In the past decade, scholars have discovered how European populist radical right parties have increasingly resorted to instrumentalizing issues of gender equality within broader anti-immigration and anti-Islam campaigns. This phenomenon has been coined as femonationalism by sociologist Sara R. Farris; building on her theorization, this thesis aims to investigate thisfurther in a Nordic context by examining whether and how femonationalism can be traced within the politics of the Finns Party (FP) and the Sweden Democrats (SD). This has been achieved by conducting an ideational analysis of the parties’ official election material and policy documents provided on their respective party websites. The analytical framework applied is political scientist Mats Lindberg’s VDP-triad, in which the central task is to capture the proposed value, descriptive, and prescriptive statements in a text. The thesis’ main findings indicate that for the FP, femonationalism could most closely be linked to their policy implications. Here, the FP advocates for extensive anti-immigration and anti-Islam policies, while also promoting policies that uphold a traditional gender order amongst Finns. For the SD, femonationalism was mostly found in their expressed value statements concerning the supremacy of western values in relation to gender equality, which migrants are supposed to internalize and respect. Implications for future research are to examine the phenomenon of femonationalism further in different country settings in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how it presents itself.

The past decades have seen a growing critique of international relations theory (IRT) as being Eurocentric, inspiring the development of alternative interpretations of international politics. One such development is the emergence of Buddhist IRT, which, with only a handful of texts written on the subject, is still very much in its cradle. This analysis attempts to systematically analyse this new contribution through the use of Lindberg’s VDP-triad of ideational analysis as well as thematic analysis. This is important given the power of ideas to shape people’s conceptions of the world and provide road maps for policy makers, as well as the role theory may have in the serving of certain interests. The analysis finds a theory rich in both value judgments, descriptions, and prescriptions, where the most important descriptions regard a unique ontology of radical interdependence, an ontology which deeply affects all other stand-points within the theory. Further, the analysis identifies several areas which need to be clarified and/or confronted in the future development of the theory, including a number of in-consistencies as well as a possible framework for the justification of violence and authoritarian policy.

This study investigates the ideational direction of conservatism in the Swedish student milieu from 1980 until 2022. By a descriptive ideational analysis, shifts in the view of the state, welfare and whether culture, tradition and coexistence in a society should be based on a cultural, national, or ethnic community is investigated. The development is structured by the use of three categories: liberal conservatism, social conservatism and ethno- conservatism. The latter is developed by the author in order to incorporate ethnic unity and monoculturalism into a conservative discourse. A relevant category since questions of borders, stability and migration have increased in political relevance in the last decades. The case for the study consists of Föreningen Heimdal. A student association that aims to spread “reform-friendly conservatism”. Material for the study consists mainly of the association's magazine’s articles and interviews with five former presidents. The period under investigation resulted in five different ideological epochs: 1980-1984 (liberal with liberal conservative elements), 1994-1989 (social con- servative), 1989-2004 (liberal conservative), 2004-2011 (social conservative with liberal conservative elements) and 2011-2022 (social conservative with ethno-conservative elements). A shift has occurred where students emphasize social cohesion and national security from a previous support for the market and an inclusive value community.

It is rather often assumed that Swedish foreign policy debate is largely characterized by consensus and that foreign policy goals often are material (for example security or economic welfare). Despite this, it is possible to identify disagreement among political parties about ideological goals – i.e. the promotion of values – in Swedish foreign policy debates. This raises questions about the nature and importance of these ideological goals in such debates. To study this closer I investigate foreign policy debates about the military conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq. The purpose of the dissertation is to describe and explain the content and relative importance of the ideological goals expressed by Swedish parliamentary parties in both party and public arenas. Four parties are included in the study: the Left, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Conservatives. The theoretical framework is made up of two main parts. First, I develop a classification scheme to identify and sort the goals found in the empirical material. This scheme includes four goal types: ideological, security, economic, and other. Second, insights from literatures on foreign policy and the behaviour of political parties are used to analyze the content and importance of ideological goals. The research design used in the dissertation is comparative case studies. The empirical material is composed of documents from the internal party arena (meeting minutes, congress material, etc), the parliamentary arena (debate material) and the official arena (press material). The material has been analyzed mainly qualitatively with the help of ideational and argument analysis. In order to estimate the relative importance of ideological goals quantitative content analysis has also been used. As regards the content of ideological goals during debates about Vietnam, the empirical results show all parties discussed the promotion of humanity, democracy and states’ rights to national independence. In the Iraq conflict, all parties expressed goals about humanity, human rights, internal security/safety, democracy and states’ rights to national independence. Beyond these goals, individual or a few parties also expressed other ideological goals. However, a central result is that the parties have linked the ideological goals – which they often agree about – to different ways of reasoning. The empirical analysis also revealed that ideological goals have generally been more important than other types of goals (with the exception of the Conservative Party in the debate about Vietnam). Regarding developments over time, the importance of ideological goals was unchanged for the Social Democrats and the Liberal Party. For the Left there was a slight decrease, and for the Conservatives a significant increase. The overall conclusion about what explains the content and importance of ideological goals in the foreign policy debates studied here is that explanations at the systemic level are inadequate. Variables like the international political structure (polarity) and institutional mechanisms in the EU and the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy had little explanatory power. Instead, explanations like type of foreign policy issue, party ideology and party strategy were more useful. Differences in parties’ fundamental ideological views were also discussed as an important source of difference as regards the positions and arguments that expressed ideological goals.

The role of the United Nations in international peace and peacekeeping has traditionally been supported by the Russian Federation, promoting the UN as a central actor in international politics and using force in the establishment of peace in Russian peacekeeping operations. However, blocking several military interventions and UN resolutions on peacekeeping and criticising the use of the UN as a political tool for western states, the Russian perception of peace in the UN remains uncharted. In an attempt to provide new knowledge to the Russian perception of peace, this thesis investigates Russian ideas of peace expressed in national policy documents and UN Security Council statements between 2019 and 2020, concerning the establishment of peace in international conflicts. Using an ideational analysis, Russian ideas of peace are interpreted according to the theoretical framework of situational and relational peace, developed by Jarstad et al. (2019), examining peace as situational security and political order, and as a relational behaviour, attitudes and ideas. The analysis reveals that Russian ideas can be interpreted as characterised by both situational and relational peace, promoting peace and peacekeeping based on international law, establishing security and stability through peaceful means of conflict management rather than promoting forceful military means. Further, ideas of peacekeeping are interpreted as promoting a return to status quo, and state responsibility.

Denna uppsats syftar till att synliggöra och diskutera hur klimatförändringar beskrivs i läromedel ämnade för grundskolan i ämnet geografi. Studiens teoretiska och metodologiska utgångspunkt är systemisk-funktionell grammatik, med fokus på den ideationella grammatiken. Det analyserade materialet utgörs av tre läromedelstexter, avsedda för årskurserna 4-6, 7 och 8. Genom en transitivitetsanalys visar studien att mänskliga förstadeltagare sällan förekommer i materialet. En analys av texternas ergativitet visar att förhållandevis få satser är ergativa, vilket innebär att majoriteten av processerna beskrivs som händelser, snarare än handlingar. Resultatet av ergativitetsanalysen visar vidare att agenter realiseras genom nominaliseringar eller andra abstrakta fenomen. Människans roll i klimatförändringar sätts således i periferin.

This study aims to examine how meaning and value is created in IKEA’s internal and external means of communication. I want to see if the values expressed in the internal and external communication tangent. I will additionally inspect how IKEA present themselves depending on whether the recipients are internal coworkers or external customers. The last thing to be inspected is the internal and external “ideal reader”, which is translated from the Swedish term “modelläsare” (Björkvall 2003). Furthermore, the objective of the study is to contribute to the field of linguistic research. This is done by exposing how values are used to shape different versions of the identity of organizations internally and externally. The internal documents consist of a vision and a “värdegrund”, in English called “fundamental values”, and the external communication entails three images from the advertising campaign “Where life happens”. I analyzed the material through the ideational metafunction belonging to the theory of systemic functional grammar and through a sociosemiotic multimodal analysis. The result reveals that nearly all of the expressed values occur both internally and externally. An example of prominent values is togetherness, inclusiveness and openness. However, the way in which IKEA present themselves towards internal and external target audiences varies markedly, as does the constructed ideal reader. The internal ideational representation of IKEA marks the coworker as part of the organization. At the same time multiple demands describing how the coworker should act and think greatly constricts and controls the internal audience. The external recipients, however, are free to be of a varying kind. IKEA expresses how the external target audience includes everyone. As a result, there are no expectations of who the external ideal reader should be, with one exception. The internal and external ideal readers are both part of a community, as contrasting to being portrayed as solitary.