The ambition of this essay is to examine if groups on Facebook are examples of “slacktivism” and discuss which qualifications these groups have in order to provide a democratic conversation. The results will be discussed relative to democratic participant, information overload, interactivity and previous research. By nethnographically observing three groups and analyzing selected posts and comments with the critical discourse analysis one can see that slacktivism spreads easily by people liking and sharing posts from the groups to their friends. The particular groups that has been analyzed in this essay are committed to save Swedish traditions that they believe is threatened. The outcome showed no proof that the groups contribute to social change and they did not give rise to a democratic conversation. Instead the groups spread and encouraged nationalism and racism by blaming immigrants and Muslims for threatening Swedish traditions.

This thesis begins by arguing that the defining moment of New Zealand nationalism occurred not at Gallipoli but in Britain in 1905 with the triumphant tour of the All Blacks. The myths were later strengthened in the 1930s cultural literary movement which placed the 'ordinary bloke', and his traditions, at the centre of importance in New Zealand society. While this literary movement diminished towards the 1970s, it continued to exert a powerful influence in New Zealand up till the 1980s when authors, such as Greg McGee, sought to challenge the relevance of this nationalism and definition of masculinity. The intention of this thesis is not only to consider the mutually reinforcing areas of masculinity and rugby in generating a distinctively New Zealand identity, but more importantly to demonstrate how perceptions towards masculinity have been reviewed and reevaluated since the late 1970s. Rugby has also had a role in challenging and undermining those myths of identity. In order to chart the shifts in these perceptions, the thesis will not only focus on Greg McGee's Foreskin's Lament and its subsequent revision in 1985,but also on Whitemen. Old Scores, Skinand Bone and the accompanying literary criticism which deals with all of these texts to destabilise the myths and suggest where masculinity now stands in New Zealand.

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In Ireland's divided society in which everything is political except solutions, the evaluation and redefinition of the governing metaphors of political and cultural identity is a matter of public concern. For nationalist Ireland, the traditional centrality of the poetic imagination to the development of the legitimating tropes of national identity endows representative status upon all subsequent poetry which treats of these themes. The heated public and critical debate about the poetry of Seamus Heaney derives from the recognition that as nations are "imagined communities", so the form and content of the poet's imaginative process is heavy with political and social implications. Heaney's poetic negotiation between the given collective traditions of his community and the transfigurative appeal of the individual imagination engaged with modernity, produces a sustained reflection upon the nature and implications of cultural identity in modern Ireland. What is implict in the tenor of the debate surrounding Heaney is explicit in Heaney f s compelling poetic, namely, that in the modern age cultural identity remains central to social and political definition. But whereas the fact of cultural identity is central to social definition, the form (either hegemonic or inclusivist) of any such expression of identity is dependent upon the discursive practices which imagine and construct such definitions. In this context what begins for Heaney as a lyric flirtation with the possibilities of language, becomes a critical reappraisal of nationalist ideology's governing metaphors of place, history and belonging. In order to situate and define Heaney's contribution to the preoccupying question of identity it is necessary to evaluate the history and discursive evolution of nationalism as an ideology. Such an evaluation demonstrates that nationalism as a product of post-dynastic modern societies, is dependent upon a number of figurative habits and discursive practices for its universal and universalising appeal. By identifying these formations and by establishing the connection between these figures of thought and the expression of cultural identity as a hegemonic or inclusivist narrative, criteria may be determined against which the status of Heaney's own expressions of cultural identity may be assessed. Against the contemporary background in which nationalism appears to have acquired the status of a political metaphysics, Heaney's candid engagement with the cherished illusions informing this perception reveals him for what he is - a definitively modern poet announcing to those who will listen that there is and must be, poetry after Auschwitz.

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This thesis traces the evolution of Arab nationalism in Syria from 1908 to 1920. It attempts to determine when Arab nationalism was accepted as the primary focus of political 1oya1ty by the Syrian Arabs during this period and what reasons prompted the Syrian Arabs to support Arab nationa1ism. It was found that during the years from 1908 to 1918 Arab nationa1sim as a po1itica1 force came into being in Syria and was embraced by a few Syrian Arabs. At this time, however, the majority of Syrian Arabs of all classes rejected Arab nationalism and maintained their po1itica1 allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. In 1918 with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalism in Syria was accepted by most Syrian Arabs as the only ideological alternative now avai1ab1e by which to maintain and protect their traditional interests and to build a new po1itical community.

This thesis demonstrates the powerful relationship between ethnicity, culture, nation and state in the Basque Country and the Former Yugoslavia. In placing Basque and Yugoslav sub-state nationalism in comparative relief this study argues that political state or autonomy seeking behavior on the basis of an ethnically defined or imagined community continues to have powerful contemporary salience. Furthermore when situated within the literature on nationalism, these two cases suggest that the theoretical literature needs to be reworked beyond the positions of Anthony Smith and Ernest Gellner. The endurance of cultural claims to a political state suggests that the connection between ethnicity and the nation is stronger then many contemporary observers have suggested. It is argued that the cultural, political and territorial rights of sub-state nations are likely to remain highly divisive sites of historical, cultural and political contestation. As a force, nationalism is by no means relegated to the past by cosmopolitanism or a ‘post-national’ shift as a number of high profile commentators in the contemporary social sciences have argued. Rather, it remains an active and powerful idea that will continue to shape the sociopolitical landscape of human societies into the twenty-first century as it has the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.