<p>During November and December 2007 a Minor Field Study was conducted in the southwest</p><p>of Sri Lanka with the aim of exploring the aspirations and perceptions of freedom and</p><p>possibilities among a sample of Sri Lankan youth and also how their situation is viewed upon</p><p>by people in their close surroundings. The aim was also try to discern the main concerns and</p><p>indicators of unfreedom that in the eye of the informants are viewed as obstacles to</p><p>development, to personal human development as well as to the development of Sri Lanka as a</p><p>nation. The theoretical framework that was used as inspirational ground and basis for the</p><p>formulation of the project, was Amartya Sen’s concept of “development as freedom” and his</p><p>“capability approach” which focuses on the human potential and what freedom an individual</p><p>enjoys to convert capabilities into desired functionings or the realization of aspirations. This</p><p>modern economic theory was tested in this context to find out if it is applicable and relevant</p><p>in ethnographic development studies. Despite its lack of numerical metrics, the “capability</p><p>approach” seems very relevant to describe the reality of at least the Lankese youth in this</p><p>study. As methodology for the qualitative field work, Hadley Cantril’s “aspiration-model”</p><p>and his “self-anchoring striving scale” was used which provides a simple, easily applicable</p><p>interview technique for exploring the unique reality of an individual and what it shares or</p><p>don’t shares with that of others. The results show that there are many strong aspirations</p><p>among the Sri Lankan youth; aspirations of being a good person that achieve something in</p><p>life, aspirations of being able to take the best care of the family, to go through a qualitative</p><p>education and to get a good job with a good salary. Many youth want to go abroad. Of course</p><p>there are aspirations of peace in the war-torn country. There are concerns and feelings of</p><p>unfreedom that relate to the unemployment situation, a very difficult economic situation in the</p><p>country, underdevelopment and inadequate facilities, the ongoing war, and political</p><p>unfreedom.</p>

<p>The purpose of this study is to understand the situation concerning women and gender in relation to development, in the Mozambican district of Nacala Porto. The ambition is to identify present theoretical feminist perspectives in terms of perceived problems for women, their ability to solve them, focus areas for improvement and strategies for reaching development aims.</p><p>To enable an understanding of the situation concerning women and gender in relation to development, we have conducted an analytical framework consisting of three main theoretical feminist perspectives in international development policies. These were applied as analytical tools, which consisted of Ester Boserups perspective of Women’s role in economic development, Women In Development (WID) and Gender And Development (GAD).</p><p>The study displayed a discrepancy between the powerful women in the Mozambican parliament and the lack of social power described by the women in Nacala Porto. At the district level the results showed a dominating modernistic paradigm, similar to the situation identified by Boserup, who emphasised that the economical development did not benefit women equally. The subordination of women has been apparent in the district. The long-term strategy of transforming the gender structure has been met with support as well as resistance. The GAD-aim of mainstreaming gender showed a gap between international policy and practise in the district. The interventions that were WID-oriented have on the other hand shown progress regarding female representation, non-discriminatory legislation and increase of girls starting primary school. However, the WID-progress is limited without a gender perspective.</p><p>Three main areas were continuously discussed as means having to change, to potentially alleviate poverty and include women in the development process. These areas were the access to employment, sustainable education and functioning family relations. The interdependence of these areas also seemed to require an integration of the three theoretical feminist perspectives of Boserup, WID and GAD.</p>

<p>In 2005 the Swedish government introduced a law of amnesty for refugees in the country which made the Minister of Integration invite a number of national organizations to discuss this law. After that, seven organizations in Gothenburg also felt that something should be done and they started talking about a cooperation to improve the situation for newly arrived people to Gothenburg. They formed a project, “Plattform Göteborg”, which in this paper will be evaluated according to a manual from Sida. The project consists of seven organizations which have their separate activities formed by them to improve the integration. They do things such as teach Swedish, offer a place for counseling, teach sports to young people and have different activities for children. I will here present these activities, how the organizations planned this, whether these plans is in accordance with what really happened and evaluate the results. To do this I have preformed interviews with the people involved. I have then examined and evaluated the project according to five different criteria; effectiveness, impact, relevance, sustainability and efficiency. From this I have concluded that the idea of a cooperation between organizations is good and necessary a better cooperation with the municipality is needed to make it work better. The project also needs to be structured in a better way and more well-planned, and here the organizations could help each other better. It is also necessary to take effects in to consideration in a better way than done up until now, to see what they want to get out from the project and also think to examine more after which effects that have come from this.</p>

<p>North West University is a creation of one of many mergers between previous universities in South Africa. The process is partly thought to integrate previous advantaged and disadvantaged universities, often also previous white or black dominated universities.</p><p>Even though the merger of NWU has been perceived as successful by many, there are still problems and tensions between the campuses. This report will describe the integration process at NWU as well as handle people’s perceptions towards it and towards the changes brought by the merger. The study has been done through thematic open interviews by staff, management and students at two of the three campuses in the merger of NWU, Mafikeng and Potchefstroom. In our report we have found six clusters which we examine; responses to the merger, within and outside group, differences, history, social status, and within and outside process.</p><p>All through the report the traces from history and Apartheid are still visible in people’s minds and in the clashes between the groups. History also affects the social status of the groups, affects that today create problems for integration.</p><p>The merger was opposed by both parts, however inevitable. People from Mafikeng were found more critical to the merger, highlighting the different power relations between the campuses and fear of being swallowed by Potchefstroom. Potchefstroom in general did not see many changes and white people seem to be more worried about their individual future.</p><p>Once united as one university there is still a low grade of integration or interaction between the campuses and between the groups within them. There have been initiatives to enhance integration at an organizational level, this has though not affected the social level in a significant way. One reason to the lack of integration might be the domination of one culture group at each campus, at Potchefstroom Afrikaans, and at Mafikeng SeTswana. This domination has shown to hinder integration since minority groups either feel left out or have to assimilate to fit in. Differences between the groups also create misunderstandings and clashes in the integration process. However we have seen that the persons within the merger process tend to be more positive than the people outside of it. This might be due to increased interaction, better information and a possibility to affect the outcome that makes the people involved more positive then the ones not involved.</p>

<p>The aim of the essay is to investigate how the term ’Third world’ is constructed in media. With this I intend to make a historical survey of the conception. With the help of Swedish newspapers and their description of the concept, I am going to answer the following questions: How is the concept ‘Third world’ constructed in script, in a historical context and in modern time? Is there a tendency of racism in the term?</p><p>The method I used was discourse analysis. To get further answer to my questions I used postcolonialism as a theoretical starting-point, whitch brings forth the effects and after-effects colonialism has on the identity and culture of the colonialised. The concept ‘Third World’ has gone from signifying a composition of countries that wanted to prove they stood neutral in the ‘Cold war’, to, during the latest centuries, consist of a very large group of people that are believed not to be able to take care of themselves an thereby needs to be brought up by the Western world. In order to this, social hierarchies are established along with hidden conditions of power, whitch you only can start breaking down by showing that they do exist.</p>

<p>The Balkans has suffered from quite a few problems as a result of the countless ambitious endeavors for great states of the ethnic groups residing in the Peninsula. The most recent great state idea to have caused troubles in the region is the Serbs’ Great Serbia (i.e. Yugoslvia), which caused a cycle of wars, the latest one being the war in Kosovo in the late 1990s. This thesis attempts to evaluate the rumors of yet another great state in the making – or rather awakening again: the attempt at a Greater Albania, and whether the Albanians in the Balkans are still harboring the idea of any such state. Particular emphasis is placed upon the following questions:</p><p> </p><ul><li>Where does the idea of a Greater Albania stem from?</li><li>Is a Greater Albania today still on the Albanians’ agenda as a real political plan?</li><li>What speaks for and against a Greater Albania? Is the idea even feasible?</li></ul><p> </p><p>The findings indicate that none of the Albanian communities residing in the Balkan region wish for a Greater Albania, nor do their leaders. The Serbs nonetheless maintain that an Albanian threat exists and has done so ever since 1878 when the idea of a Greater Albania first arose. However, according to the results of this study, their claims lack credibility. Everything indicates that today, and with Albania striving for membership in the European Union, the idea of a Greater Albania has been left in the past.</p>

<p>In the wake of state borders becoming more porous the flows of people crossing them in search for opportunities have increased. This trend is evident in Greater Mekong Sub region where the economic boom of Thailand attracts thousands of migrant workers every year from neighboring countries making Thai industries dependent on the cheap labor. Alongside these developments, human trafficking, the slave trade of our time, has emerged as an increasing challenge.</p><p>In Lao PDR the historic ties to Thailand make for a long history of cross-border relations and flows. With the relative economic differences, labor migration to the richer neighbor is becoming an accepted way of improving family conditions. However, the risks involved, exploitation and trafficking, are not widely known in the communities.</p><p>Counter-trafficking work in Lao PDR has been evolving over the passed 10 years. This study has, through an ethnographic approach to organizational work combined with reflections and observations, tried to create a picture of the counter-trafficking work on the ground. Using semi-structured interviews projects, aims and assumptions could be derived and three main problems identified: Trafficking is hard to separate from labor migration, thus making it hard to effectively target; there is a dissonance between perceived and actual inter-sector communication, and; the trafficking sector is isolated from other sectors as dialogue across sector borders appear to be nonexistent. Reasons given for these discords mainly came down to dependency on donors and a need to meet their requirements. Essentially it seems that organizations working with this open-border phenomenon are rigidly closed to each other.</p>

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Quality of Government (QoG) peace is a concept gaining some traction alongside more known concepts such as the democratic peace, or liberal (capitalist) peace or the globalist/modernist peace. This study aims to uncover how perceptions of governance quality uncover variation in the number of violent and nonviolent collective and interpersonal events at the sub-national level in Nepal. National survey data is used to operationalise the mechanisms for quality of governance perceptions which are then aggregated at District level. In-country elite level interviews were also completed in order to trace the process in the causal mechanism and control for reverse causality. Results point to a strong negative effect between perceptions of governance quality and the number of events occurring. There was not, however, any causal relationship established between perceptions of governance quality and the ratio of violent to non-violent events. Instead, interviewees related the resort to violence as coming about more strongly from a committed leadership of protest movements (or lack thereof) and moves by the State to instigate violence through repressive tactics against protest events.

In 2017 and 2018, the city of Cape Town, in South Africa, suffered one of the most severewater crises ever seen, becoming the first big city to face a realistic scenario of a "DayZero", the day in which the dams reach a water storage level unable to provide waterservices to other than critical services. In the wake of this emergency, severalorganisations and movements started to organise themselves to mitigate the effects ofthe drought and find a solution. The measures undertaken by the local government, whichincluded punitive tariffs for the citizens, caused a big discontent among the population,who protested in the streets to demand a proper solution. Amid the protesters, the socialmovements rose to demand from the authorities democratic and reasonablemanagement of the water in the city, putting pressure by protesting, creating petitions,mobilising people and spreading facts about the crisis and what they believed were thetrue problems behind it.This qualitative research included a field study in the city of Cape Town and usesabductive research for the analysis of data. The study is exploratory, as it intends tounderstand and explore what happened during the crisis and the role of socialmovements to create a narrative. Five interviews were conducted between two differenttarget groups: social movement actors and authorities.This thesis focuses on the role that social movements played and their dynamics in theoutcome of the actions taken by the authorities to address the water crisis in Cape Town.Using social movement theory and alliances theory, this explores what actors wereinvolved, what actions and activities the social movements conducted, and what was theoutcome of the role they played. This is done in order to create a narrative of the factsthat occurred during the crisis until the Day Zero was officially called off by the localauthorities, the moment in which the organisations stopped their engagement due towhether the loss of the momentum, the collapse of the alliances or the accomplishmentof their minimum demands.The study concludes that there were two moments that determined the role of socialmovements during the water crisis: first, with the emergence of the crisis, the movementsgathered and played a communicator role, delivering information and sharing facts;secondly, after the measures taken by the authorities were announced, the movementsplayed an instigator role as an opposition to the local government, putting pressure mainly in the streets. We conclude that the outcome delivered by the authorities, the so-called Water Strategy, was an important step but did not respond to the demands of the movement sufficiently, as it was not conducted in a participatory way, although itincluded some of the demands of the movement. It is not possible to conclude that therole played by the social movements was key to determine the outcome of the crisis, butthey contributed to put pressure and make visible the demands for a more democraticwater management.