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This dissertation examines how new gender norms and family relations challenged the structures and categories of European welfare provision in the late twentieth century. It recovers a crucial yet forgotten era of welfare reform between 1957 and 1992, in which policymakers and publics grappled with how to adapt welfare institutions designed for paid industrial workers to suit the needs of unpaid family caregivers. These reforms were sparked by mass demographic and social changes in the age of affluence: working motherhood, the increase of migrant workers and their families, rising divorce rates, aging populations, and new definitions of equality. This process of reform was actually realized, however, amid the economic turmoil and political realignment of the 1970s and 1980s, as demographic changes and social movements pushed on the budgets of reformist governments and constrained the viability of their economic reforms. In this dissertation, I show how the attempt to develop social protections for family care entailed more than the creation of new or better benefits. Rather, addressing the demands of family care required that politicians, bureaucrats, sociologists, feminists, trade unions, poverty activists, and officials in the European Community rethink the very notions of “risk,” “aid,” and “insurance” on which European welfare states had been based. Drawing on archival records in five languages from seven countries, I reconstruct how centrist governments in the 1970s developed a series of innovative measures – social-security credits for caregivers, workplace protections for part-time workers, cash benefits for families with disabilities, leave allowances for caregivers, new entitlements and restrictions for family migrants, European Directives on gender equality– that reshuffled the relationship between welfare, employment, and care. But I also show how revisionist governments in the 1980s adapted those same policies to confront new economic conditions marked by high unemployment, low productivity, and low-wage, flexible work. The result was a new politics of welfare, developed first for caregivers in the 1970s and then expanded to the long-term unemployed and the socially “excluded” in the 1980s. Precisely because care troubled the categories of the post-war welfare state, care policies of the 1970s helped found the active employment policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Working at the intersection of the intimate and the international, this dissertation recovers how the post-industrial welfare state emerged from contestations over the gendered foundations of the industrial welfare state that preceded it.

This dissertation is primarily a story of anticolonial thought, during a time when social cohesion was being threatened by foreign encroachment. It explores political and social thought from Iraq in the period from 1909-1925, during the period of transition from Ottoman rule over the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra to the formation of the Iraqi nation-state under the British Mandate. The thinkers whose works I explore in the journals al-‘Irfan, al-‘Ilm, and al-Yaqin, many of whom situated themselves in the pan-Islamic reform tradition of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, posited Islamic unity as a bulwark against such intervention, and they believed fostering the values and practices necessary to achieve that unity was imperative. Nahda and reform, for them, was the project which sought to achieve those ends. They were influenced by the developments of the Ottoman and Iranian Constitutional Revolutions, and believed constitutionalism could save Muslims from tyranny and autocratic rule. They saw their time as one in which morals had been corrupted, a reference to faltering political systems, unjust economic distribution, and a lack of communitarian social structures and social cohesion. Their proposed response, the notion of reform in the Islamic tradition as a process of the continuous enactment of virtue, reinstituting Islamic values, or correcting harmful innovations, was one and the same as the practice of nahda as instituting what is demanded by the public interest. This notion of a public interest aimed at a quasi-socialist, Islamic welfare state in which the concept of freedom involved duties and obligations to one’s community. These thinkers were witnessing some of the failures of the modern state and critiqued attributes and actions of modern politicians. They developed different conceptions of the end goals of a polity, articulated primarily by thinking through the relationship between the individual and the community. It is those relationships that dictated the nature of moral and ethical life, manifested most clearly in the social, political, and economic realms, all of which were deeply intertwined and inextricable in their ideal form. They believed that the growing assumptions amongst their contemporaries that these fields could be siloed, i.e. that a politician could achieve the true ends of politics while disregarding moral values and practices, played a significant role in the division of the umma and decline of Islamic civilization, a weakness which left the community vulnerable to foreign threats. Such forms of political rule were also described as a suppression of the truth, so part of the project of reform involved fostering a certain degree of shared understanding around what constitutes ‘ilm, or knowledge, and truth. Each of the chapters represents one aspect of how these thinkers jointly believed the project of nahda would be enacted: unity (chapter 1), enjoining good (chapter 2), establishing truth and ‘ilm (chapter 3), and preventing stagnation through ijtihad (chapter 4).

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Denna studie har undersökt advokaters uppfattning och erfarenheter av straffrabattens avskaffande för unga lagöverträdare mellan 18-20 år. Studiens syfte var att undersöka på vilket sätt advokater upplever att avskaffandet av straffrabatten har medfört några konsekvenser samt hur lagändringen fungerat i praktiken och hur lagändringen framställs av advokaterna. Studiens undersökningsmetod var semistrukturerade intervjuer, och resultatet analyserades med hjälp av en tematisk analys. Resultatet visade att advokaterna beskrev konsekvenser på flera nivåer och tre teman utvecklades ur materialet: konsekvenser för de unga lagöverträdarna, konsekvenser för advokater samt konsekvenser för samhället. Studiens slutsats är att advokaterna ställer sig kritiska till lagändringen, något som kan förklaras både utifrån ett instrumentellt perspektiv och ett rättighetsperspektiv. / This study has examined lawyers' perceptions and experiences of the abolition of the penalty discount for young offenders aged 18-20 years. The purpose of the study was to investigate how lawyers perceive the abolition of the penalty discount to have brought about any consequences, as well as how the legal amendment operates in practice and how it is portrayed by the lawyers. The study’s research method was semi-structured interviews, and the results were analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings revealed that the lawyers described consequences on multiple levels and three themes developed from the material: consequences for young offenders, consequences for lawyers, and consequences for society. The study's conclusion is that lawyers are critical of the legal amendment, which can be explained from both an instrumental perspective and a perspective of human rights.

A large portion of the population of South Africa is made up of people who, due to poverty, disability, old age and/or lack of education, rely solely on social assistance provided by the government for their survival. The issue of the welfare state in terms of responding to these issues has been subject to increasingly heated debates especially with regard to long-term socio-economic improvements, moral obligations and economic sustainability. This dissertation generally explores the status of social welfare in South Africa, and more specifically, South Africa’s socio-economic status as a welfare state against the backdrop of selected philosophical arguments used to justify and criticize existing social welfare laws in South Africa, whilst keeping South Africa’s unique history in mind. Although South Africa already has a detailed set of social welfare laws and policies, the social and economic needs of the country are ever evolving and therefore it is important that these laws and policies be constantly re-evaluated in order to ensure that they are effective in addressing and meeting the changing socio-economic and other demands. / Jurisprudence / LL. M. (Jurisprudence)

La tesi si snoda lungo tre piani di analisi per esaminare i rapporti fra Unione europea e welfare state. Innanzitutto, essa guarda alla CEE come organizzazione sorta principalmente per perseguire l’integrazione economica degli Stati membri senza interferire sulla loro funzione di welfare. Nel ripercorrere l’evoluzione delle competenze sociali dell’Unione europea, la tesi suggerisce come i sussistenti limiti procedurali e sostanziali evidenzino quella logica. In secondo luogo, la tesi ricorre alla categoria di costituzione economica europea al fine di spiegare la limitazione di sovranità cui gli Stati membri sono andati incontro per favorire l’attuazione del principio di libertà economica. Su questa base, vengono enucleati taluni effetti prodotti dalla costituzione economica europea sul welfare state. Un’attenzione particolare è dedicata ai riflessi della costituzione economica in materia pensionistica. Infine, la tesi guarda alle innovazioni apportate dalla Strategia di Lisbona e dal Trattato di Lisbona, con particolare riguardo al rafforzamento del metodo aperto di coordinamento ed all’entrata in vigore della Carta dei diritti fondamentali. In questa luce, si coglie la tendenza all’edificazione di un modello sociale europeo. Avendone discusso genesi e sviluppo, vengono illustrati i suoi tratti distintivi ed i suoi riflessi sulle politiche nazionali di sicurezza sociale e del lavoro. / The thesis examines the relationship between European Union and Welfare State under three different perspectives. Firstly, it looks at the EEC as an organization pursuing economic integration of Member States while not interfering with their welfare function. In tracing the evolution of the social competences of the European Union, it is highlighted how the original logic still underlies the existence of procedural and substantive limits to those competences. Second, the thesis draws on the category of European economic constitution to explain how Member States bounded their sovereignty in order to give full effect to economic freedom. On that basis, the thesis describes some of the inroads made by the European economic constitution into national welfare states, with special attention to its effects on pension systems. Finally, the thesis looks at some of the innovations introduced by the Lisbon Strategy and the Lisbon Treaty, focusing on the strengthening of the Open Method of Co-ordination and the entry into force of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. In this perspective, the thesis captures the emergence of a European social model. Having discussed origins and development of the European social model, its main distinctive features and reflexes on domestic social policies are spelled out.

This essay explores if and how welfare attitudes in Sweden and in the United Kingdom have changed since the 1990s. Due to an increase in privatization and globalisation during the last 20-30 years, Sweden has become more economically liberal or right wing, aligning more with countries like the United Kingdom. The question therefore is to see if Sweden’s welfare attitudes have changed to become more like the welfare attitudes in the United Kingdom. There is a lack of research on how welfare attitudes change over time, as earlier research has focused more on comparison between countries or between groups. This essay uses empirical data from The International Social Survey Programme, in which three surveys from the years of 1996, 2006 and 2016 has been selected. In these surveys respondent have been asked how much responsibility they think the government should have for its citizens. The results show that the development in welfare attitudes in Sweden and United Kingdom are remarkably similar to each other. The analysis of the empirical data showed no differences between Sweden and the United Kingdom in welfare attitudes across all time periods. Compared to 1996, most groups in these countries wanted less state intervention in welfare generosities which is meant to aid poorer and more economically vulnerable people in their own society.