This thesis present an analysis of pension systems in the Czech Republic and the United States of America, according to the status in 2013. The aim is to make comparison of pension schemes based on defined criteria, that are budgetary responsibility, the quality of life for the elderly, social justice, social solidarity, equivalence and financial sustainability of the pension system. Another objective is to compare each pillar of the pension systems and analyze the different elements of the benefits that are provided from mentioned pillars. Theoretical basis include the Welfare State theory, the theory of public finance and the theory of market, state and civic sector and the criterion anchoring of the reform. The research is devoted to the analysis of pension systems ability to provide an adequate income in retirement, what is the real purchasing power of pensioners, whether the pension systems are due to unfavorable demographic development in the future financially sustainable and how the pension system encourages older workers to remain in the labor market.

This research is inspired by Albert Memmi’s paradox of the colonizer who refuses, yet remains the colonizer, complicit in colonial structures. It is explorative, qualitative, speculative and possibility orientated. It utilizes a Critical Disability Theory (CDT) lens to seek out confluences with Indigenous Resurgence, decolonial actions and reconciliation praxis. It explores the concept of Everyday Acts as being applicable for resurgence projects and non-indigenous solidarity and reconciliation practices that center Indigenous self-determination and land and water based lifeways as paramount to ecological justice. The research design is phenomenological, embodied and transformative. It endeavours to explore some of the more nuanced pockets of possibility for emergent ally-ship, and solidarity within the context of the settler who refuses through engaging with Access Intimacy, symbiosis/solidarity, gifting economy, failure as praxis, and relationship building. It does this through a thematic literature review, an interview and the idea of email essays as Life Writing. Interview and Email essays are offered as phenomenological life writings from four Collaborators, that share personal insights and stories conveying everyday experiences of accountability, responsibility, community care, community engagement, intergenerationality, embodiment, disability, collaboration, friendship and everyday acts. In concentrating on the smaller felt spaces of engagement, this modest research project hopes to bring insight and awareness to how small conscientious intergenerational everyday acts of solidarity can catalyze meaningful change and the possibility of transformation. To conclude, the research offers a discussion and some recommendations for future research. / Graduate / 2023-04-14

In this paper, we discuss the bridging potential of “interspecies” solidarity between the often incommensurable ethics of care and justice. Indeed, we show that the Environmental Communication literature emphasizes feelings of care and compassion as vectors of responsibility taking for animals. But we also show that a growing field of Political Animal Rights suggest that such responsibility taking should instead be grounded in universalizable terms of justice. Our argument is that a dual conception of solidarity can bridge this divide: On the one hand, solidarity as a pre-political relation with animals and, on the other hand, as a political practice based on open public deliberation of universalizable claims to justice; that is, claims to justice advanced by human proxy representatives of vulnerable non-humans. Such a dual conception can both challenge and validate NGOs’ claims to “speak on behalf of animals” in policy following the Aarhus Convention, indeed underwriting the Convention by insights from internatural communication in solidarity as relation, and by subjecting it to rational scrutiny in mini-publics in solidary as practice.

This study concerns the alliance against clearcutting that has been formed between the Swedish environmental movement and the Sami movement. Earlier studies on environmentalist/Indigenous alliances have found that such cooperation often has been formed through reproductions of a colonial political relationship, perpetuating Indigenous peoples' structural marginality. This study therefore examines the production of solidarity within this alliance, and attends to how they challenge or reproduce a colonial power asymmetry. The analysis shows that the alliance has formed solidarity over identity and community borders, through conscious commitment to pluralism. This commitment has further shown to rely on the alliance functioning as a site of knowledge-sharing, placing embodied knowledge-practices central to a solidarity production of decolonization. The environmentalists in the alliance have by understanding and recognizing the forests they are seeking to protect as Indigenous land, and as occupied territory central to traditional cultural Indigenous life, enabled a decolonizing reconfiguration of the environment. Notwithstanding, the study problematize certain findings in relation to the risks they demonstrate of reproducing a colonial power asymmetry, and discusses the complexities of environmentalists claiming authority within foreign cultural landscapes, and carrying out protests affecting the social dynamics of Indigenous local communities. / Denna studie rör den allians mot kalhygge som bildats mellan den svenska miljörörelsen och den samepolitiska rörelsen. Tidigare studier om allianser mellan miljöaktivister och urbefolkningar har funnit att sådant samarbete ofta har bildats genom reproduktioner av en kolonial politisk relation, vilket vidmakthåller urbefolkningens strukturella marginalitet. Denna studie undersöker därför produktionen av solidaritet inom denna allians, och utforskar hur de utmanar eller reproducerar en kolonial maktasymmetri. Analysen visar att alliansen skapar solidaritet över identitets- och samhällsgränser, genom ett medvetet engagemang för pluralism. Detta engagemang möjliggörs genom att alliansen fungerar som en plats för kunskapsdelning, vilket placerar förkroppsligade kunskapspraktiker centralt för en solidarisk produktion av avkolonisering. Miljöaktivisterna i alliansen har, genom att förstå och erkänna skogarna som de försöker skydda som ockuperat territorium centralt för traditionellt kulturellt liv, möjliggjort en avkoloniserande omstrukturering av sin framställning av miljön. Studien problematiserar vidare vissa fynd i förhållande till de risker de utgör i att reproducera en kolonial maktsasymmetri, och diskuterar komplexiteten i att miljöaktivister gör anspråk på auktoritet inom främmande kulturlandskap och genomför demonstrationer som påverkar den sociala dynamiken i urbefolkningens lokalsamhällen.

The purpose of the project is to create a model for improved and expanded participation in an activist network, The Ada Songor Salt Women's Association (ASSWA) by enhancing communications. ASSWA is an organization of Brave Women (Yihi katseme) salt winners from the Songor lagoon area in south eastern Ghana. They are committed to ensuring that the lagoon and its harvest is a resource for all. ASSWA has found over time that to defend the lagoon and the livelihood of the 45 communities around it, requires that they articulate the experiences and demands of women and marginalized members of the community. This study exmines communications of the ASSWA network within the context of Communications for Change. describes the dialectic within the network, how members discuss issues and resolve differences, how they define and articulate their programmes and demands. It examines if the mobilisation and activism of poor rural women can challenge the dominant discourses of traditional development and patriarchy. Key to learning is abstraction, the linking of issues and abstracting of the problematic causative mechanisms, the project studies this process within the ASSWA context by looking at how the network and its members link their struggles with broader social movements within Ghana and beyond. The continued agency of the ASSWA is challenged by the poverty of the community within which it operates and by its ability to communicate effectively locally, nationally and internationally. As it stands now, the organisation is active but long-term sustainability may be compromised by the lack of dialogic interactions at all levels of engagement. This paper creates a model (theory) for more active participation in based on their identified priorities, needs and requirements, in such a way as to promote ‘power participation’. The research was conducted using a critical realist ontological framework and qualitative interview research methodologies

This diploma thesis aims to find out what the human solidarity means and how it is created in expression of mutual aid with support in Kropotkin's conception of mutual aid. The thesis acquaints a reader with Kropotkin and his theory of mutual aid presented in the book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. It follows up Kropotkin's crucial thoughts and the theory of mutual aid in related contexts. Next it interprets the solidarity as a structure and as a process and describes them in details. The thesis also substantiates the discipline Psychosocial Crisis Co-operation, particularly its starting point that men have helped each other from time immemorial.

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The diploma thesis deals with the relationship of the Solidarity movement with the Catholic Church in Poland until 1989 and the manifestations of this relationship in Czech samizdat periodicals. The researched periodicals are Lidové noviny, Informace o Charte 77 and Informace o církvi. The thesis presents the situation of the Polish civil opposition, especially in the 1980s. Much of the work is devoted to the Solidarity movement. Not only important milestones of this movement are presented here, but to some extent also its sociological profile. In addition to the civic opposition, the situation of the Catholic Church in Poland is described with emphasis on the circumstances and events that built the relationship between the Church and the stateas well as between the Church and the Solidarity movement. Due to the profile of the work, one of the chapters also deals with dissent in the then Czechoslovakia, both civic and Catholic. The researched periodicals have a samizdat character, so one of the chapters is dedicated to this form of written text and the author explains the reasons for choosing the three mentioned samizdat titles. Quantitative and qualitative analysis was used to find answers to research questions. Both analyzes and conditions created by the author for the inclusion of certain...

This dissertation focuses on the rise and fall of “local-level foreign policy” and the local coalitions of leftists and liberals behind these policies. Relying on extensive archival research and interviews, the project shows that, in the decades following 1968, newly elected left-liberal city officials collaborated with leftist, international solidarity activists to use city resources as a means of offering support to social movements in distant parts of the world. In the process, city officials and grassroots activists both aided international movements and drew public attention to the downturn in public funding for social programs in lieu of an expanding military budget. The study refers to these partnerships as “Urban Internationalist Coalitions.” In the 1970s and 1980s, Urban Internationalist Coalitions around the United States passed ballot measures, created sister-city relationships, and organized city-based international delegations designed to challenge and ameliorate the impacts of, what they understood as, the unjust foreign policies of the U.S. federal government towards North Vietnam, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. These initiatives reshaped local politics as strategically capable of tackling problems beyond the city’s borders. By the 1980s, local politicians and grassroots activists’ collaborative engagement around opposing U.S. foreign policy made local-level foreign policy a prevalent aspect of city politics nationwide. As the influence of Urban Internationalist Coalitions and their political strategies expanded, this left-liberal group of collaborators experienced growing pains. By the late 1980s, dozens of cities had replicated local-level foreign policy projects in opposition to the Reagan Administration’s policies towards revolutionary Nicaragua. However, cities’ projects often correlated more with distinct, local political conditions rather than an over-arching, national strategy. Thus, as local-level foreign policies grew in prevalence, a coordinated national strategy became more difficult. When Urban Internationalist Coalitions’ politics did come to inform a national strategy in the form of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, the increased scale of a national campaign unearthed leftists and liberals’ strategic differences. Organizing across an expanded, national terrain, Urban Internationalist Coalitions confronted the obstacle that neoliberalism’s political and economic impact posed to their political goals and the longevity of their left-liberal alliance. Urban Internationalist Coalitions ultimately experienced Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition organization as a series of political clashes. The political schisms exposed within the Rainbow Coalition frayed at the edges of leftists and liberals’ working relationships locally. Facing substantial political and economic challenges, Urban Internationalist Coalitions unraveled by the early 1990s. / History

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