The purpose of this thesis is theory development. It begins by evaluating existing explanations of why states undertake humanitarian intervention. Realists argue that states only intervene when their national interests are at stake. Normative scholars argue that states are at times motivated to save foreign citizens. Neither approach adequately accounts for the pattern of post-Cold War state practice. Building from this conclusion, the thesis conducts research based on two propositions derived from an analysis of existing debates: that examining state motive holds promise for elucidating the weaknesses in current approaches and that studying state argumentation can provide insight into state motives. To better investigate state motives, a theoretical framework is developed to explain how motives translate into state decision-making and manifest themselves in state argumentation. By employing process tracing, argumentation analysis, and elite interviews, this framework is applied to three cases: Northern Iraq in 1991, Rwanda in 1994, and East Timor in 1999. Each case study constructs a theoretically informed narrative, assesses debates between states at the United Nations Security Council, and evaluates the consistency between state discourse and state practice. The cases are then used heuristically to identify opportunities for improving existing theory and developing new theory. This yields several conclusions. First, not only do states often possess mixed motives, but the humanitarian impulse also appears in some cases to have been a necessary condition for humanitarian intervention. Second, the norm of humanitarian intervention does not function as a general rule. Rather, it is a cluster of principles derived from just war theory and international law, but also connected to related norms about sovereignty, human rights, and self-determination. Third, state decision-making is a collective process structured by the prevailing post-Cold War institutional and normative context. The thesis concludes by outlining promising avenues of research for better understanding why states respond to some occurrences of mass atrocities and not others.

Ukraine’s foreign policy has puzzled observers since the dissolution of the Soviet Union due to its unusual inconsistency. This inconsistency exhibited itself in contradictory decisions by the Ukrainian executive carried out within a short period of time, which signalled either greater cooperation with Russia and relative cooling of relations with the West, or integration into Western institutions and worsening of the relations with Moscow. This study aims to explain the inconsistency by examining the sources of Ukraine’s foreign policy through process-tracing in four policy cases: Ukraine’s renouncement of nuclear weapons (1991-1994), the status of the Black Sea Fleet (1991-1997), the Odesa-Brody pipeline (2002-2004), and the 2006-2009 gas disputes. Contrary to dominant interpretations of Ukraine’s foreign policy vacillation that emphasise the role of external influences, especially that of Russia and the West, this study concludes that Ukraine’s inconsistent foreign policy decisions are best explained by domestic factors – intra-executive divisions and the influence of vested interests on policy-making. The work relies on the use of primary sources including archival research, elite interviews, and Ukrainian and Russian newspaper reports.

How can political science account for the decision of African states to strengthen their ties with China, often at the expense of other alliances and often in the face of economic risks? This thesis explores this question in the context of relations between Ethiopia and China, especially in the context of investments made by Chinese sovereign wealth funds in the Ethiopian economy. To begin to answer this question this thesis recasts the China-Africa debate to focus on African, i.e. Ethiopian, agency. The focus is on how Ethiopia's political leaders make foreign policy decisions and on the factors that shape their preferences. This focus reveals the influence of cognitive variables on their foreign policy decisions; the influence of their guiding ideology, 'revolutionary democracy,' is especially key. An analysis of Ethiopia's formal institutions demonstrates they are inadequate to explain the policy choices of Ethiopian leaders; they have been designed to reflect the concepts of revolutionary democracy. Using the language of prospect theory, a descriptive theory of decision-making under risk, this thesis contends that Ethiopian leaders select foreign policy options by weighing their possible outcomes as gains or losses relative to revolutionary democracy as their reference frame. Ethiopian leaders sanctioned China's finance of the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation despite the monopoly it gave to China and its impact on Ethiopia's debt. They formed a front company between Ethiopia and China's military industrial complexes despite its negative effects on economic development. They opened Ethiopia’s regions to Chinese capital although capital flows only to state-owned enterprises. Yet in each case, ideological objectives were advanced. This examination demonstrates how non-structural factors play a critical role in a bureaucratized state. Theoretical frameworks that account for these factors, like prospect theory, are therefore valuable to more robust understandings of Ethiopia, and Africa's, deepening relations with China.

This thesis presents a sub-national comparative analysis of the nexus between migration and development using the case of two disparate migrant communities (from the Upper East and Eastern regions of Ghana) in the UK. The aim is to examine how inherent socio-economic inequalities prior to emigration impact on emigrants’ migration patterns, experiences, transnational activities and, ultimately, development outcomes at the micro and meso levels in the sending country. I argue, in this thesis, that the focus by development economists and most migration researchers on national-level macro analysis, as well as ‘location specific’ or single-site sub-national analysis, of the centrality of remittances to the enhancement of development at ‘home’ masks important nuances that are revealed by a comparative sub-national analysis. This study uses a case study approach, whereby two migrant communities are investigated in detail within their pre-migration contexts. This allows for a deeper understanding of how transnational migration practices and/or processes are influenced by, and influence their context. It examines regional socio-economic inequalities and the interconnections between migration stage, spatial scales and local development. This is achieved through a fifteen-month fieldwork using multiple research methods (key-informant interviews, in-depth structured and semi-structured interviews, surveys, participant observation and library research) in order to corroborate and triangulate findings from different sources. The thesis takes a spatiotemporal perspective in the migration-development nexus debate. Respondents for this research include economic migrants and refugees/forced migrants. Among others, I conclude that globalisation and access to effective, yet relatively cheap, technological and communications facilities have bolstered individualistic migratory decision making thus reducing the centrality of the family or household as the unit of analysis in the causes and consequences of migration discourses. Overall, the thesis aims to contribute a new, broader, and more inclusive perspective to migration research by arguing that migration-development phenomena are better appreciated through a comprehensive approach that encompasses migrants and sending communities and underlines the relationship between the two within a sub-national context.

Paragraphs 138 to 140 of the Outcome Document of the 2005 UN World Summit not only elevated the element of prevention to a prominent place within the principle of “responsibility to protect” (R2P), but also restricted the scope of R2P to four specific crimes under international law: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. This thesis explores the conceptual and practical consequences of linking R2P to the concept of international crimes, with a particular focus on the preventive dimension of R2P, the socalled “responsibility to prevent”. To date, much of what has been written about the “responsibility to prevent” borrows primarily from conflict prevention theory and practice. Such conflict prevention inspired accounts of the “responsibility to prevent” tend to depict the principle as a long-term agenda that seeks to build societies resilient to atrocity crimes; that rests primarily on pillars one (state responsibility) and two (international assistance and capacity-building); that is supportive rather than undermining of state sovereignty; and that can largely adhere to the traditional conflict prevention principles of impartiality, consent, and minimal coercion should more direct prevention efforts become necessary. Drawing on literature from criminology, this thesis develops an international crimes framework for operationalizing the preventive dimension of R2P. The framework, combined with three case studies of international crime prevention (Bosnia 1991-1995; Kenya 2007-08; and Libya 2011), challenges key assumptions of the conflict prevention accounts, arguing that linking R2P to the concept of international crimes turns the “responsibility to prevent” into a principle that is more focused on the short-term, rather than on so-called root causes of atrocity crimes; more focused on individuals, rather than on state structures and capacity; more partial regarding perpetrators and victims; and more coercive, intrusive, and controversial than is commonly acknowledged in academic writing and policy debates on the subject. More broadly, the thesis concludes that taking R2P’s focus on the prevention of international crimes seriously requires re-rethinking the “responsibility to prevent” in important respects.

For the most part, formal economic integration between African states can be characterised as ‘theatre regionalism’: governments sign regional economic agreements with no intention to implement them. Yet amidst widespread theatre there have been a few instances of actual integration. This thesis sets out to explain this variance: under what conditions do African governments implement – and not just sign – formal agreements on regional economic integration? To answer this question the dominant Eurocentric literature on comparative regionalism is amended with insights from the third worldist literature on African states to develop a new approach for comparative analysis, the ‘Regionalism as Policy Space’ (RPS) framework. This framework models African regionalism as a two-stage game. At the first stage, governments’ interests in regionalism are determined by perceptions of the existence of structural cross-issue linkages connecting implementation of regional agreements with the widening of government policy space. Given such linkages, at the second stage, governments of a region engage in a coordination game to establish the distribution of benefits from integration. Variance in the implementation of regional agreements, then, is explained by variance in the existence of perceived cross-issue linkages (the Benefits Existence Condition) and the ability of participating governments to ease distributional tensions (the Benefits Distribution Condition). Four African customs union case studies - the East African customs union of the 1960s and 70s, the customs union of the East African Community in the 2000s, the customs union of the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Customs Union – lend strong empirical support to the RPS framework. The thesis ends with a discussion of the role of hegemons and proposes a series of policy measures aiming to reduce the likelihood of theatre regionalism in Africa.

Syftet med denna studie har varit att undersöka hur väl informerade och förberedda svenska gymnasieelever blir när det gäller internationella studier, jobb eller praktik. Resultatet visar att 85 procent av de elever som svarat på enkäten inte anser att de får tillräcklig information när det gäller utlandsstudier, jobb eller praktik. Detta kan sättas i perspektiv till att 79 procent av eleverna själva är intresserade av internationell erfarenhet. Alltså finns det ett behov av information som inte är tillfredsställt. / The purpose of this study is to investigate how well informed and prepared Swedish students are for international studies, work or internship. The result shows that 85 percent of the responding students do not think that they receive sufficient information regarding studies, work or internship abroad. In comparison to the 79 percent of the students who are interested in international experience, the unsatisfied need for information is clear.

Copyright law relegates translation to a secondary, or derivative, status, which means that publishing a translation requires the permission of the rights holder of the original. This thesis argues for the timeliness of revisiting the translation right by analyzing its foundations and its implications from a transdisciplinary public policy perspective. This is done by first studying the historical and philosophical foundations of copyright law itself where the translation right is housed, revealing questionable philosophical arguments and a colonial past that has created legal path dependencies. The thesis then undertakes an examination of the foundations of the translation right specifically, dubbed “the international issue par excellence,” which confirms the same pattern observed in the development of copyright law. Given the complete absence of the translator’s perspective from all international discussions on the translation right, copyright’s view of translation is then contrasted with recent scholarship in translation theory, with a special focus on the notion of agency(-ies), exposing the incompatibility of these views on translation, and highlighting the importance of including the perspective of translation studies in policies and laws related to translation. The last part of the thesis explores the present-day realities of knowledge societies, digital technologies, and globalization, in order to identify the role of translation today and in the future, while highlighting the tremendous gaps between the have’s and the have-not’s, and the necessity of recognizing the specificities of different societies. Knowledge is the new capital of the world, and the translation right is an impediment to the key role translation can potentially play in allowing societies to participate in the cycle of its consumption and regeneration. Digital technologies are powerful enablers that have allowed those who have leveraged and embraced them, such as the open movement and prosumers of all types, to transform the nature of their interactions with their environment macro- and microstructurally. This has also been reflected in the profession of translation, where collaborative projects are constantly initiated, while the nature of the translator’s work is changing to the point where one seriously doubts whether the provisions of the century-old translation right still apply to it. The discussion on globalization focuses on language in a globalized world, power relations between linguistic communities, and means of preserving linguistic diversity and heritage. The translation right, with its questionable foundations and outdated nature, is an impediment to the potential role of translation (as representative of the public interest) in the world, and must be revisited and at least reduced to the point of constituting balanced public policy. Social development, power relations and the necessity of differentiation (or “otherness”) are running themes throughout the work, which tries to balance between theoretical discussions from various relevant disciplines and reliance on United Nations and other public policy research.

I argue that a country’s preferences in an international trade negotiation ultimately reflect the domestic distribution of power across economic sectors not only in the field of the market, but also in the field of society. Fields correspond to arenas of power. Whereas in the market societal actors have economic capital (EC), their position in society determines their identity capital (IC). The more a sector is associated to the dominant conception of national identity, the higher is its IC. Both types of capital impact a sector’s political power (PP). IC manifests itself in the phase of ratification either instrumentally, when in dispute in the political field, or structurally, if embedded in state institutions. Hence, when IC is instrumentalised, only if the coalition in government espouses a social paradigm to which a sector is mostly associated it will be able to convert its level of IC into PP. As ratification shadows negotiation, constraints in this latter phase tend to be false positives in explaining the formation of the national interest. The hypothesis on the role of IC in shaping the weight of sectors’ preferences in trade negotiations is tested along with a process of theory-building through a multi-method structured-focused comparison. For the comparison, two countries were chosen as their societies are diverse in terms of identity, yet each represents a variety of the effects of IC. Brazil and India have identity-based social cleavages that are expressed in structural and instrumental terms respectively. They are key players in the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) multilateral system of trade, having participated of the Doha Development Round of trade liberalisation. Brazil expressed interest for liberalisation as the mostly racially-diverse sectors had offensive demands. In turn, protectionist demands prevailed in India, as defensive sectors are associated to the dominant secularist paradigm of national identity.

The purpose was to analyze Turkey's current music teacher training curriculum as situated in the centralized educational system, focusing on the extent to which the written document (1) reflects the core elements of the overall centralized educational system; (2) prescribes the nature of teaching materials and methods, assessment tools and other forms of evaluating and monitoring performance as teachers and musicians; and (3) acknowledges cultural diversity by addressing repertoire, musical activities and concepts according to geographic and cultural regions. Qualitative-descriptive and quantitative content analysis, including the methods of (a) Inverse document frequency and (b) relevance feedback model, were the analytic tools. Of the required 147 credit hours, 138 are the core. The music core consists of 87 (63%) and the non-music core of 51 credit hours (37%). On paper, there is a conceptual overlap in wording between the music core, the general core, and the teacher training core, suggesting curricular cohesion and consistency. Noticeably less cohesion exists between the document and three major policy papers on teacher competencies. By word count, preparing teachers for instruction in Turkish folk music and multicultural issues appears to hold a low priority in the curriculum. However, course descriptions, where they exist, speak to skills and knowledge linked to performing and understanding Turkish folk and art music, not Western art music alone. Missing from those descriptions is any reference to teaching materials and methods, specific assessment tools, and other forms of evaluating and monitoring students. With reference to works by Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Robert Merton, the study concludes with a discussion about issues and problems inherent in a centralized teacher program that seeks to prepare music teachers for a culturally diverse society.