Magister Administrationis - MAdmin / The African continent has over the past 40 years witnessed a continued scourge of violent conflict and human rights abuses. These conflicts have significantly undermined the social, political, and economic prosperity of African citizens. Additionally, women and children are particularly affected by these conflicts. Women and children are regarded as ‘the most vulnerable’ as they often become the targets of sexual abuse by the enemy. The African Union (AU) is primarily responsible for the resolution of conflicts on the continent. It professes to be committed to the prevention of human rights abuses and the protection of African women (and children) during armed conflicts. It has thus developed an array of mechanisms, protocols, and instruments to address the exploitation and sexual abuse of women during conflict periods. These instruments include: The Constitutive Act of the AU (2000); The Solemn Declaration of Gender Equality in Africa (2003); the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa- ACHPRWA (2004); and the Protocol relating to the Peace and Security Council. In this research project, I consider whether the narratives used in these AU documents sufficiently and explicitly address the use of rape as a strategic weapon during armed conflicts; or whether these narratives inadvertently contribute to a culture that perpetuates war-time rape. My analysis shows that these AU documents deal with war-time rape in very vague and euphemistic terms. Although gender discrimination, sexual violence, exploitation, discrimination, and harmful practices against women are condemned, the delegitimization of rape as a weapon of war is not specifically discussed. This allows for varying interpretations of AU protocols, including interpretations which may diminish the severity of strategic rape. This has lead me to propose that the narratives used in these AU protocols and related documents draw on patriarchy, perpetuate patriarchy, and thus inadvertently perpetuates a culture that perpetuates the use of rape as a weapon of war

It is seemingly accepted that a democracy functions better with a reasonably informed citizenry. As we cannot acquire knowledge about a complex reality on our own, democratic societies operate through a set of institutions of which two are attributed the explicit task to assist citizensa legitimate pathway to knowledge. These institutions include news media and science. Evidence from recent years indicates that more and more elected politicians across the democratic world engage in attacks towards these institutions, with the deliberate aim to undermine their legitimacy. Because the functionality of news media and science essentially relies on their legitimacy, this trend has raised societal concerns in parallel with scholarly interest. While recent research has made important contributions to better understand political attacks towards institutional knowledge providers, several dimensions are still understudied. This thesis addresses such dimensions. Using quantitative content analysis, the research conducted in this thesis explores prevalence, party distribution and expressions of delegitimizing criticism (characterized by a presence of incivility and/or absence of reasoning) towards news media and science(conceptualized as epistemic authorities) among tweeting Members of Parliament (MP) in Sweden. The study analyzes single tweets by all Swedish MPs represented in the national parliament (and on Twitter) over a one-year study period (31st of October 2020 - 31st of October 2021) (N = 1828). Results from the exploration show that Swedish politicians engage in delegitimizing evaluations of epistemic authorities in a small and concentrated scale. Findings are several; Swedish politicians are remarkably more hostile towards the news media than towards science;one party affiliation contribute to more than half of all delegitimizing evaluations; delegitimizing criticism takes on several expressive forms but addresses to a large extent dimensions surrounding poor quality and partiality. The conducted study contributes to research about political hostility towards institutional knowledge providers in empirical and theoretical regards and provide entrances for further discoveries. A special request for futureresearch is to engage in more in-depth and detailed assessments of dimensions having been explored, for example by mixing in qualitative methods.