populations, and urban spaces from the colonial period to the present. This, in turn, is used to explain the barriers being encountered in current pro-poor water supply development projects in Jakarta. The thesis thus makes a contribution to current academic debates over the ‘colonial present’. The contribution is both theoretical – in the emphasis placed upon the materiality of governmentality – and empirical. Finally, the thesis also makes a contribution to the urban and development studies literatures through its reinterpretation of the urban ‘water crisis’. / Arts, Faculty of / Geography, Department of / Graduate

This dissertation focuses on Serbian veterans of the post-Yugoslav wars and their attempts to secure symbolic and material recognition from the state after losing a series of wars. My main goal is to examine some of the main features of Serbia’s welfare system and to explore the ways in which war veterans negotiated their entitlements and secured access to social care. On a different level, I analyse Serbia’s transformation from a socialist society to a free market economy – a process in which a large part of the veteran population seems to have been caught in the middle, between warfare and welfare. I raised the following questions: (1) in what ways did the Serbian state provide for the population of war veterans, (2) what was the role of VAs in this process, (3) how did the interplay between actors and their position within the local political and economic landscape influence veterans’ prospects for social recognition and access to care, and (4) how did war veterans justify their demands and in what ways did they reproduce or transform the official rhetoric that validated or challenged their privileged position? Therefore, this study is an analysis of the predicaments of Serbian veterans of the post-Yugoslav wars and the ways in which they were constructed, articulated and mobilised as a discourse and tool to differentiate and bestow a particular social group with particular rights to state resources. This was occurring in what I described as zones of ambiguities and unsolved contradictions due to the fact that two decades after post-Yugoslav wars, Serbia still had no official records about the exact number of killed and missing persons, or about the size of its veteran population. This also means that the state officialdom had no information about postwar living conditions of a large portion of its population, which impacted veterans’ and other people’s ideas about nationality, the state and their rights as Serbian citizens. Veterans voiced their discontent with the state and wider society through what I have observed as narratives of multiple lacks and losses that pointed to particular sites of ‘injury’ that affected their sense of dignity. In the process of making their claims for status recognition they competed with other groups in Serbian civil society over their respective positions in a hierarchy of victims in need of state protection. This could be described as a paradoxical process in which subjects seem to oppose the state while replicating forms of state power to gain recognition. I analyse the practices through which war veterans consolidated and communicated their demands for recognition as well as the responses by the Serbian state and society to those demands while, following Foucault, treating both acts as techniques of government and exercises in governmentality.

In this thesis I describe state directed transformation through urban regeneration policy in the context of Moss Side, Manchester in the North West of England. The thesis explores connections between the state project of urban regeneration and the lives of residents’ who were targeted by strategies. The thesis therefore moves from economic and political contexts that informed the policies of urban regeneration to how they were implemented and by whom, and then into the personal lives of residents in order to demonstrate connections between these. The latter half of the thesis focuses particularly on residents who were associated with the gang “GCG” who were often the targets of regeneration strategies. The thesis deals with a variety of themes: global cities, governance, constructing race, recognition politics, localities, simulations and violence. These are grounded in detailed ethnography describing Moss Side through residents lives which transformed as a result of regeneration policy. The thesis argues that urban regeneration strategies do not (as is often argued by regeneration practitioners) relieve the difficulties existing residents experience and yet often have far reaching consequences. I demonstrate this through a variety of examples: new governing structures, consultation processes, anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs), gang members strategies opposing displacement, pirate radio disc jockeys searching for legitimacy, and the threat of sexual violence.

This thesis will revisit Michel Foucault's original arguments on the ‘urban problem’ and the concomitant question of circulation, which I contend has been disassociated from more general renderings of his concept of governmentality. Throughout the 1970s, and particularly during his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault would regularly return to the problem of urban circulation; how it has been conceived, calculated and distributed. Foucault would ponder the ways that material infrastructures have canalised people and resources, and naturalised their complex coexistence, in the interests of urban economic restructuring and state aggrandisement. Here, the ‘question of water’ was not only incidental to Foucault’s analytics of government but absolutely integral. Indeed, according to Foucault, whether flowing through rivers, canals, pipes, pumps, sewers or fountains, or stagnating in swamps, marshes and ditches, water has required the especial attention of town planners attempting to optimise the contentious process of urbanisation. Using Singapore as a case study, I will consider how the circulation of water has been administered under the three technologies of power identified by Foucault, with the greater emphasis put on discipline and security. The overarching argument will be that the modern state was consolidated and subsequently decentralised through the material configuration of drainage infrastructure, reservoirs and distribution systems, where governmental programmes have been co-produced with the technological networks of water circulation. Although disciplinary techniques had initially been found effective in terms of pollution control and flood alleviation, counterproductive consequences of concrete modernism quickly emerged requiring a greater uptake of security mechanisms, where government would be increasingly exercised through practices of exposure rather than enclosure. Mosquitoes were now thriving in the subterranean network of drains, valuable land was being wastefully converted into dormant storm canals, whilst people had become socially and emotionally disconnected from water. Released and revalorised, water now serves as a mobile technology of government which can penetrate and pervade the urban form and the everyday life of its inhabitants, centrifugally unleashing the potency of water flows and human desire whilst facilitating Singapore’s transformation into a global city. With its methodological nominalism and commitment to concrete practices, I argue that once reoriented around the urban problem, Foucault’s analytics can advance environmental politics debates by demonstrating that government is a mundanely material process orchestrated through the everyday infrastructure of water management. In so doing, I also shift the emphasis from the urbanisation of nature to the naturalisation of the urban, of circulation and the art of government itself.

This thesis aims to analyse how well recruits of the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) have embraced soldier ideals put forward by the SAF following a shift in means of recruiting, changing from a system of compulsive conscription to an All-volunteer force (AVF). This has been done using a Governmentality-analysis of an extensive survey conducted at Ärna Air Base in November of 2019. The concept of Governmentality has to do with the way states and other forms of authorities govern. Launched in the 1970s by French philosopher Michel Foucault, it is based on an understanding that states no longer governing mainly by force, but rather by appealing to its citizens’ free will governing through “the conduct of conduct”, through the creation of self-governing subjects. The recruits were asked to rank different reasons for enlisting, and to assess various ideal qualities of a soldier, as well as pictures used by the SAF with the intention to recruit soldiers. The results were widespread and showed a big dissonance both among the recruits internally but also between the SAF’s military identities promoted by the SAF and the recruits. In some instances, the recruits seem to embrace the SAF’s ideals and in others they seem to be hostile of them. A few reasons for this are suggested in the final chapter of the thesis for example the societal collective understanding of the SAF or the role of the instructing officers.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze a Swedish Integration Policy Bill (2009/10:60) for refugees and humanitarian immigrants. The aim of the thesis is to investigate how integration process in Sweden is governed through ‘problem’ representations it holds. Research is conducted by using a method introduced by Carol Lee Bacchi (2009) known as ‘What’s the ‘problem’ represented to be?’. It finds answers to four of the six questions mentioned in the method, through the perspective of Foucault’s triangle of rule (i.e. governmentality, sovereign and disciplinary powers) along with the concepts of power and knowledge. State uses the knowledges produced by dichotomies, such as educated/uneducated and motivated/unmotivated immigrant, and categories, such as ‘welfare-dependent’ and ‘economic burden’, to form norms to control the behaviors and thoughts of the immigrants. Norms such as ‘active participation’ and ‘to increase their efforts’ for integration are formed, which is an example of disciplinary power exercised by government to regulate integration.

This paper examines the intensified focus on ‘return’ in Danish asylum policy and the changed approach to the assessment of revocation of residence permits and asylum claims made by Syrian nationals. The aim of the study is to understand the interplay between Danish state actors and the Refugee Appeals Board and their tactics of legitimization in adopting this new approach and rejecting asylum protection to three Syrian nationals. The study concludes that discourses linking asylum protection to ‘international obligations’, refugee status to ‘return’ and ‘the refugee’ to an essentialist understanding of the term are fundamental in facilitating the decisions made in the cases. Furthermore, a governmental goal of ensuring ‘the security of society’, that is, the Danish population defined in national terms, underpins and works to sustain these discourses. The findings contribute to creating detailed knowledge about the Danish asylum system and the logic supporting the increased focus on ‘return’.

This case study of a school garden focuses on concepts of community that are fostered and embodied at this setting. By utilizing participatory ethnographic methodologies, this research explored gemeinschaft and gesellschaft concepts of community. Data reveals that students are able to learn mastery, belonging, generosity and independence while participating in the garden work. Teachers manage students who attempt to challenge the boundaries of this community by utilizing and ethic of care which allows teachers to de-emphasize authority and to first consider the networks of relationships and how to mend and improve them. Students are able to experience governmentality and an opportunity to reassess their behaviors against the community norms. It also appears that students are socialized into gemeinschaft values by experiencing caring, loving, and nurturing relationships that are meaningful and significant. Students also experience their own independence and self-governance and are afforded opportunities to share authority in a bottom-up approach. It appears that school gardens have benefits that are far more significant than simply learning math and science skills.