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The aim of this essay was to study the European Union’s (EU) role as a democracy promoter and its impact on Croatia’s democratization process. Croatia is a candidate country for membership in the EU which creates a possibility for impact and democracy promotion. The aim is met by studying the following questions:  In what way has the EU promoted democracy in Croatia? How did Croatia respond? To what extent has the EU contributed to Croatia’s democratization process?   Croatia is treated as a case study of the EU’s democracy promotion and the method used was qualitative text-analysis. The result of the study shows that the EU has considerably contributed to the consolidation of democracy in Croatia. However the EU’s democracy promotion is characterized by conditionality and Croatia’s interest in becoming a part of the EU has been essential for influence. Finally a discussion of to what extent the EU has contributed to the democratization of Croatia is provided.

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yes / The African continent is a sleeping giant which will increasingly be a player to be reckoned with on the global stage. At the same time, its migration potential will be multiplied by Africa’s forthcoming demographic explosion. Consequently, the EU and Africa have a shared interest in working together towards making African development sustainable. African integration will be key towards speeding up this process. This paper first evaluates the stakes of the African challenge for the European Union. It considers the economic potential that can be unleashed by speeding up integration processes in Africa. Second, it argues that Africa will be ‘the China of the 21st Century’, and that any development, positive or negative, taking place there will have large repercussions in Europe, and that therefore the EU and Africa are communities of destiny in need of a joint approach towards African industrialisation. Finally, it provides a roadmap of important steps that Europe needs to consider in its endeavour to support African development.

M.A. / Since the end of the Cold War era, peace and security have been the first priority of the African states. Africa has been afflicted by armed conflicts, wars and genocide since the African states gained their independence in 1960s. Presently, there are still some countries that are involved in conflicts including Sudan and Somalia. Armed conflicts undermine Africa's social and economic developments. Furthermore, this situation threatens African political stability in particular, peace and security. The international community is actively engaged in promoting peace, security and stability in Africa. So far, the United Nations (UN) has conducted eighteen peacekeeping operations and it still leads eight peacekeeping operations in Africa. It was found that peacekeeping operations are crucial to sustain peace and stability on the continent. The focus and aim of this study is to investigate cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU) with regard to peacemaking and peacekeeping in Africa. It was found that cooperation between the EU and AU has increased since the first EU-Africa Summit in Cairo in 2000. Both the EU and the AU have recently strengthened their relationship in a wide range of activities including human rights and governance, economic growth as well as peace and security. Importantly, the second EU-Africa Summit was held in Lisbon, in December 2007. At this, the EU highlighted the importance of a comprehensive, robust and long-term framework for its relations with the AU. The EU and Africa are connected by strong historical, trade and colonial links and the EU has a deep interest in a prosperous and stabilised Africa. Meanwhile, armed conflicts not only paralyse the African continent's, but also the European states' interests. Thus, the EU has reinforced its relationship with the AU in the fields of peace and security.

Magister Legum - LLM / The United Kingdom (UK) is one of the largest Member states within the European Union (EU) that receive export goods from developing countries. The UK has successfully voted to exit the EU through a referendum and this may impact the already existing developing countries’ markets that depend on their exports to the UK. On the one hand, the UK has promised that it intends on maintaining the existing trade agreements with most of its trade partners including the Southern African Development Community (SADC)-EU Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA). On the other hand, the UK is concerned of its independence from the EU and at this point in time, it can only be anticipated that, agreements if any, relating to Brexit will only suffice once the entire exiting process has been completed.

Energy policy in the European Union (EU) is a patchwork of diverging interests and preferences. While the European Commission pushes for a common energy policy, Member States are responsible for their own separate energy policies. These divergences in interests and preferences might create a conflict situation between the Commission and Member States. This thesis explores the Commission’s behaviour vis-à-vis the Member States, investigating the conditions under which the Commission is likely to try to deviate from Member States’ preferences in the external dimension of the EU internal energy market. Adopting a Principal-Agent Model (PAM), this thesis conceptualizes the Member States as principals and the Commission as their agent. A qualitative case study approach and process-tracing method are applied to appreciate the variety of preferences of the actors involved, and provide a means to study the various shades of post-delegation agent’s behaviour. This thesis looks at four in-depth case studies: 1) Decision 994/2012 on establishing an information exchange mechanism with regard to intergovernmental agreements between Member States and third countries in the field of energy; 2) Directive 2009/73/EC on common rules for the internal market in gas; 3) Energy Community Treaty; and 4) Energy Charter Treaty. These were selected based on their relevance to the research question. Findings suggest that two factors are likely to affect the Commission’s deviation from Member States’ preferences: a) the preference alignment among the principals and b) the preference alignment between the principals and the agent. This thesis suggests that when the preferences between the agent and the principals are heterogeneous, the agent is more likely to deviate from the preferences of the principals. This thesis also suggests that the preference alignment among the principals only has a secondary effect on the agent’s deviation. Finally, this research contributes to the further development of the PAM offering a possible categorisation of post-delegation agent’s behaviour going beyond the dichotomy of deviation and non-deviation.

The thesis examines the European Union as a mediator in the case of Belgrade-Pristina dialogue. It tends to discover which factors led to lower mediation effectiveness after 2015, by EU's mediation strategy, leverage and coherence. The thesis is designed as a qualitative case study which compares three different stages of the case by implementing a combination of congruence method and process tracing. Drawing for the content and document analysis as well as four interviews conducted and two personal communications, the thesis analyses the factors which influenced effectiveness and compares them throughout three different phases of the mediation. In the end, the analysis shows that while strategy remained the same, levels coherence and leverages changed and concluded that it was the weaking of EU's leverage strength that influenced mediation effectiveness the most.

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.

Yes / This contribution focuses on two fundamental features of the African continent that will affect both sides of the Mediterranean in the 21st Century. On the one hand, the huge migration potential of Africa. On the other, the speed of economic change of a continent increasingly regarded as ‘the next China’. The challenge facing both the European Union and Africa is to ensure that African growth and demography will be sustainable. The paper argues that Europe will be the part of the world the most directly affected by developments in Africa, be they the worst random shocks or the most virtuous economic trends. It therefore calls for an ambitious renewed EU-Africa economic partnership, similar in scope to the Chinese cooperation model in Africa but without imitating it, to avoid a migratory haemorrhage and make African development sustainable to the benefit of both sides of the Mediterranean.