This thesis examines the migration management of the European Union from 2015 until 2019. The discursive approach towards securitisation of the Copenhagen School will be applied in order to examine the processes of security that underlie the European Union’s approach to migration. However, since the European Union’s discourse on migration does not fulfil the requirements of emergency language required by the Copenhagen School and often relies on the language of routinised migration management, the concept of risk as developed by Critical Risk Studies will be introduced in order to account for the perception of migration as an issue of security for the European Union. By conducting a discourse analysis of selected speeches by high ranking EU officials, this thesis will argue that European Union migration management since the refugee crisis in 2015 is defined by a normalisation of migration as a security issue in the official discourse. This discourse is constitutive of as well as constituted by routinised practices of security and risk management.

In this thesis, the norms used in Sweden’s counterterrorism strategy will be compared to the norms that are used in the European Union’s counterterrorism strategy. Sweden has been criticized by scholars and parties of the parliament for not implementing laws that are strict enough so that Sweden can sentence those who have travelled and joined terrorist groups like ISIS. The EU sets out strategies and directives as guidelines that its member states should adopt. The aim of this research is to see if Sweden’s is regressive in relation to the EU, or if Sweden’s way of handling counterterrorism is in line with the directives and strategies that EU set out for its member states. To be able to study this, content analysis is used to analyze material from Sweden and the EU that focus on how the work of counterterrorism should be done. With the use of norm theory, the central norms in the material is recognized, and the norms which Sweden uses is compared with the ones used within the EU. The comparison shows that there are differences in how the norms are used. Sweden has adopted norms from the EU and changed them to fit in the Swedish context which repeatedly refers to the importance of the norm’s compatibility with human rights.

The following paper aims to answer the question, how do national populist movements perceive an institutionalized approach to migration on an EU level? Maintaining International Relations relevancy, the puzzle at heart is eminent with its acknowledgement of national-populist parties in relation to EU collaboration, specifically in reference to the issue of migration. Thus, the paper establishes the central argument that populist discourse establishes the EU as a constituent of the elite, projecting a nationalist agenda on migration rather than cooperating and maintaining a collective identity through the institution. Constituting contra-camp identities between the institution and its citizens whilst addressing issues at the EU level, ultimately influences transnational relations. The paper presents the cases of Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia who have arguably held populist governments during or following the migration crisis 2015/2016. Implementing a poststructural framework in collaboration with a populist ‘theory’ or paradigm, a set of quantitative analyses are enlisted, featured as a ‘backdrop’ for the discursive practices and context stage of the prominent CDA analyses. Conclusively, the results find a noticeable critique toward the EU migration approach, where the institution is recognized as an ‘elitist’ establishment maintaining opposing values to ‘the people’ and favoring migration.

A culture of accommodation and tolerance is a necessary part of establishing and preserving a functional multi-national and multi-ethnic European Union. Civil society organizations and their associated social capital have been shown to foster civic capacity and achievement of public policy goals. However, social capital that is based on group identity can also contribute to a sense of intolerance towards out-groups, undermining the stated tolerance objectives of the social pillar of the European Union. States with a strong presence alongside civil society are expected to be curb the development of the exclusionary bonding form of social capital in favor of bridging social capital which will improve progress toward policy goals. This study tests the link between government capacity, social capital and tolerance using data from the 1990-2009 waves of the World Values Survey and European Values Study. Using path analysis and multi-level models of the relationships between political capacity, social capital and intolerance, the model establishes that government capacity enhances bridging social capital and which increases social tolerance. The study fills a gap in understanding how government capacity and policy can result in improved social capital even with greater diversity. A proposed relationship between political capacity and bonding forms of social capital was not supported.

The present study explores the relationship between trust placed in national institutions and opinion of globalization. A secondary data analysis is conducted using data collected by the European Commission in a 2004 Eurobarometer survey of European Union (EU) citizens on various issues regarding the EU, globalization and national challenges. A prominent theme in the literature is that, in recent times, globalization has had the effect of compromising the sovereignty of nation-states. This has generated a backlash of nationalistic attitudes wherein globalization is posited in opposition to the nation-state. This surge in nationalism has reinforced a culture wherein any external force that has the capacity to compromise or merely challenge national sovereignty is deemed undesirable. The EU represents a unique response to the phenomenon of globalization. It is the only economic bloc that attempts to manage globalization and mitigate its negative effects through the promotion of a free market system that is actively reinforced by political and social transnational unity. By assessing EU citizens' opinion of globalization and its relation to national attachment, one can investigate whether in living in a system of shared national sovereignty, which attempts to actively manage globalization, one experiences globalization not as an external invasive force, but as an integral component of the nation-state.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and describe Russia’s Hybrid Warfare against the European Union between the years 2014-2020. The research question conducted is: In what ways has Russia been using hybrid warfare against the European Union between 2014-2020? This is conducted through an operationalization on the concept Hybrid Warfare, using the categories from the MPECI-framework (Military, Political, Economic, Civil, and Information) created by the Multinational Capability Development Campaign along with the use of previous research on the subject. The material is acquired from government statements and documents, European Union statements and documents, news articles, peer-reviewed articles, academic texts, and literature on the subject made by experts. The aim of the study is to discover the ways Russia has used hybrid warfare against the European Union between 2014-2020. The theoretical development has created valuable aspect of hybrid warfare through the analysis. The result of this study shows that Russia has used all five instruments of the MPECI-framework to implement hybrid warfare against the European Union between 2014-2020.

This research paper investigates how Transnational Organized Crime has expanded and increased their presence and their activities across borders in the European Union. Four significant concepts and theories; Globalization, migration, the social embeddedness theory, and the illegal enterprise theory were applied in order to explain how a crucial factor, globalization, in different forms has facilitated for the expansions. Using data in form of reports, documents, and news articles, a qualitative content analysis was conducted. The results show that globalization within certain industries such as transportation and trade has facilitated for the expansion in terms of activities. While globalization in terms of an enhanced movement of people across borders facilitated for the expansions in terms of recruitment of new members. Based on the results, the term globalization itself is not efficient enough to explain why and how it has facilitated for the expansions. Hence the importance of the theories and concepts that in this case have enhanced the analysis and enlarged the discussion which led to the above stated conclusion on how globalization in different forms have facilitated for Transnational Organized Crime to expand across borders.

In this thesis, I study subnational and supranational institutional dynamics and their effects on international connectivity. In the second and third chapters, I focus on regulative harmonization within regional integration as a proxy to the changing institutions at the supranational level. I use process of Turkey’s candidacy to full membership in the European Union (EU) as a context of regional integration. In the second chapter, I adopt a network perspective to the international connectivity and track the progress in regulative harmonization by constructing a basic composite index using EU Commission annual progress reports. I utilized social network analysis on USPTO patent data to understand the effect of regulative harmonization on the centrality, complexity and resilience of Turkey’s innovation network. In the third chapter, I adopt a team perspective to the international connectivity. Using the same context, I construct a more sophisticated composite index by utilizing a combination of content analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and linear aggregation methods to track the regulative harmonization in a robust way. In this chapter, I investigate the relationship between regulative harmonization and international connectivity in innovation using the same patent data supplemented by additional manually parsed company and country level data. I use a classic entropy-based measure, Shannon, to analyze the international connectivity of co-inventor teams in patents. Additionally, I explore asymmetrical impact of different regulation groups as well as a possible mediatory role of MNEs conditional on their origin using a signaling theory perspective. This chapter presents insights regarding the relationship between institutional fundamentals and international connectivity of a country. Finally, in the fourth chapter, I analyze the mechanisms through which national formal institutions interact with subnational informal institutions. More specifically, I use exploratory qualitative analysis supported by the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to study how and under what conditions subnational informal institutional factors, that are represented by local business communities and local government-business relationships, exacerbate or ameliorate voids in national formal institutions. Export promotion programs represent the context for formal national institutions in this final chapter. My study contributes, first, to institutional theory by offering a deep analysis of how national formal and subnational informal institutions interact and result in different subnational responses to common institutional voids. Second, it contributes to the literature on economic geography and innovation by demonstrating the institutional fundamentals as antecedents of international connectivity in innovation from both network and team perspectives. My thesis also contributes to the IB literature by showing the asymmetrical effect of different groups of formal institutions on international connectivity and mediatory role of MNEs conditional on their origins in the relationship between regulative harmonization and international connectivity in innovation. I also contribute methodologically to analyses of complex social phenomenon by putting together a novel bundle that produces the Weighted Average Regulative Progress Index, WARP Index, and then combines it with Shannon’s Entropy Index and a recently published estimation method, ivmediate for Stata, that accounts both on endogeneity and mediation. / Business Administration/Strategic Management

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