The aim of the study is to investigate individual policy entrepreneurs who work to act upon their foreign policy proposals within the US political system.The study is focusing on how the following policy contractors which have acted against Cuba, and how they have succeeded in changing the US foreign policy position towards the country. The aim of the study is to analyse how policy contractors in Congress work and their impact on foreign policy decisions concerning Cuba.The underlying methodology of the study is a case study design with a limited focus on Foreign Policy Analysis, where the underlying material includes several different sources that mixes Congress own documents with news articles. Theories applied to the study are Actor-Specific Theory and Policy Entrepreneurship to explain the actors' roles, methods and motives.The results of the study show that the congressional actors work in a highly unorthodox manner. The actors seek support and financial resources from independent interest groups that have similar agendas concerning Cuba. The actors also form internal interest groups in Congress in order to increase support for each other's policy proposals. There is also a great deal of importance in a policy entrepreneurship that can make an adequate problem formulation to fill the experienced political vacuum. Policy entrepreneurs have a pronounced media profile and do not choose everything to rarely search for the American people by turning to media.

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This study investigates how the European Union may have an impact on countries before and after accession to the union applying the theory of conditionality through a case study of Romania. To answer the main objective of this study, three research questions will be answered, theses are: 1) How have the process of Romania looked like before and after accession to a membership in European Union? 2) How has the development of the Political Criteria been before and after its accession to European Union? 3) How does the theory of conditionality work during and after Romania´s accession to the European Union. The study will use the methodology of a qualitative desk study with the theoretical framework of conditionality and the Copenhagen Political Criteria. The study has concluded that Romania faces similar problems with the political criteria as they did almost twenty years ago. It also concludes that the EU conditionality have had impact on Romania both before and after their accession the EU, but just to some extent.

Yemen is the poorest state in the Middle East and has been in conflict during the larger part of the century. Today the country suffers from the biggest humanitarian crisis in modern history, which is a consequence of a war that took off after the Arab Spring. The causes of the war have been presented trough different narratives which claims that the war is a "proxy war" between Saudi Arabia and Iran, or as a war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, or as a consequence of Al-Qaida's extension. This study challenges these narratives and gives another explanation, which takes several aspects into account when explaining the war's causes. This study strives to answer the question "what are the causes of the war in Yemen?" and does so by using the theory of states and nations by Benjamin Miller, and by using three levels: local, regional and global. The study concludes that the war can be explained through Miller's theory of State-to-Nation Balance, due to that the state Yemen is missing a nation, and due to that groups within the state does not identify with the state. The study also discusses the impact of Iran, Saudi Arabia and USA, but it also questions Miller's concept of a nation and the adequacy of using it when studying clans and tribes.

During the spring of 2014 two midwives in Sweden were denied work because they refused to perform abortion on the grounds of their religious beliefs. Shortly after the health authorities were sued for discrimination. The purpose of this study is to examine whether there should be room for exemptions based on one’s conscience in a neutral liberal state. This essay applies Cécile Labordes theory of individual exceptions and liberal justices on the midwives’ case in Sweden to perform this purpose. Should, or could, they have been exempted from performing abortion and thus be allowed to work as midwives? This essay’s analysis demonstrates that the current case is not compatible with justice and there is thus no room for exemptions on a national level. However, there should be space for exemptions for cases that are compatible with justice, in order for all citizens in a pluralistic society to live in accordance with their own conception of the good.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka om Storbritanniens utträde ur den Europeiska Unionen (Brexit) har förändrat inställningen till EU:s försvars- och säkerhetspolitik i den nuvarande regeringen (2014-2018) och i allianspartierna. Uppsatsen berör EU:s försvars- och säkerhetspolitik mellan 2014 till 2018 uppdelat i två perioder: oktober 2014 till juni 2016 samt juni 2016 till mars 2018. För att analysera om en förändring skett har Albert O. Hirschmans teoretiska koncept sorti, protest och lojalitet applicerats på det insamlade materialet. Det insamlade materialet bygger på en omfattande genomgång av propositioner, motioner, utrikesdeklarationer, skrivelser, fakta- promemorior, debattartiklar, tal samt övriga säkerhetspolitiska dokument kopplat till EU:s gemensamma försvars- och säkerhetspolitik. Som ytterligare komplement till detta material har två intervjuer med riksdagsledamöter från Socialdemokraterna och Moderaterna genomförts. Resultatet indikerar en tydligare svensk EU-lojalitet efter Brexit-omröstningen, där partierna mer explicit välkomnat den försvars- och säkerhetspolitiska utvecklingen inom EU. Resultatet visar att regeringen särskilt betonar sammanhållning efter Brexit-omröstningen, vilket tydligt märks i och med att regeringen framhäver det som ett nationellt intresse i den svenska säkerhetsstrategin från 2017. Från allianspartierna har särskilt Moderaterna stuckit ut, där både textmaterialet och intervjun visade en förändrad och mer positiv inställning till EU:s försvars- och säkerhetspolitik. Slutsatsen efter Brexit kan sammanfattas av att partierna tydligare betonar sammanhållning inom EU, är mer öppna för utökat samarbete inom EU:s försvars- och säkerhetspolitik samt är mer positiva till den samtida utvecklingen inom detta politikområde.

In recent decades, Sweden's and most of Europe's defense budgets have fallen. It has created a greater need between countries for the cost-effective maintenance of defense capabilities. The Swedish Finnish Naval Task Group (SFNTG) is a part of this trend. It will be operational in 2023 and aims to jointly use the marine forces of the countries in a cost-effective way. In this case study, the cooperation in SFNTG between Swedish and Finnish combat boats is investigated. Based on the increased need for defense cooperation, different concepts for describing and applying collaborations in the short and long term have been created. In this work the term Joint Force Generation was used to analyze the different systems of the Swedish and Finnish combat boats. The term Pooling & Sharing was used to analyze cooperation in the longer term. The purpose is to explore how the political and strategic plans will work on the tactical level of cooperation. Empiricism has been gathered through interviews by officers from both countries. Literature study of reports on the meaning of cooperation have been made. The work was limited to research & development, maintenance, management and material purchases. The interviews showed that the different communicationsystems in the combat boats required extra human resources and a common communicationsystem was desirable. Conclusions are that there are shortcomings of a functioning relationship for the combat boats to meet the requirements of the year 2023. The use of each other's bases as another goal must coordinate logistics, training and warehousing to create better impact. In the longer perspective a greater political understanding must be for the importance of the joint material purchases. The major gain is in cost savings through various forms of collective research development.

In all times soldiers have fought wars with orders from the political ruling power. Therefore the soldier becomes the utmost instrument for implementing the political objective in conflicts. In modern conflicts, the soldier is a frontline bureaucrat. If the soldier does not understand, can, or will act in agreement with the political objective, the soldier's actions is not based on legitimacy. The polical objective with the intervention will not be accomplished. Swedish soldiers who participated in the international forces in Afghanistan have not fully understood their government’s goals, and what the efforts aimed at resolving. Soldiers have not fully been given the practical or theoretical ability required to work with the goals of the intervention. Soldiers also showed a willingness to participate in the conflict which can not be fully regarded as being in line with the goals they are supposed to resolve. The soldier’s willingness to reach the goals has been influenced by the reality of the conflict in which the soldiers participate in. The soldier also experienced a disengagement in relation to what the political will wants to achieve, and the physical reality the soldier has been working in.

This study aims to investigate and identify the democratic restrictions in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2018. The country is internationally known for its burdensome history of war in the 1990s, however, Bosnia and Herzegovina seems to be in the process of developing. In addition to having one of the world’s most complicated political systems, the country’s efforts to improve their democracy have not been recognized. Therefore, the question at issue will be operationalized by utilizing the theory of polyarchy composed by Robert Dahl. This theory establishes seven institutions; elected political officials, free and fair elections, inclusive suffrage, the right to run for public office, freedom of expression, alternative sources of information and associational autonomy. These institutions will be examined using empiricism that has been developed with textual analysis. Moreover, the institutions will be analyzed to ascertain if these rights can be found within the Bosnian society.                     The results revealed that only one of the institutions, namely, “inclusive suffrage” is maintained in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Four of the remaining institutions, which are; elected political officials, free and fair elections, the right to run for public office and associational autonomy, were recognized as partially maintained. The last two institutions; the right to run for public office and alternative sources of information did not meet the requirements. Due to these results, it can be established that Bosnia and Herzegovina does not maintain all seven requirements of Dahl’s theory. Despite the country’s efforts to improve their democracy, the democratic process of Bosnia and Herzegovina seems to have ceased.

Previous research has found that civil resistance has a positive impact on democratic development. Still, despite increased academic attention to how civil resistance affects democratization and democracy, no systematic study has yet examined how the nature of inclusion in a civil resistance impacts various elements of democracy. This study addresses this research gap by comparing how inclusive civil resistance and non-fully inclusive civil resistance uprisings between 1943-2013 affected the development of liberal, egalitarian, participatory, and deliberative democracy. Two theoretical arguments are presented for how the nature of inclusion in civil resistance affect its impact on democracy: one arguing that inclusion should generate higher levels of participatory democracy and another underlining how the nature of inclusion in civil resistance generates higher levels of deliberative democracy. The arguments are tested with a quasi-experimental difference-in-difference measure combined with a nearest neighbour matching propensity score method. The results give tentative support for that inclusive civil resistance compared to non-fully inclusive civil resistance increase democracy in general and deliberative democracy in particular up to five years after civil resistance ended. The impact of inclusion in civil resistance does however vary considerably, and further research is needed to strengthen the theory and generate more statistically significant results.