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In the world today there is a tendency that women and minority groups are under-represented in political decision-making. In order to come to terms with the under-representation of women and minorities many countries are taking measures to increase the number of women and minority representatives. However,there is an ongoing debate on whether increased number of group representatives lead to increased representation of group interests. The question is if women and minority representatives are more responsive to their respective group’s interests compared to other representatives. In this study, I have conducted asurvey with members of the Jordanian House of Representatives in order to investigate whether women and minority representatives are more responsive to their respective group’s interests compared to other representatives. The survey has been designed to capture representatives’ priorities and attitudes towards certain policy areas and issues. The results from the survey show that women and minority representatives to a certain extent are more responsive to their respective group’s interests compared to other representatives, indicating that an increased number of women and minority representatives would lead to increased representation of women and minority interests. Furthermore,this study finds that female representatives are more responsive to women’s interests when it comes to priorities than when it comes to attitudes, whereas representatives from the Christian minority are more responsive to Christian issues when it comes to attitudes than when it comes to priorities. These results indicate that there are differences between different groups when it comes to the representation of their groups’ interests. Thus, research on one group might not be directly transferable to other groups.

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This thesis investigates how colonial legacies shape representational practices in contemporary French cinema and interrogates how hierarchical differences are produced and challenged in the cinematic media. Combining the fields of postcolonial theory and culture studies enables a theoretical framework that connects contemporary cultural debates about the politics of representation with the legacies of colonial stereotypes and racialized imageries. Through the application of qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis the thesis strives to make a theoretical contribution to the existing body of litterateur that is empirically driven. Additionally an intersectional dimension will be included as the thesis addresses the question of representations in relation to race, gender, class and sexuality and further how power operates through culture as a production of knowledge. The major findings of the thesis consist of how the empirical material reveals how contemporary cinematic expressions reuse colonial racial stereotypes and appropriate blackness as instrumental in commodification of “otherness”. Accordingly the thesis challenges dominant notions of the impact of race in a French context.   KEYWORDS: Colonial discourse, representation, cinema, intersectional, appropriation, commodification, otherness.

The study sets out to contribute to research regarding the failure of a gender equality policy proposal. This case study, drawn from Mexico, examines the proposed legislation on “Violence against women in politics”. This policy proposal was approved in the senate, however later stalled within the Mexican Chamber of deputies, and was therefore never adopted. The study also describes the re-mobilisation efforts that were made due to this failure, in terms of tracing the progress of further policy proposals presented on “Violence against women in politics”. By using theory regarding feminist triangles, veto-players and narratives of how to re-mobilise after defeat, this study finds that the collaboration became more extensive and coherent as subsequent policy proposals on violence against women were presented. Further remobilisation also occurred despite some of the specific narratives of defeat suggesting this would not have been the case. However, as this research shows, those collaborations that occurred were not strong enough to achieve the adoption of the bill as a critical veto-player failed to provide the necessary support.

This is an International Relations thesis that will address the current situation in Mali regarding the conditions attached to aid and debt-relief by the World Bank. These conditions are of a neoliberal nature introducing privatization and liberalization of prices in the cotton sector in Mali. The goals with the use of these conditions are to promote economic development and growth in order to reduce poverty in Mali. However, these conditions have been argued by some authors and reports to inefficient in achieving poverty reduction. It have been questioned whether the neoliberal ideology used by the World Bank is the most suitable for the current development situation in Mali.

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The purpose of this study is to find out whether the Women Economic Empowerment Program (WEEP) targeted at HIV positive women in Ngong, Kenya, empowers its participants psychologically. The research data consists of ten interviews conducted in 2015 in Ngong with women who were recently enrolled in the 18-month program and women who had recently graduated from the program. The field work also included systematic observation. A qualitative content analysis was performed on the interview material, and the impact of the program on the participants’ psychological empowerment was analyzed in terms of the interviewees’ feelings of self-confidence/beliefs in self-efficacy, self-respect, and acceptance. The results show that the newly-graduated participants demonstrate higher levels of self-confidence and stronger beliefs in self-efficacy than the newly-enrolled, framing their own hard work as the most important factor affecting whether they will accomplish their goals in life. The newly-graduated also experience higher levels of self-respect. The newly-graduated experience higher levels of acceptance than the newly-enrolled women when dealing with stigmatizing relationships. Based on these findings, the WEEP program is argued to empower its participants psychologically. Inspirational leadership, capacity building activities, experience of goal success, and the program as a space for emotional peer support were identified as some of the factors and processes behind the result. The results can, with consideration, be generalized to contexts with similar target groups and organizational goals and settings.

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