This thesis investigates the relationship between the ecosystem of independent media organisations in Lebanon, and their relationship to the European Union, specifically the European Endowment for Democracy. The analysis follows a trajectory starting from Beirut all the way back to Brussels, the lens of focus widening as it reaches its conclusion. It does so through first focusing on the case study of Megaphone News and whether it can be considered a Non Profit Media Organisation as proposed by economist, Julia Cagé. Then it takes testimonies from seven respondents across a number of these organisations to consider whether their approach and strategies align with the theory of participative journalism. Finally it uses thematic clusters to broaden discussion to consider the European Endowment’s role in the development of Lebanon’s independent media.  It concludes that European involvement in this context is fundamentally limited and impact by interests other than democracy assistance. It shows that neither theories can accommodate the interdependence and collaboration between organisations. It shows that the work of these independent media organisations has influenced the development of the European Endowment in a relationship that can be characterised as symbiotic and contradictory to the founding principles of this European Union institution. Both theories do not fully accommodate for the difficulties of operation in a collapsing economy and an unrepresentative political elite. The fluidity and innovation of these organisations in difficult conditions generate insights about how the theories and the relationship with Europe may be improved to facilitate continuation of development. The European Endowment is crucial in facilitating the growth of independent media in Lebanon, but those organisations have also shifted perspective of the Endowment in return. The content of this facilitation reveals internal limitations to democracy assistance efforts.

This study focuses on how important foreign policy crises are interpreted and used to construct images and framing of transnational threats. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ukraine 2014, the security order in Europe and within the European Union has been affected in various ways because of how Russia is portrayed as a potential threat. Accordingly, the aim of the study is the examination of the extent of EU’s framing of Russia as a military and political threat in the annual Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) reports between 2012-2020. Through a qualitative content analysis with a quantitative conception, the aim is to identify the negative frames of demonization that can be distinguished in the CFSP reports that correlate to EU’s framing of Russia as a threat. The theories of neoclassical realism, demonization and framing are used to provide the deductive approach of indicators that construct the frames of categorization for Russia as a military and political threat within the CFSP reports. The study concludes that the EU has framed Russia as a military threat in relation to Russia’s border transgression within Ukraine, implementing the annexation of Crimea, and Georgia. Russia is also demonized as a political threat through means that intend to cause instability in neighboring states in order to influence domestic policies, for example economic-induced pressures, spread of disinformation, and different kinds of hybrid weapons.

This thesis aimed to answer how the European Union performed as a 'global actor' in the Russia and Ukraine war from 2014 until 2022 using theoretical approaches of international relations theories. Furthermore, realist scholars define the concept of actorness as an entity capable of military decisions. At the same time, the constructivist believes that actorness is defined by other capabilities that impact the global arena. The thesis discusses the realist thinking that the European Union is not a global actor yet due to its lack of military powers. Whereas constructivism states that the European Union is a global actor, placing other means of power forward such as normative, civilian, and economic capabilities through examples. The European Union's performance as a global actor in the Russia and Ukraine conflict has not effectively stopped the war, as it has escalated despite the gradual economic sanctions imposed in 2014. The sanctions imposed by the European Union have not been effective in the past as Russia managed to blow the economic pressures over due to each other's economic interdependence. Therefore, the European Union launched its sixth package of economic sanctions in 2022 and might see success as it decided a total ban Russia's natural resources in the upcoming year. However, that remains a matter of speculation as the European Union is a global actor in progress, and the practical growth of its foreign policy is under exercise and will be discussed better in the future.

This thesis is designed to explore the complex question of compliance within the European Union. The European Union relies on the voluntary submission of it members to rules that the organization sets up. Other international organizations operate through this dynamic as well. As such, it is highly important to shed light, through research, on why states comply with the rules set forth by the organizations they belong to. Why do states comply in the European Union? There are many channels of research currently looking at this question. This thesis seeks to examine the European Commission's role in ensuring compliance in the European Union. The Commission is the chief enforcer and monitor within the European Union; as such, it is a critical component in the examination of state's compliance behavior. In order to examine the question of compliance within the European Union a researcher is forced to look at an alternative variable. Compliance is not measurable in a direct fashion and thus some proxy measure must be constructed in order to research it. The conduct of the Commission with regards to suspected and actual Member State violations of treaty obligations offers such a variable. Using data drawn from a variety of sources including the European Commission itself and a framework of research drawn from Mbaye's Why National States Comply with Supranational Law (2001) this thesis finds that no single explanatory variable is responsible for Member State compliance with the rules and laws of the European Union. Rather several factors are at work and must be looked at. This thesis finds moderate support for several hypotheses sourced from the extant literature on the subject of compliance through the models proposed herein. Other hypotheses do not hold up as well under scrutiny.

Since the early 2000s, the European Union evolved a policy of externalization of management of migration into its territory. The externalization policy makes migrant transit countries neighboring the EU a frontier of EU migration control. As a significant jumping-off point of the Central Mediterranean Route for EU-bound migrants, and given its weak state structure, Libya is a fundamental component of the EU externalization policy. In enforcing the EU externalization policy through EU-funded and supported interception and detention of EUbound migrants, Libya's authorities have systematically abused migrants. This study examined the responsibility of the European Union for the abuses of migrants in Libya. The study relied on the theory of state responsibility to argue that the EU is responsible for the abuses of migrants by Libyan authorities pursuant to the implementation of the EU externalization policy. This study is a single case study that relied on content analysis to make inferences from the corpus of documents retrieved mainly from EU institutions and international human rights organizations' reports. The result shows that the EU relied on cooperation agreements like the Memorandum of Understanding 2017 and the Malta Declaration 2017 to train Libyan Coastal security, provide logistics, share information on migrants’ boats, and fund the interception, detention, and abuse of thousands of migrants by Libyan authorities. Considering the weak state institutions in Libya, the abuse of migrants in Libya, and the responsibility of the EU to immigrants under its own laws and international conventions, the study recommends that the European Union reassess its engagement with Libya in the area of migrants’ interception and detention, with a view to providing for migrants detention in the EU where their rights are more recognized.

The Rule of Law is one of the European Union’s founding values and is not only a Treaty obligation under Article 2 Treaty on European Union but also a part of the accession criteria for potential Member States of the Union. Therefore, the Rule of Law is part of the foundation of the European Union’s institutional order, and fundamental to European integration. During the past several years concerns have been raised regarding the Rule of Law in the Union and especially regarding Poland and Hungary. The European Union has established a comprehensive response function to breaches of the Rule of Law which both Member States have been subject to. However, there are differences in the procedure and different mechanisms have been used in relation to the two Member States, and while neither the Rule of Law nor the response mechanisms available are unstudied subjects neither for social sciences nor the legal community there is a lack of research combining the two fields and comparing the Member States. This study has been conducted with the goal to fill this gap by conducting a comparative study on the Rule of Law responses at the European Union’s disposal and using Poland and Hungary as the cases addressed. The study attempts to find a correlation between the breaches within the Rule of Law committed by the Member States and the responses used by the European Union to find motivations for why it is justified to approach the Member States differently. To accomplish this the study compares first the breaches found by the European Commission in the respective Member States and then the response mechanisms used to address the concerns. By conducting this comparative analysis, the study has found significant motivations behind the different approaches used by the European Union which shows a correlation between the concerns raised and the European Union’s approach to address the concerns. The result of the study shows that it is motivated to use different approaches despite the two Member States breaching the same value.

The Eastern Partnership was founded in 2009 with three main areas of focus: one being security. The research questions: ‘What effect has the changing security situation had on the usage of the term security by the EU/joint statements by the Eastern Partnership on selected non-security terms from 2009 to 2021?’ and ‘How have the security terms been affected?’Using content analysis, sampling was kept to official statements concerning the partnership as a whole and do not include material from sub-co-operations, such as the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly. The coding, with a focus on ‘security’, includes several expressions that include security, such as; ‘energy security’; ‘human security’; ‘cyber security’; as well as ‘resolution of conflicts’ and ‘peaceful settlement’; while the codes included in the primary analysis are; ‘economic integration’; ‘stability’; ‘strategic’; ‘prosperity’ and ‘common values’. The theory of securitization was utilized due to its foundation in constructivism and the theory aims to explain how securitizing actors use speech acts to bring attention to issues. Findings show that ‘security’ has been used more in later years, while ‘stability’ is used frequently across all years with data. The selected non-security-related terms are used more overall than the selected security-related ones; a reason for this is that ‘economic integration’ is the core of the EU and one of the founding principles of the Eastern Partnership. Furthermore, one explanation why the non-security-related terms are used more could be that the Eastern Partnership and the EU do not always know where to put the focus, and as a weakness does not recognize the urgency of certain issues, and too little is done too late.

The spread of disinformation on social media platforms has in the last few years gained much scholarly attention, in particular its ability to alter democratic processes. The focus of this thesis has however been on the discourse surrounding disinformation rather than disinformation itself, more precisely, the construction and perception of disinformation as a security threat. Disinformation is an issue which is rapidly evolving with the creation of new technologies and opportunities. The aim of this thesis has been to investigate if this has led to a shift in the perception of disinformation as a threat and therefore a change of policy for the EU. This was realised through the utilisation of Carol Bacchi's WPR approach toolkits, in combination with the foundational principles derived from securitization theory. The thesis shows that the EU’s perception of disinformation as a threat has evolved from mainly focus on the decline of public trust and democratic processes. To also include and recognise a more multifaced view of the issue with a larger focus on manipulation, technology driven threats and media literacy deficiency.

Ever since its establishment, the European Union has consistently advocated its values of democracy and freedom. Over the course of the last ten years, however, these values have come to be challenged by democratic backsliding, which constitutes a new phenomenon within the Union. One of the countries that has been subject to the most severe democratic decline is Poland, which today no longer classifies as a consolidated democracy. Despite Poland´s repeated neglect of the EU values, the fulfillment of which is required to join, Poland is still a full-fledged member of the EU.  The aim of this paper is to examine in what ways the EU has exercised its normative power in order to prevent Poland´s continuous democratic backsliding and determine the reasons for its failure. Results find that the EU has taken multiple actions against Poland, however with a less successful outcome. The reasons for the EUs unsuccess consist of internal divisions between member states and its legal procedures often being protracted and too complicated. Although the EU has yet to fulfill its legal actions against Poland there are signs indicating a slight change providing hope for the future.

Immigration issues have dominated the political discourse of liberal democracies around the world in the 21st century. Recent elections in the United States and the Netherlands focused extensively on migrant flows, illegal immigration and migrant integration. Upcoming elections in France seem to be operating within similar parameters. These occurrences underpin a larger critique about the perceived failure of liberal democratic institutions to contend with immigration trends and successfully integrate migrants within their societies. Nowhere has this critique been more prevalent than within the public and political discourse of the European Union, the institution of focus for this paper. As the EU member states struggle to cope with their migrant issues, scholars are increasingly looking to the larger EU governmental structure to anticipate how the region will handle these challenges. Accordingly, much of the scholarly work done on subjects such as integration policy within the EU are mainly focused upon the perceived convergence of policy amongst member states. The intent of this thesis therefore, is to evaluate the validity of claims that migrant integration policy is converging amongst EU member states, and to explain why this may be the case. This was accomplished via a cross-comparison of policy outcome scores, (provided by the Migration Integration Policy Index), over time between EU-15 and EU-12 states. The convergence of policy in the EU is a topic that has been routinely addressed by scholars, but by examining the potential trends amongst the traditionally ignored EU-12 states, this thesis hopes to contribute to the academic discourse by providing a different perspective.