The use of civil dialogue has increased in Sweden during the past decades. Civil dialogue is advocated by important operators as the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and promoted in the Official Reports of the Swedish Government as a way forward for the Swedish democracy. The aim of this study is to examine what the civil dialogue is trying to solve and how it´s supposed to work as a solution. This study carries out a discourse analysis using poststructural theory as Laclau & Mouffes discourse theory and Bacchis What’s the problem represented to be to analyse three Swedish local policy’s on civil dialogue. The study can identify what´s the problem represented to be in the civil dialogue policy´s and identifies the civil dialogue discourse to be constructed by three nodal points to make sense. The study also identifies the specific subject positions represented within the local policy´s and come to the conclusion that civil dialogue not only involves people into politics but also act as a technique of govern and may have counterproductive effect.

A few weeks before the Swedish election in September 2018, a young girl named Greta Thunberg decidedto leave school every Friday and instead sit outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm to raise awarenessabout the climate. This “school strike for climate” has since then developed to be a world-wide phenomenonand on the 15th of March more than 1.4 million youngsters participated in more than 100 countries.However, these actions have been subject of lots of debate in media; Greta being both cherished andcriticized. Framed within the questions about what motivates the political participation and in what way theschool takes a stand, this thesis aims to analyze “school strike for climate” in relation to the role of bothknowledge and fostering in the Swedish school. Through theories of street-level bureaucracy and politicalparticipation, accompanied by Carol Bacchis discourse perspective what´s the problem represented to be the studyexamines 32 Swedish newspaper articles. The result is a variety of problem representations, getting legitimized through law or moral, but also through a representation which hold both school and the pupils responsible for result in school. One of thedevelopments in the discourse is that during time and enlarging of the political activism, the youngster’sactions more and more is characterized as political participation than of an individual choice. This alsomeans that schools have to take a stand up on an organizational level, where many principals refer to schoolattendance and the law. When political activism is legislated through the curriculum it seems to be adidactical choice by the teachers, whom within their free space as professional street-level bureaucrats mayhave varying opportunities to use the theme within their teaching. Over all, the discourse focus more uponthe climate than democratic ideals, which suggests an unused potential of “school strike for climate” incivic´s education.

The aim of this study is to examine how the problem of ‘men's violence against women’ is represented and defined within the framework of parliamentary work in Sweden. With a poststructural approach the method of choice is a discourse analysis, in particular Carol Bacchi´s approach ’What´s the problem represented to be?’. The fundamental idea of this method is that the suggested solution to a problem indicates what one thinks needs to change, and thereby what the ‘problem’ is. In accordance with this method, we have analyzed eleven political documents (motions) which underlie further legalization and decision making, authoredbetween 2017-2022. All the selected political documents include solutions to the problem of men’s violence against women, domestic violence and/or honor related violence. Previous research has shown that the political debate has a significant impact on how a phenomenon is understood. Therefore, each epoch has a certain way of representing and defining a problem. In this study, four problem representations were identified: ‘lack of support’, ‘the legal system’,‘lack of knowledge’ and ‘social norms’. Together these themes represent how contemporary society comprehends the problem of men's violence against women. Acknowledging this is ofimportance because the problem representation provides a framework of action – for society, as well as the individual.

The starting point of this thesis is that gender equality should be studied as an empirical field. After the Swedish general election in 2014 the newly formed government proclaimed itself to be the world’s first feminist government. This study aims to examine how gender equality is made and filled with meaning by this feminist government since 2014 and to analyse the results by making use of postcolonial feminist theory and relevant research. Carol Bacchis analytical strategy, “What´s the problem represented to be?” is used as the study’s methodological framework. This approach to critical policy analysis focuses on how governing takes place through problematizations within policy. The results of the study show that gender equality is made by problematizing a lack of regulation, a lack of knowledge, a lack of collaboration, wrongful designation, a lack of attention for certain groups as well as a lack of Swedish strategy. One of the most significant results drawn from the analyses confirms previous research findings that neoliberalism as well as ethnocentric discourses dominate this field of policy. This leads to the conclusions that Swedish Gender Equality Politics, through to its fragmentation is emptied of a specific content and direction as well as that Swedishness and Norms of Honor are created in an asymmetric-diametrically relationship.