Increasingly, postcolonial scholars are recognising that the discipline must move beyond the mere critique of European imperialism, and that the future lies, in part, in seeking solutions to the conflicts and injustices that remain the persistent legacy of the colonial era. A concurrent trend in literature departments has been the push to incorporate and encourage comparative methodologies. This essay brings into conversation two works of Asian American fiction that address the problematics of transnational encounter in the age of globalisation. In both Ha Jin's "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town" and Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch the authors explore familiar postcolonial themes: Western economic and cultural hegemony, cultural imperialism, the legacy of the Euro-American colonial era - yet they do so from a very particular (and increasingly common) perspective that as yet has not been sufficiently addressed by postcolonial scholars. Reading these texts through the lens of Roger Célestin's theorisation of the limits of traditional literary exoticism in From Cannibals to Radicals, this essay calls for a re-evaluation, not merely of our understanding of literary exoticism, nor merely of our understanding of the transpacific as a political imaginary, but also of our long-held conceptions of national literature and comparative scholarship.

Increasingly, postcolonial scholars are recognising that the discipline must move beyond the mere critique of European imperialism, and that the future lies, in part, in seeking solutions to the conflicts and injustices that remain the persistent legacy of the colonial era. A concurrent trend in literature departments has been the push to incorporate and encourage comparative methodologies. This essay brings into conversation two works of Asian American fiction that address the problematics of transnational encounter in the age of globalisation. In both Ha Jin's "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town" and Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch the authors explore familiar postcolonial themes: Western economic and cultural hegemony, cultural imperialism, the legacy of the Euro-American colonial era - yet they do so from a very particular (and increasingly common) perspective that as yet has not been sufficiently addressed by postcolonial scholars. Reading these texts through the lens of Roger Célestin's theorisation of the limits of traditional literary exoticism in From Cannibals to Radicals, this essay calls for a re-evaluation, not merely of our understanding of literary exoticism, nor merely of our understanding of the transpacific as a political imaginary, but also of our long-held conceptions of national literature and comparative scholarship.

The overall aim of this study is to examine how Swedish women’s youth- magazines describes women. Through a social constructivist perspective, this essay particularly focuses on how the magazines deals with issues of gender and sexuality and what norms they reproduce. The magazine’s image of the young Swedish woman is a somewhat complex one, although one thing is strikingly clear: she is very different from men. While adjectives as hard, cold and tough are being ascribed to the latter, the woman is often depicted with more “soft” qualities. In some cases she is portrayed as an emotional and goodhearted little princess that faithfully is waiting for “mr. Right” (heterosexuality is a consistent assumption), while in other cases the magazines seem to urge her to take responsibility for both her own and the man’s sexuality and pleasure.

The purpose of this research project is to examine the role of conflict resolution in training programmes for military peacekeepers. It offers a significant contribution to the conflict resolution literature by providing contemporary analysis of where further manifestations exist of the links between military peacekeeping and the academic study of conflict resolution. The thesis firstly provides a thorough analysis of where conflict resolution scholars have sought to critique and influence peacekeeping. This is mirrored by a survey of policy stemming from the United Nations (UN) in the period 1999-2010. The thesis then undertakes a survey of the role of civil-military cooperation: an area where there is obvious crossover between military peacekeeping and conflict resolution terminology. This is achieved firstly through an analysis of practitioner reports and academic research into the subject area, and secondly through a fieldwork analysis of training programmes at the UN Training School Ireland, and Royal Military Training Academy 4 Sandhurst (RMAS). The thesis goes on to provide a comprehensive examination of the role of negotiation for military peacekeepers. This examination incorporates a historical overview of negotiation in the British Army, a sampling of peacekeeping literature, and finally fieldwork observations of negotiation at RMAS. The thesis discusses how this has impacted significantly on conceptions of military peacekeepers from both the military and conflict resolution fields. The thesis adds considerably to contemporary debates over cosmopolitan forms of conflict resolution. Firstly it outlines where cosmopolitan ethics are entering into military training programmes, and how the emergence of institutionalised approaches in the UN to ¿human security¿ and peacebuilding facilitate this. Secondly, the thesis uses Woodhouse and Ramsbotham¿s framework to link the emergence of cosmopolitan values in training programmes to wider structural changes at a global level.

This thesis empirically investigates the impact of an individual’s dominant independent self-construal, interdependent self-construal, cosmopolitan and local orientation on the effect of the four self-congruity types (actual, ideal, social, ideal social) on brand attitude. A widely used practice among marketers focuses on communicating the notion that using their brands will bring consumers closer to how they would like to see themselves, their ideal self-concept (e.g. being a slim person like the models in the ads), instead of how they actually see themselves, their actual self-concept. However, recent research shows that there is no “universality” of a superior self-congruity effect. Specifically, individual-level characteristics (e.g. public self-consciousness) determine whether actual or ideal self-congruity impacts brand perceptions more strongly (Malär et al., 2011). This study extends that research by considering (a) all four self-congruity types and (b) additional individual-level characteristics (independent and interdependent self-construal, cosmopolitan and local orientation), which are valuable for segmenting consumer markets within and across countries. Survey data from a non-student sample were collected in two countries (the US and India). After performing data cleaning procedures, over 800 usable responses in each country were analysed with the use of PLS-SEM. The findings show that, as expected, these individual-level characteristics have an impact in regard to which of the four self-congruity types has the strongest effect on brand attitude. For instance, for individuals with a local orientation or interdependent self-construal, actual self-congruity has the strongest effect on brand attitude. These findings extend self-congruity theory by considering how an individual’s dominant independent and interdependent self-construal, cosmopolitan and local orientation impact the effect of the four self-congruity types on brand attitude. Moreover, the findings offer marketers insights into which self-concept type they should try to match with their brand communications when targeting these specific consumer groups. Details on the contributions as well as managerial implications are presented.

The purpose of this research is to examine China’s emerging role in peacebuilding. With a fast-growing economy, China is becoming very influential and has increased its political leverage in conflict-affected countries. At the same time, China’s foreign policy and strategy are evolving and Beijing is becoming more proactive in engaging and intervening on peacebuilding efforts. China has developed a unique peacebuilding approach, one that is based on economic growth as way to alleviate poverty and social unrest. China could contribute to bringing these alternative and complementary perspectives to the Peacebuilding debate and open this field to non-Western understandings. This research is going to examine China’s approach, its origins in China’s domestic situation and how China is exporting this model at the international level. Some of the aspects that will be analyse include: general aspects of the Chinese civilisation, philosophy and history, the domestic situation as well as on the ways that China handles its domestic conflicts in Xinjiang and Tibet; and some of the particularities and characteristics of Chinese foreign policy that shape the way it exports peacebuilding policies to the international arena. The intervention of China in the conflict of Kachin, Myanmar will illustrate how Chinese peacebuilding is evolving and moving away from its Westphalian principles of non-interference. China has thus become a key actor in supporting peace and stability and it should be part of any debate around peacebuilding moving forward based on shared interests in, and concern to promote peace and stability.

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Our study aims to discover how young men aged 15-19 perceive the image of men in women’s magazines. To do this we let eight young men read the two women’s magazines most read by young women their own age, Vecko Revyn and Cosmopolitan. We want to find whether they consider this image to be representative of their own reality. We are also interested in their opinion when it comes to possible consequences of this image as well as their ideas on how men should be portrayed. We used a combination of different methods. First, we used introspection by letting each of the young men note down their thoughts in a diary while reading the magazines. We then used qualitative interviews to further explore their opinions. We applied the method of phenomenology to our research, which allowed us to concentrate solely on the young men’s experiences without regard to our own opinions or interpretations. Our study shows that the majority of the young men in our study consider the image of men in magazines to be stereotyped, sexualized and lacking in complexity. They express a wish to see more ordinary men as well as different sides of men. Also, there is an interesting contradiction between the young men’s ideals which are very traditionally masculine and their criticism of these values being portrayed in the magazines. Furthermore, there is a noticeable gap in insight between the 15-year olds and the other young men. The youngest two alone accept the image of men in the magazines. All of the young men deny that they are affected by the image of men in the magazines, though they express their concern that other, weaker individuals as well as young women may be affected.

Diploma thesis "From construction of media reality towards a social stereotype in the printed advertising" deals with stereotypical portrayals of people emerging in Czech magazine production in the first decade of 21st century. The first part of the thesis describes the theoretical fundamentals of the field, including the theory of the social construction of reality by Berger and Luckmann. In its second part, using the sample of magazines Týden, Reflex, Maxim (formerly Quo), Cosmopolitan and Žena a život, the thesis surveys the occurrence of stereotypical depictions in the period from 2000 to 2008, materialized using semiotic codes. These depictions are named, described and it is shown how are they used in the process of constructing a complex communicate. This thesis is trying to point out the disproportion in the depictions of males and females in advertising and (based on previous classifications available) comes up with an original classification of the stereotypical depictions. The thesis also describes the results of a quantitative content analysis in order to find out about the occurrence frequency of the stereotypes in pictorial texts used in advertising production and it segments the occuring stereotypes in three categories according to the frequency of their occurrence. The categories are...

While globalisation is a multidimensional phenomenon, present educational foci tend to lie not on preparing students for a complex, globalised 21stcentury, but on preparing students for a 21st-century economic globalisation. In order to advocate a change of consciousness, this present study examines the concept of human flourishing and the skills – referred to as cosmopolitan soft skills – fostering the phenomenon. Taking a critical realist approach, a theoretical and an empirical investigation was carried out. The theoretical analysis undertaken by the study identified flourishing to be a three-dimensional concept and established that flourishing cannot be fully realised unless an individual is flourishing both from a positive-psychological, a moral-political, and a moral-ethical perspective. The empirical, comparative analysis of school policy documents and interviews with school principals, on the other hand, eventuated a comprehensive list of skills and competences that contemporary educational institutions aim at equipping their students with for the sake of flourishing. By an interplay between theory and empirical data, the study resulted in a possible conceptualisation of cosmopolitan soft skills, consisting of the four core skills of attention, acceptance, respect, and responsibility, and 78 other skills organised into four main categories. Provided the critical realist stance taken, the results are believed to be of a flexible and ever-changing but universal nature that facilitate future research into the educability of the cosmopolitan soft skills concept and the empirical realisation of human flourishing.