After the fall of the USSR and Yugoslavia, the international recognition regime changed from being based on largely descriptive criteria to increasingly adding normative criteria. The role of the great powers - here defined as the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia/USSR - in deciding which entities manage to obtain independence and become a member of the UN has gained scholarly focus in the same period. This thesis seeks to add to the growing scientific knowledge by identifying what the motivations of the great powers are when approaching a conflict where an entity seeks independence. Specifically, this thesis investigates the case of Western Sahara. While claiming the whole territory, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) controls over approximately 20% of the territory, with Morocco controlling the remaining 80%. It is an interesting case as international law and several UN resolutions state that the people of the territory should be given the right to self-determination. The question then is why this is not the case. This thesis finds that instrumental motives are far more important than affective when the great powers decide on their approach to the Western Sahara conflict. To the great powers, Morocco is a partner too important to provoke. Although different reasons have been of different...

Hur kan begreppet support structures förstås i relation till det konstnärliga projektet SOLO SHOW? Denna uppsats behandlar arbetets villkor och synliggörandet av dessa inom konstens fält. Support structures (stödstrukturer) kan förstås som det arbete som upprätthåller, uppmuntrar, stärker och står bakom (något). Närmandet till ett, eller flera,”svar” på frågeställningen sker genom ett resonerande i relation till utsnitt ur Julia Bryan-Wilsons Art Workers: radical practice in the Vietnam war era, Hito Steyerls ”Is a Museum a Factory?” och hennes tolkning av termerna ”work” och ”occupation”, samt det genomgående teoretiska verktyget: begreppet support structures.

Late in 2004, King Abdullah of Jordan coined a controversial phrase that still dominates the heart of the geopolitics of the Middle East: The Shia Crescent. “If pro-Iran parties or politicians dominate the new Iraqi government, a new ‘crescent’ of dominant Shia movements or governments stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon could emerge to alter the traditional balance of power between the two main Islamic sects and pose new challenges to U.S. interests and allies. What the King of Jordan saw as a threat, Iran saw as the bedrock of its newfound regional power. However, what the King of Jordan and his Arab-Sunni aides downplayed was Iran’s ties with non-Shia groups, ranging from Sunni parties to secular and even non-Muslim groups. More importantly, they neglected Iran’s presence in the Middle East before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In fact, the seeming omnipresence of Iran’s proxies in the Middle East is not a recent, nuanced phenomenon; rather, it dated back to the Shah’s foreign policy in making connections with both the Iraqi Kurds and Shia Lebanese. While much ink has been spilled on Iran’s foreign policy under the Islamic Republic, there has been a void in the analysis of Iran’s ties with Non-State Actors (NSAs) in the pre-1979 Revolution Era. v From this point of view, the present study is an attempt to set forth a new understanding of the emergence and fluctuation of Iran’s ties with NSAs at the heart of the Middle East during the Shah’s era. I will accomplish this by identifying the Iran-NSA relationships within an examination of the larger historical context of state-NSA relationships in the region. Here, the story of the evolution of Iran’s ties with NSAs can be narrated as the unfolding of constant interaction between states and non-state forces in the Middle East. Analyzed from this perspective, my research examines the actors, processes, and mechanisms that Iran has used to construct ties with NSAs from 1961 until 1979. “What actors and processes at what levels of analysis and through what mechanisms have constructed Iran’s ties with NSAs?” This is the central question that guides the analytical narrative in the present survey. Therefore, the dependent variable for this research is the evolution of Iran’s ties with NSAs, while the intervening variable is a set of actors and processes that have brought about such sub-state ties. In this framework, the proposed work will undertake these main tasks: A) Tracing the history of the ebbs and flows within Iran’s ties with non-state actors through a geopolitical lens. B) Explaining how Iran’s ties with non-state actors unfolded and understanding why Iran’s proxies evolved in the way they did. C) AssessingthebroadcontoursoftheevolutionarytrajectoryofIran’stieswithNSAs and its possible future path(s) for the geopolitics of the Middle East and its regional balance of power.