This thesis explores the (re-)positioning of the EU border agency Frontex within a wider shift towards humanitarianism and human rights in EUropean border governance. By examining Frontex’s public self-representation through time, it shows that the agency has gradually appropriated humanitarianism and human rights, while at the same time continuing to rely on a conceptualisation of migration as a security issue. The thesis traces this development, outlining how the agency has increasingly mobilised all three discursive formations in its public narratives about itself, border controls, and unauthorised migration to EUrope. Seeking to move beyond analysing Frontex through its public documents and statements only, the thesis complements this analysis with insights gained through interviews and informal conversations with Frontex staff and guest officers, as well as participant observations at Frontex events and in joint operations between May 2013 and September 2014. Exploring the perceptions of those working for and with Frontex, it complicates common portrayals of Frontex as a unitary, rational actor in EUropean border governance. Instead, it argues that Frontex is better understood as a highly fragmented organisation situated in an ambiguous environment and faced with inconsistent and contradictory demands. Situated at the intersection of critical security studies and critical migration and border studies, this thesis seeks to make three contributions to these literatures: first, it argues that critical security studies would benefit from a cross-fertilisation with insights gained in new institutionalism, which add organisational dynamics as an additional layer of analysis to developments in broader security fields. Second, it provides insights into the relationships between the discursive formations of security, humanitarianism, and human rights in contemporary border governance. The thesis argues that the three formations, at times seen as opposed to one another, share a number of important commonalities that create the conditions of possibility for the appropriation of humanitarianism and human rights by security actors such as Frontex, and for the emergence of new coalitions of actors in the EUropean border regime; as security, humanitarian, and human rights actors share the goal of rendering EUropean border controls less (visibly) violent. Third, the thesis provides rare empirical insights into the security actor Frontex, which has remained relatively opaque and elusive despite attracting much interest within academic and activist communities alike.

This thesis examines the interplay between regional, national and transnational dimensions of identity and language in the Danish and, to a lesser extent, the German minority communities of Sleswig. It also investigates the relationship between subjective and objective interpretations of minority membership. Obtaining data from a survey study carried out on 208 individuals from the Sleswigian minorities, this thesis maps out the composition of minority identity in the 21st century, whilst also using historical evidence as an explanation for the findings. The study shows that the minorities function as two closely-linked and supplementary groups to the national majorities. German language dominates most spheres in both minorities, yet bilingualism and code-switching are essential to minority life and defining group identity. Furthermore, whilst national identities are of a lesser importance to the minorities today than regional or transnational identities, minority identity is still nonetheless hybridised from its roots in the national cultures and languages of Denmark and Germany. The minorities are thus able to "cherry-pick" social, economic, political and linguistic capital from both nations. I argue that although minority identity and language are constantly under negotiation, legitimising a claim to minority identity by way of subjective will is nevertheless juxtaposed with meeting certain objective criteria expected by members of the communities, such as bilingualism, ancestral and geographical links to the region, an understanding of regional history and shared political beliefs. The study seeks originality by mapping the interaction between the regional, national and transnational dimensions of identity in the Danish and German minorities and by examining the influence of social media on identity expression in Sleswig. It also provides a fresh critical understanding of the impact of language on minority identity formation across recent generations in Sleswig. Finally, the thesis proposes a theoretical framework for the study of hybrid and dual minority identities, rooted in theories from nationalism studies, sociology, anthropology and sociolinguistics.

Die Grenze - historisches Auslaufmodell? Moralische Zumutung? Unabdingbare Tatsache? Meist ist sie eine Art Limes: Durchlässig für den Austausch bestimmter Waren und Personen, zugleich Schutz gegen das Eindringen unerwünschter Fremder. Vielfach erklärtes Ziel ist ein "grenzenloses Europa". Im Innern der EU sind Schlagbäume verschwunden, an den Rändern wird vielerorts abgeschottet. Die Grenzsortierungen der EU sind Thema der aktuellen WeltTrends. Afghanistan und kein Ende? Die Londoner Konferenz verspricht trotz "neuer Strategie" keinen erfolgreichen Neuanfang. "Es wird zunächst schlimmer", so ein hoher deutscher Militär. Alternativen müssen diskutiert werden: WeltTrends bietet den Raum.

The paper will describe one of David Miller’s arguments for limiting immigration by concluding that immigration is a threat to a successful democratic welfare state. There is a threat to a democratic welfare state when there is lack of trust in a heterogeneous society. Immigration contributes to heterogeneity. The paper will present flaws in Miller’s argument, which include the unacknowledged concepts of ignorance and fear that can lead to mistrust in cultural heterogeneous communities. I will then consider Miller’s response to the critiques. Lastly, I will mention some proposals for increasing trust and addressing the real issues in a multicultural society.

Nowadays, companies face many difficulties due to the much competitive environment they have to evolve in. Therefore, multinational ones, particularly dealing with customers and employees, as well as competitors worldwide, have to take all the tools available into consideration to be able to stay afloat, or, at best, to be successful. Culture can be one of those efficient tools that can be used to make sure that the company will gain competitive advantages on the long run. However, the development of a strategy based on cultural aspects is not that easy as culture is a very complex and hardly understandable phenomenon – no matter if it is national culture, or, as here in this thesis, corporate. Thus, as this thesis focus on the employee’s side, it is obvious to imagine that the more numerous the countries, in which IKEA as the focused company wants to be present, are, the harder it will be to deal with cultural aspects and then to be successful thanks to a correct understanding on every side. How does a multinational company deal with culture within the company and across borders? This above research question is the base of our research process. It seems indeed to be interesting to focus on a company implemented all over the world to wonder then whether this company manages to deal with cultural differences when crossing borders IKEA as a multinational company is then an example that can be used to write such a thesis. On the one hand, it is a company which deeply plays with its image and culture and broadcast a particular corporate culture based on Swedish roots. On the other hand, IKEA, since the 1970’s, has successfully tried to cross borders first in Europe and then in Asia facing then unexpected problems among the employees, for instance. As culture is not a notion that implies easily calculation and numbers, it seems natural to use meetings and interviews to lead the research. To feel the culture and to understand its process, a direct access into the Swedish company has to be part of the method used for this thesis. Otherwise, the thesis would be only based on secondary data which should be avoided in order to ensure reliability and validity. The theoretical framework for this thesis will contain the ideas and theories of researchers like E.H.Schein and R.Daft with the main focus on organizations, culture building and leadership as well as Jackson&Carter with their view on semiotics. Furthermore, regarding the transmission of cultural aspects, the ideas of “The Three Faces of Leadership” from Hatch and Kostera will also be taken into consideration. Furthermore many researchers in the past noticed that culture is more a source of conflict and complex outcome and situations rather than a mean to gather employees, people in general. The results of this thesis are that IKEA, in spite of its so called unique global culture is not totally successful in dealing with this complex notion of culture especially among employees across borders. Indeed, IKEA’s managers tend to forget to take the many particularities of national and regional cultures into consideration, they deal with everywhere in the world. Although it came out that in many countries which are culturally close to Sweden the leader and managers efficiently transmit the core beliefs and values to the employees.

<p>The persistent presence of refugees challenges political theorists to rethink our approaches to citizenship and national sovereignty. I look to philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), who brings to the Western tradition her insight as a refugee who attended to other refugees. Deploying the tropes of Threshold, Refuge, and Attention (which I garner and elaborate from her writings) I read Weil as an eminently political theorist whose practice of befriending political strangers maintains the urgent, interrogative insight of the refugee while tempering certain "temptations of exile." On my reading, Weil's body of theory travels physically and conceptually among plural, intersecting, and conflicting bodies politic, finding in each a source of limited, imperfect, and precious Refuge.</p><p>I then put Weil into conversation with several contemporary scholars - Michael Walzer, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah - each of whom takes up a problematic between duties to existing political community and the call to engagements with political strangers. Bringing Weilian theory to bear on this conversation, I argue that polity depends deeply on those who heed the call to assume variously particular, vocational, and unenforceable duties across received borders. </p><p>Finally, by way of furthering Weil's incomplete experiments in Attention to the other, I look to "accompaniment" and related strategies adopted by human rights activists in recent decades in the Americas. These projects, I suggest, display many traits in common with Weil's political sensibility, but they also demonstrate possibilities beyond those imagined by Weil herself. As such, they provide practical guidance to those of us confronting political failures and refugee flows in the Western hemisphere today. I conclude that politico-humanitarian movements' own bodies of theory and practice point the way to sustained, cross-border, political relations.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Nowadays, companies face many difficulties due to the much competitive environment they have to evolve in. Therefore, multinational ones, particularly dealing with customers</p><p>and employees, as well as competitors worldwide, have to take all the tools available into consideration to be able to stay afloat, or, at best, to be successful. Culture can be one of those efficient tools that can be used to make sure that the company will gain competitive</p><p>advantages on the long run.</p><p>However, the development of a strategy based on cultural aspects is not that easy as culture is a very complex and hardly understandable phenomenon – no matter if it is national culture, or, as here in this thesis, corporate. Thus, as this thesis focus on the employee’s side, it is obvious to imagine that the more numerous the countries, in which IKEA as the focused company wants to be present, are, the harder it will be to deal with cultural aspects and then to be successful thanks to a correct understanding on every side.</p><p>How does a multinational company deal with culture within</p><p>the company and across borders?</p><p>This above research question is the base of our research process. It seems indeed to be interesting to focus on a company implemented all over the world to wonder then whether this company manages to deal with cultural differences when crossing borders IKEA as a multinational company is then an example that can be used to write such a thesis. On the one hand, it is a company which deeply plays with its image and culture and broadcast a particular corporate culture based on Swedish roots. On the other hand, IKEA, since the 1970’s, has successfully tried to cross borders first in Europe and then in Asia facing then unexpected problems among the employees, for instance.</p><p>As culture is not a notion that implies easily calculation and numbers, it seems natural to use meetings and interviews to lead the research. To feel the culture and to understand its process, a direct access into the Swedish company has to be part of the method used for</p><p>this thesis. Otherwise, the thesis would be only based on secondary data which should be avoided in order to ensure reliability and validity.</p><p>The theoretical framework for this thesis will contain the ideas and theories of researchers like E.H.Schein and R.Daft with the main focus on organizations, culture building and leadership as well as Jackson&Carter with their view on semiotics. Furthermore, regarding the transmission of cultural aspects, the ideas of “The Three Faces of Leadership” from Hatch and Kostera will also be taken into consideration.</p><p>Furthermore many researchers in the past noticed that culture is more a source of conflict and complex outcome and situations rather than a mean to gather employees, people in general.</p><p>The results of this thesis are that IKEA, in spite of its so called unique global culture is not totally successful in dealing with this complex notion of culture especially among employees across borders. Indeed, IKEA’s managers tend to forget to take the many particularities of national and regional cultures into consideration, they deal with everywhere in the world. Although it came out that in many countries which are culturally close to Sweden the leader and managers efficiently transmit the core beliefs and values to the employees.</p>

Feminist geographic debates have drawn attention to the multi-scalar role of borders as processes of social differentiation that are reproduced and inscribed on the bodies of migrant workers in everyday life. This thesis explores these questions in the context of Singapore’s global city-state where the increasing visibility of low-wage foreign workers in local residential areas has become a subject of tense neighbourhood frictions that frequently bring borders into sharp relief. Using the case-study of a recent public furore surrounding the proposed location of a foreign worker dormitory in Serangoon Gardens, one of Singapore's well-known middle-class estates, it examines the ways that migrant exclusions in local residential areas are informed by border anxieties and practices that mark out the labouring bodies of foreign workers as alien and “out of place.” The Serangoon Gardens incident exhibited a moment of tension whereby gendered, racialised, and class-based meanings attached to specific forms of flexible labour (particularly foreign construction and domestic work) were inserted into wider debates about nation, community, and the socio-spatial preservation of middle-class identity and belonging. Insofar as Singapore’s growth remains undergirded by the systematic in-flow of low-wage foreign workers to service its infrastructural and social reproductive labour needs, a study of borders helps illuminate the inherent contradictions and barriers of mobility within the global city as an exclusionary landscape. This thesis argues that the deeply marginalised place of foreign workers in society stems predominantly from the constitutive role of the state’s managerial migration regime in shaping everyday social meanings and practices that construct these workers as unassimilable subjects within the city-state. The outcome of these multi-scalar forms of bordering practices has been to produce a transient, depoliticised, and governable migrant population in the interests of security and economic prosperity in Singapore’s global city-state. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2010-05-11 15:31:12.683

This thesis synthesizes theoretical and methodological insights of actor-network theory with the political economy of communication in order to trace the history of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, 2005-2009. The purpose is to demonstrate how a power elite of transnational corporate actants are increasingly structuring transnational border policy, encouraging the deployment of ubiquitous surveillance technology and the liberalization of transborder data flows and markets, primarily for the purposes of maximizing capital accumulation, ideological legitimation and the suppression of resistance. This hybridization of state and corporate actants exemplifies how prosperity partnerships and other similar informal working groups are increasingly being used as powerful vehicles for mobilizing the private sector into influencing border policies throughout North America, effectively creating powerful socio-technical scenarios for influencing global markets. The argument advanced is that borders are increasingly becoming topological spaces which unevenly distributed objects and people across various networks and flows, in turn re-shaping urban landscapes towards private interests. As such, topological prosperity entails configuring networked infrastructures and spaces such as borders and airports in ways which favour particular socio-economic groups, primarily an ascending global economic elite. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-28 15:18:47.858

This dissertation examines how US immigrant family detention policy emerged from reinvigorated border security priorities, immigration policing practices, and international migration flows. Based on a qualitative mixed methods approach, the research traces how discourses of threat, vulnerability, and safety produce detainable child and parent subjects that displace “the family” as a legal entity. I show that immigration law relies on specific kinds of geographical knowledge, producing what I call the ‘geopolitics of vulnerability.’ More broadly, I analyze how current immigration enforcement practices work at local, national, and international scales, so that detention deters future migration as much as it penalizes existing undocumented migrants. Tracing how legal categorization, isolation, criminalization, and forced mobility discipline detained families, I show how detention bears down on migrant networks, defying individualized and national scalings of immigration law. Family detention, like the broader detention system, is authorized through overlapping forms of administrative discretion, and I analyze how the “plenary doctrine of immigration” resonates with ICE’s discretionary authority. Finally, I trace how immigrant rights advocates mobilizes conceptions of “home-like” and “prison-like” facilities, and how ICE reimagined its “residential” facilities in response. Empirically and theoretically, my project contributes the first academic study of US family detention to research on kinship, citizenship, security, geopolitics, and immigration enforcement.