When her father dies unexpectedly and under mysterious circumstances, Veronika embarks on a journey spanning three continents to uncover the truth about his life as well as her own hidden past growing up in the war-torn region of Moldova.

The purpose of this dissertation is to document the evolution of Moldavian violin performance practice from the middle ages through the twentieth century and examine the major influences and significant musicians that shaped its development over time. My primary sources include excerpts from anthologies, textbooks, and periodicals, as well as audio and video clips; in most cases, the original language is Romanian or Russian and I will provide a translation if none is given in the original source.I will begin by investigating the emerging role of the violin in medieval musical ensembles and exploring the origins of Moldovan musical folklore in art, literature and culture. A discussion of lăutari (a class of musicians) is fundamental to understanding the cultural and societal roots of the taraf (a group of lăutari) and the muzica lăutărească (music of the lăutari) to help differentiate this style of music and the musicians who played it from Romanian peasant music and other folk music traditions in the region. I will show how the movement of the lăutari into cities helped familiarize people with the muzica lăutărească, normalizing and establishing it in popular culture and bringing notoriety to exceptionally talented lăutari. Next, I will examine the professionalization of violin education beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the ways in which the establishment of musical societies expanded exposure to professional performers and opportunities for education through the founding of public and private music schools. This process created a hierarchy of skilled foreign performers and teachers who raised up a generation of local musicians who became performers and teachers in Moldova and whose students became performers and teachers all around the world, some of them attaining international acclaim. I will highlight the societies, schools, teachers and performers who were most influential in helping to grow this performance practice architecture. Nineteenth and twentieth century geopolitics – changing national borders and colonial influences in the region – shaped the development of violin performance practice in Moldova which came to favor Eastern European technique and style. The characteristics of muzica lăutărească, and the centuries in which the lăutari refined their skills and abilities primed them to prefer Eastern European music. I will share examples that illustrate this preference in both audiences and performers of the time. Finally, I will focus on contemporary Moldavian violinists whose careers demonstrate the culmination of these factors that have shaped the evolution of Moldavian violin performance practice. These award-winning, internationally famous violinists are actively exporting a centuries-in-the-making home-grown performance practice that is both diverse and unique, taking its place among the best performance practice traditions in the world. / Music Performance

With Romania's acceptance into NATO, the Republic of Moldova found itself at the frontier of the North-Atlantic Alliance. This thesis evaluates the impact of NATO and European Union enlargements on the resolution of the Transnistrian conflict in the eastern part of the Republic of Moldova. Theoretically, recent changes in the geo-political environment in Europe can bring a new impetus to the process of political settlement of the Transnistrian conflict. In the wake of these changes, Moldovan leadership is looking for new supporters to back Moldova in the stand-off against Russia on the Transnistrian issue. In this respect, NATO and the EU appear to be appropriate candidates. Either one of these two organizations, taken separately, possesses enough potential to create an asymmetry against Russia. Would these two institutions get more involved in the fate of this intra-state conflict? Possible courses of action of actors involved will be analyzed through the prisms of realism and liberal institutionalism theories of international relations. Rationale for further enlargement will be assessed against "soft power" resources, such as values, norms and knowledge, accumulated over the years and shared by member-states within both alliances.

The thesis aims to estimate the future migration flows from Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova to the EU. Based on the experience of previous EU enlargements and econometric modelling using the method of Ordinary Least Squares with Fixed Effects, multiple forecasts are created. The forecasts capture the likely development of migration flows in the event of collapse of labour market restrictions as well as the case of no labour market liberalization. The results show that migration flows are expected to be moderate, posing no threats to the stability of the labour markets of EU member states. The increase of migration due to the accession to the EU is likely to be short-term, without substantial impacts in the long-run. Ukraine has the biggest migration potential and is likely to supply the highest amount of labour migration.

The focus of the present research is to explore several dimensions and their interconnections: migration, election results and implemented policies. It will analyse how emigration is affecting the elections results and voting patterns, of both, migrants and non-migrants, thus influencing the undertaken policies and institution development in the home country. This thesis is based on evidence from Republic of Moldova, an Eastern European country with a Soviet Union heritage. The study covers the years 1998-2010 using data for 6 election results in Moldova and data about emigration during the corresponding years. The key assumption, confirmed in this thesis is that with increase of number of emigrants to the West countries, especially countries of European Union, the percentage of votes offered to Communist Party decreases, while there is a positive connection between the number of emigrants to eastern countries, namely Russia, and the number of votes given to Communist Party. Therefore, the migrants have different voting patterns from non-migrants, which with time are passed to their families and connections in the home country, using the spillover effect and hence being able to change the political and economic institutions in the home country. Data is modelled using OLS and GMM. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

More and more people live in cities, cities that both present opportunities, in terms of potential sustainable growth and challenges, for example regarding insufficient infrastructure and waste management. There are several examples on initiatives to make cities reach their sustainability potential; one is to turn municipal organic waste, MOW, and sewage sludge into biogas and use it to produce electricity and/or heat or to upgrade it to biomethane and use it as a fuel in for example public transport or feed it to a gas grid. This study has focused on the potential and feasibility of producing and using biogas/biomethane as well as the remains from the production process, called digestate, in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. For the most feasible options an indication of the environmental improvement and economic performance was also estimated. The study included biogas produced from municipal organic waste, sewage sludge and methane collected at landfills. For the areas of use, electricity or heat produced from biogas was included as well as using biomethane in public transport or feeding it to the gas grid and to use the digestate as biofertilizer. Since multiple factors needs to be considered in order to adequately assess the potential and feasibility a multi-criteria approach was used for developing a framework based on an early assessment tool for biomethane solutions in the urban context. In summary it is indicated that there are good conditions for biogas production in Chisinau with biogas production from sewage sludge being included in the ongoing rehabilitation of the largest wastewater facility and methane collection from the largest landfill historically being part of the operations and planned (although not confirmed) to soon be part of these again. However, the largest potential is for municipal organic waste where the main impediments relates to financial issues and to some extent legislation that indirectly favour short term landfilling. When investigating the possible use of the digestate as biofertilizer the outlooks are considerably less promising than for the supply side. Despite the fact that the law explicitly allows the use of digestate (both from MOW and sewage sludge) the lack of knowledge within the farmer community result in a low or non-existent customer demand. Regarding the possible use of biogas/biomethane it was concluded that electricity production is the most feasible option and heat generation placing as the second most feasible. Feeding the gas to the grid appears more difficult and the least likely option is for the biogas to be used within public transport. Overall it is in general technically possible to use the gas in terms of infrastructure and there is some demand, especially for electricity and heat. The biggest inhibitory factors are rather institutional since biogas in general is overlooked or not prioritized in the strategies leading to a shortcoming in economical instruments or funds and to some extent in the legislation. This thesis is complemented by an executive summary with the same name, both in English and translated to Romanian.

International migration has a major impact on the economy of Moldova and its inhabitants. Nevertheless, it belongs to the poorest countries in Europe and its every third economically active inhabitant of this post-Soviet country is working abroad. These migrants send financial remittances, which consist of a part of their income or material goods to their families from target countries including Czechia. The theoretical background of this thesis is the type of remittances, namely the concept of social remittances, which in contrary to financial remittances draws attention to non-financial transfers - ideas, behaviours, identities and social capital flowing from receiving to source country communities. The concept was based on observation of development potential and impacts within the migration-development nexus paradigm. The basic qualitative research in this work examines the concept of social remittances within example of research Moldovan migrants working in Czechia with semi-structured deep interviews. Acquired authentic responses of the informants were processed by inductive analysis of qualitative data. The results have shown the existence of the potential for receiving social remittances by migrants and their transfer to Moldova due to ongoing circular migration. However, neither potential...

This thesis explores the Security Governance of the European Union (EU) by examining the relationship between the external dimension of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) and civilian crisis management missions. More specifically it tests the capacity of EU level actors to project the external dimension of JHA's goals, in a coordinated and coherent fashion, into the Union's near abroad. The research 'puzzle' lies in the multi-dimensional character of the external dimension of JHA. The fact that the domains tools and competencies are spread within and across all three pillars of the EU make its coordination with civilian crisis management missions far from straight-forward. The ambition to link the two policy domains has been expressed repeatedly by the EU in high profile strategic documents, such as the European Security Strategy of 2003, and the 2005 'A Strategy for the External Dimension of JHA: Global Freedom, Security and Justice'. This thesis endeavours to test the EU's performance in governing the external dimension of JHA and the need to link its goals with those of civilian crisis management missions. It does this by taking three civilian crisis management missions recently projected into the EU's milieu, with mandates related to security sector reform and JHA. The missions selected for comparison are: Proxima launched in 2003 in Macedonia; EU Border Assistance Mission to Moldova and Ukraine launched in 2005; and finally, EULEX Kosovo launched in 2008. These missions are selected to serve as prime test cases for the interface between JHA and civilian crisis management missions, covering a time period that will allow for an examination of continuity and change in foreign and security policy at the EU level.

Today migrants are increasingly seen as potential ‘philanthropists' or even as the ‘instigators' of development transition in their countries of origin. This thesis explores, via an original multiperspective bottom-up approach, how the discourse of migrants' contribution to development is constructed and put into concrete practice in the case of Moldova. The young republic is one of Europe's lesser-known countries and yet, with its intense recent experience of migration, it presents a fertile territory for in-depth study of the migration–development dynamic, with special reference to the role of migrant associations. More specifically, the heart of the thesis investigates, with a transnational lens, representations and negotiations of migrants' collective development efforts, firstly among migrants, secondly among development actors, and thirdly the aid-relationships between the two. The thesis engages with the literature on the relationship between migrants' transnational development practices and transnational power hierarchies, highlighting the role of international development policy discourses and initiatives from an interdisciplinary perspective. It aims to contribute to the broader theoretical discussion on linkages between transnational collective practices of Eastern European migrants living in EU countries and the development transition in the Eastern European 'neighbourhood'. Using a variety of field methods including multi-sited ethnography, the data collection took place over a period of one year – following the ‘discourse on migrants' contribution to development' in the transnational social field of migrant civil society and in the transnational field of development organisations across seven European countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Moldova, Switzerland and the UK. The findings reveal significant differences between migrants and mainstream development agencies on the issues of Moldova's transformation process, development practices and on the notion of ‘ideal' development partners. Migrants' collective transnational development practices appear as a dynamic process shaped not only by the current and understudied Moldovan migration features and based on various socio-economic and cultural indicators, but also by the country's Socialist past and its marginalised place within Europe. The results also show unexpected relationship patterns between migrants and state institutions and aid agencies, in which the latter two rely on migrant associations to carry out their newly-created migration–development policies and programmes. And an overall discomfort was found among aid-workers in engaging Moldovan migrants as their partners, expressed in double standards applied to migrants in ‘aidland'.

In recent decades, countries around the globe have engaged in rule of law and judicial reform initiatives, with such efforts being most prominent in transitional democracies, post-conflict and post-communist countries. Despite the fact that the concepts of judicial independence and the rule of law continue to be contested among political and legal scholars, popular wisdom and belief in the international community suggests that an independent judiciary is the cornerstone of a democratic, market-based society based on the rule of law. However, the disagreement over the extent to which an independent judiciary effects the establishment of the rule of law has resulted in the failure to determine whether an independent judiciary is necessary for the establishment of the rule of law, and thereby a stable and peaceful society where human rights and civil liberties prevail. This paper examines the effect of judicial independence on the establishment of the rule of law, and analyzes whether the type of political regime and legal system of a country affects judicial independence and the rule of law. I use data available from the most recent years of 2007 through 2012 that are comprised of a set of indicators of judicial independence and the rule of law covering 51 different countries in the global system. OLS multiple regression is used to analyze the effect of three independent variables (legal system, type of political regime, and judicial independence) on two dependent variables (judicial independence and the rule of law). It is expected that higher levels of judicial independence will be strongly associated with an established rule of law, and that the type of political regime and legal system will affect the presence of a highly independent judiciary. Additionally, I employ qualitative case studies of Serbia and Moldova in order to examine justice sector reforms taking place and assess their impact. The cases of Serbia and Moldova provide an example of the global effort to reform the rule of law and establish an independent judiciary and demonstrates the need to enshrine judicial independence not only within the content of legal documents, but also in practice. The results of the comparative quantitative analysis demonstrate the importance of judicial independence, particularly de facto judicial independence, in establishing the rule of law. Furthermore, the qualitative studies of Serbia and Moldova show how the lack of judicial independence in both countries can be linked to human rights violations adjudicated by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The goal of this research is to add to the growing field of transitional justice, and contribute to comparative law and politics literature concerning judicial independence and the rule of law.