This thesis generates a greater understanding of the George W. Bush administration’s Freedom Agenda for the Middle East and North Africa. It is motivated by two central research questions: How and why was the Freedom Agenda developed? And, how was the Freedom Agenda constituted? To address these questions, a constructivist institutionalist methodology is developed. The value of this undertaking, is that it theorises the relationship between the events of September 11, 2001, and the rise of the Freedom Agenda. Consequently, this research focuses on the narrative constructed in the aftermath of the “crisis”, and how this laid discursive tracks for the evolution of the Freedom Agenda. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the Bush administration appropriated and articulated multiple discourses into a distinctive ideological-discursive formation, which in turn, sedimented particular definitions of concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. This created a new policy paradigm, which failed to address the ‘conflict of interests’ problem central to US-Middle East relations. As a result, the Freedom Agenda demonstrated a commitment to regional stability and the gradual reform of ally regimes, whilst seeking to challenge regimes hostile to the US. It was a policy caught between promoting democracy and domination.

This thesis scrutinises the material on post World War II Swedish architecture produced by the Swedish Public diplomacy organisation "Svenska institutet" ("The Swedish Institute") during the period of 1945 through 1976. The outset is the dilemma encountered by every such organisation: how can the projected narrative of the own nation relate to as many countries as possible, without becoming too general? And how can the organisation address specific countries, without excluding others? By employing a two-sided model of interpreting the material, where it on the one hand is interpreted from the universal properties projected on the narrated architecture, and on the other hand from the particular ideological notions related to the same, the thesis suggests that the Swedish Institute continously relates the architecture to a West-European and American context by consistently connecting its universal properties to particular ideological notions orientated towards the West. The results underline the malleability in regard to ideological notions connected to modernist architecture. Earlier research in the Swedish context has focussed on how modernist architecture in Sweden, under the local tag "funktionalism", was established in regard to a Swedish audience as a particular Swedish architecture by relating it to a alleged continuos Swedish tradition, as well as to notions of a a progressive welfare state. By studying a similar material, though aimed towards a foreign audience, the thesis suggests that these allegations constitue an elucidatory example of how national and ideological narratives can form within the framework of technological-ideological dynamics of modernist architecture. Furthermore, it argues that the potential of this form of ideological particularisation can be regarded a universal charactersistic inherent in modernistic architecture.