An increased global attention has been placed on the effects of migration on development, particularly in Africa, due to the increase in remittances to the continent. The African Union (AU) has negotiated multiple migration frameworks and conventions to promote development in this arena. The increased attention has also made researchers within the Migration-Development Nexus (MDN) question the uncritical use of the concept development. This study aims to answer the question of: “How does the AU’s representation of development affect its migration policy?”. The “What's the Problem Represented to be?” model was used to analyse the colonial discourse in the representation of development in the Migration Policy Framework for Africa 2018-2030. The results showed that development is discursively represented as economic growth, migrants are seen as agents of development and North-South hierarchies are evident in the representation of developed/underdeveloped. It was concluded that focus should lie on state-by-state definitions of what development is and is not

This dissertation concerns motivations of the Swedish arms export since the implementation of feminist foreign policy in 2014 until it was discarded in 2022. It contributes to knowledge on the intersection between feminist foreign policy and arms export. Using tools of textual mechanisms, this dissertation has a discursive approach and turns to government justification to explore how the Swedish government and its representatives have motivated arms export. The theoretical framework consists of militarism and gendered language. The findings of the dissertation include narratives on securing the defense capability of the Swedish Armed Forces, maintaining technological competence and references to foreign policy to create legitimacy for arms export. The dissertation also finds that masculinity is used to motivate armament and arms export and language use constructs meaning for motivating and justifying the Swedish defense industry and arms exports.

This thesis evaluates the effectiveness of the United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) in addressing the conflict in the DRC. Through a comprehensive analysis of MONUSCO's performance using established theoretical frameworks and success parameters for UN missions, the study highlights the mission's achievements and shortcomings. By focusing on a single mission, one can thoroughly study the circumstances surrounding the peacekeeping operation, thus allowing a complete understanding of the chosen parameters. Despite some strategic successes, MONUSCO faced significant challenges, including inadequate resources, external interference, and ineffective diplomatic efforts. The findings demonstrate that understanding these factors is essential when analysing mission effectiveness, as they directly impact the outcome and the interpretation of the results.

This study aims to contribute to the debate on the influence of Europarties in the European Union decision-making process, and more precisely in the European Council. As a starting point the theory on Europarty influence in the European Council, by Jonas Tallberg and Karl Magnus Johansson, will be tested in order to assess its validity. There is a need to further research the role of the Europarties in the decision-making processes of the European Union, since the contributions to the field are scarce. The theory suggests that Europarties can be expected to be influential when 1) there is ideological polarisation surrounding the question of concern, 2) one party is dominating the European Council, and 3) when a Europarty is successful in mobilising and creating cohesion among its leaders. In addition, the Europarties have to be able to compete with domestic constraints that the members of the Council are bound by. The theory is empirically tested by a comparative case study on the outcomes of the Spitzenkandidaten-processes in the European elections in 2014 and 2019. It seems that the Europarties were influential and managed to get a Spitzenkandidat elected as Commission President in 2014, but less successful in 2019. However, the findings of the empirical study suggest that the Europarties were successful in mobilising support also in 2019, but a chain of events led to the fall of the Spitzenkandidaten-process in its current shape and the Europarties have most likely lost a part of their long-term influence.

Completed military service as a condition for suffrage – a matter of course that was reversed?

As a condition for male suffrage in Sweden between 1909 and 1922 citizens were required to have completed military service. This article investigates how this restriction on voting rights, introduced more orless unanimously, was abolished equally unanimously and with little debate only 13 years later. Two main reasons are pointed out. Firstly, since women were given suffrage in 1921, this restriction affected men only and was therefore suddenly perceived to be an unjust discrimination against the latter. Secondly, this restriction was closely linked to the particular political situation in Sweden around the turn of the twentieth century. For decades the twin issues of military and suffrage reform had been interlinked and thus blocked each other until they were resolved in 1901 and 1909 respectively. Once they had been resolved, the political connection between them rapidly became redundant, as did the symbolic and practical expression of this connection, namely completed military service as a condition for suffrage.

This article traces the political process towards full formal integration of women in the military professions in Scandinavia and Finland, investigating the shifting roles played by military labour demands and politics of gender equality. It provides the first comparative overview of these developments in the Nordic region. The analysis demonstrates the importance of historical continuity in women’s military participation. Due to military labour demands, women were throughout the post-war decades recruited into a range of auxiliary, voluntary and hybrid capacities in the Scandinavian armed forces. The reforms opening the military professions to women in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the 1970s were the outcome of a double crisis, as military needs for the regulation of these women’s organisational status coincided with new political demands for gender equality in the labour market. Corresponding reforms in Finland were delayed by the country’s lack of continuity in women’s military participation as well as its sufficient supply of male military personnel. A common Nordic model of gender and military work nonetheless emerged in the 1990s, marked by equal rights to military participation for women on a voluntary basis, combined with mandatory military conscription for men.

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, there has been an elevated interest in private debt and as a macroeconomic variable. In light of the lack of high-frequency data, this study presents a unique monthly time series dataset on credit from and deposits in Swedish commercial banks from 1875 to 2020, covering 1,752 monthly observations and most of Swedish commercial banking history. In a first application, the study examines to what extent money in Sweden has been exogenous, created independently of demand by the central bank, or endogenous, created in response to demand by commercial banks, during different institutional settings. The results, derived via cointegration and impulse-response functions, show that though the relationship between deposits and credit has changed over time, both theories often hold validity simultaneously. While changes in deposits often have had significant impact on credit, the opposite has also been true. There are, however, differences between different regulatory regimes, as well as for different groups of banks.

Financialisation has become a new buzz word in social sciences, but, although some of the earliest usages of the concept can be found with economic historians, the recent fad has largely been ignored by economic history. This is true also for the Nordic region. This survey article highlights a handful of studies on financialisation in the Nordic countries in general and within Nordic economic history, in particular, but more importantly, it relates Nordic economic history with a long wave approach to a corresponding stance in financialisation scholarship. It concludes that Nordic economic history is in an advantageous position to both shed light on contemporary financialisation with the help of historical examples. Moreover, it is also able to, through the lens of history, problematise some of the assumptions made within financialisation theory. In this, the Nordic region can provide apt case studies as varieties of financialisation over time and space. All in all, Nordic economic history has barely scratched the surface of this potential. 

This investigation explores the long-run relationship between the wage share in the non-construction private sector and government efforts to create jobs in public services and construction of infrastructure and houses, in Sweden in 1900 to 2016. In the present article, it is argued that the creation of employment with generous wages by the Swedish government has increased the bargaining power of workers outside of these sectors, thus raising the wage share, up to about 1980. Correspondingly, retrenchment from such policy has been detrimental for the wage share in recent decades. This argument is supported by the results of cointegration tests, estimation of long-run and short-run, speed of adjustment, coefficients, as well as by Impulse-response functions. While government consumption is often found to be an important determinant for the wage share, earlier research has neglected the full labor market effect of government job creation associated with an expansion of the welfare state. Sweden is an ideal case for studying the impact of welfare policy on the wage share, since it has been one of the most extensive welfare states and simultaneously has been one of the most egalitarian countries in the world.

Financialization is generally described as a trend occurring in the World economy since the late 1970s/early 1980s, but several scholars note that financialization is a historically recurrent phenomenon. Phases of financialization can be described as tides influenced by laissez-faire policy and collective intervention, most often via governments. By looking at three variables central to financialization – private debt levels, inequality and investment – this study finds that the finance-dominated capitalism in advanced economies between the Long depression, ending in the 1890s, and the Great depression in the early 1930s was similar to the current era of financialization: Rising inequality bred a higher debt-to-GDP ratio during both periods of financialization, mostly via larger collaterals and larger loanable funds. But whereas recent financialization, indicated by a rising debt-to-GDP ratio, has been associated with a declining investment-to-GDP ratio, financialization in the early 20th Century was positively associated with investment, manifest in the Second industrial revolution. During the “de-financialized” period after World War Two, inequality was neither associated with investment nor with private debt levels. Rather, macroeconomic policy reorientation and government management of financial markets led to a positive association between investment and private credit. The present study considers advanced capitalism as a totality rather than each country individually, since global capital flows play a crucial role during eras of financialization. A special focus is on institutional changes in the leading capitalist countries – The United States, Great Britain, Germany, France and Japan. The study also considers the special status of China in the World capitalist system. The coverage of advanced capitalist country GDP is about 75 per cent for the first era of financialization in 1896–1931, close to 90 per cent for the de-financialized era in 1946–1973, and almost 100 per cent for the recent period of financialization in 1983–2016. The dating of the three periods is based on available data and on established periodization by scholars in the fields of financialization, regulation theory and macroeconomic policy regimes. The conclusions are supported by cointegration tests, vector error correction models and impulse-response functions.

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam built on the Nile has sparked conflicts for over twelve years now since it was first announced in 2009. But in 2020 when Ethiopia finally started to fill this behemoth of a dam hostilities ramped up between Egypt and Ethiopia. Because around 95% of Egypt's freshwater comes from the Nile and this dam is positioned upstreams of Egypt's vital water source. As such, Egypt did not take lightly to Ethiopia's challenge towards their historical water hegemony and responded with threats of violence and war. To further complicate this situation Egyp is facing an acute water shortage in 2025 and climate change will throw a wrench into the whole situation as droughts and floods will become more frequent as the world grows warmer. The empirical work of this thesis used a process-tracing approach to identify that realistic fears are driving Egypt to react with aggression and seek conflicts. However, Egypt's goal is to achieve cooperation and create a water-sharing agreement with Ethiopia. The problem is that Ethiopia does not want to give up their dam control and is satisfied with the status quo, while Egypt is striving to create a situation where they both have something to gain from cooperation. Be it through threatening to invade Ethiopia and blow the dam up or through their use of international institutions to force Ethiopia into cooperation. In the end, the conflict continues as no cooperation agreement has been signed.

This is a study on the Indian government's use of mercantilism and imperialism in their policy choices in regards to the diminishing supply of sand. Because of this the study will revolve around the globally growing problem that is a sand shortage, and how the Indian government is preparing to handle it. What consequences the solutions have had and how different levels inside the government are working against each other. Then the rising phenomenon that is the Indian sand mafia will be analyzed, who are their partners and benefactors. How come they could emerge and what exactly is a sand mafia? These are some of the questions this thesis will answer

De humanitära interventionerna (HI) som genomfördes i slutet på 1990-talet gav upphov till en mängd diskussioner såväl som skapande skiljaktigheter mellan världens nationer. Detta hade sin grund i de bakslag som de genomdrivande insatserna resulterade i. Med hänsyn till detta ämnar denna studie till att ta reda på utfallen av de humanitära interventionerna i fallen Rwanda samt Kosovo.  Utöver detta är syftet att se över FN:s lärdomar av dessa unika fall och utöka förståelse. Med anledning av detta används en jämförande fallstudie med innehållsanalystik insats såväl som FN:s principer om förpliktelser, efterlevnad samt genomdrivandet som grund för det teoretiska ramverket. Först undersöks utvecklingen av både fallen fram till den tidpunkten för argumentationer av hur genomdrivandet skulle framföras. Vilket slutligen leder till de utfallen samt lärdomar som medfördes i takt med händelseförloppen av både fallen. Resultaten från denna analys kommer därför att ge en bredare översyn av humanitära interventioner såväl som hur väl FN följer sina principer i praktiken. Materialet som används i denna studie är publicerade FN resolutioner från säkerhetsrådet såväl som forskningsstudier gjorda av personer med expertis i detta område. Denna studie fann att utfallen av både Rwanda samt Kosovo ledde till bakslag såväl som konsekventa efterföljder. Där operationerna som genomdrevs hade felbedömt sammanhanget på hur allvarlig situationerna var i både fallen. Med åtanke på detta kan lärdomar från dessa operationer bli användbara i framtida interventioner.

Farming women have between the year 1950 and the present time had to fight hard to participate in the farming sector in Sweden to the same extent as men. There are old, gendered biases towards women who labour on farms by people both on and outside the farms. Farm labour has been considered a “man’s work” and women were better suited to perform household labour. However, women have been recognised as proper farmers and official owners in recent years. The thesis examines the changes over time for Swedish farming women regarding their economic activities, institutional changes, and social changes that have had an impact on them. The thesis highlights factors that hinder gender equality and empowerment on farms. It also highlights elements that empower women to further establish themselves in farming. Both statistical data which brings concreteness to the research and interviews with farming women which brings a narrative has been included in the research. The findings have been analysed with the reproductive labour theory and the concept of patriarchy.

This paper investigates gendered morbidity patterns by employing micro data derived from sicknessrecords and membership ledgers on working class men and women in the early 20th century Sweden.We find that the main reason for gendered morbidity differences - that woman faced fewer, butlonger sickness episodes than men – reflects gendered productive and reproductive activities. Mensuffered from the large number of work-place accidents as workers in the production sector, whilewomen faced major risks due to pregnancy, childbearing and related sickness. Women also sufferedmore from for diseases of the blood, diseases of the digestive & metabolic system and diseases thegenitourinary than men. Both men and women faced shorter, but longer, sickness episodes in urbanareas attributed to the underlying differences in morbidity causes during the epidemiologicaltransition.

The aim of this thesis is to partly get an overview of how financial market participants operating in Sweden complied to third article in the new Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) in forced by the EU and partly to investigate how financial market participants handle and navigate through the forced transparency, in the search of finding increased understanding to why the allocation of capital is not going fast enough toward sustainable economic activities. To reach this aim a content analysis was conducted on Swedish financial monetary institutions’s sustainability reports and institutional theory was used as the theoretical framework.The result showed that a small majority comply with the third article more extensively than what is forced by law and that financial market participants navigate through disclosure by rather presenting a positive than transparent picture of their role and impact on the planet and climate. The results indicate that the institutional pressure of sustainability reforms is still in the journey of being accepted and legitimized, and not fully implemented by the financial sector yet, which reveals perspectives of the absence of urgency to allocate capital towards sustainable economic activities. 

Even though violent attacks resulting in civilian fatalities can be seen as constituting failure on the part of the incumbent party to provide security to citizens, governments are not always punished electorally. Rather, at times, they appear to gain votes following terrorist attacks. Here we argue that political parties that can take advantage of their local presence to frame and communicate their narrative in response to terrorism, can better manage to avoid blame and even to emerge victorious in times of violent conflict. The AKP in Turkey is one such important example. Our statistical analyses of municipality-level aggregate election results show that the party not only maintained national incumbency, but even strengthened its predominance in the political system in the face of growing security threats. In municipalities where AKP controlled the local government and hence municipal resources, the party did not lose votes following terrorist attacks. This finding remains even when we consider past voting, regional variations, competitive districts, and ethnicity. Our argument that incumbents can avoid punishment through their capacity to reach out to voters at the local level is also supported by individual-level survey data and the comparison with neighboring municipalities. As such, we highlight how local government control can be consequential for national politics, including periods when security dominates the national agenda.

This article follows the discussion on female consumers in Swedish advertising journals and handbooks. The aim is to problematise the gendered aspects of Swedish consumer and early advertising history, by studying how the notion of the female consumer intersected with notions of social class, marital status and sexuality. The article also closes in on the persons who were invited to embody the consuming women and what kind of interests they represented. The article concludes that, from the start of the twentieth century, gender and class was prevalent in the advertising literature. The married woman was also from the start seen as the head of the consuming family. Therefore, reaching her through advertising became key for facilitating the relations between producer and consumer. With time, different women's organisations, the weekly press, and new theories of advertising from the US addressing the notion of 'Mrs Consumer' came to influence the Swedish advertising trade press. The result became the favouring of a certain kind of middle class, urban and rational kind of femininity, strongly connected to homemaking and women's roles in purchasing for the family. However, this femininity also paralleled notions of 'the flapper' and the professional woman.

This article demonstrates how Stockholm's reputation as the capital of sex attracted tourists and business alike during the sexual revolution. It follows the rise and decline of the ‘porn street’ Klara norra kyrkogata, and how it was liberally seen and handled by the police as a ‘free zone for pornography’. The article maps porn commerce on this street and in Stockholm city at large shortly before and after the legalization of pornography in 1971. For almost a decade, pornography was part of the accepted economy and could market business in ordinary newspapers. However, all of this changed with increasing resistance and protests against pornography from various groups in the 1970s and some re-regulations of porn in the 1980s. Then porn retailers were evicted, and Klara norra kyrkogata was cleaned up and reconstructed, instead turning into a ‘porn-free zone’ in the late 1980s, in accordance with outspoken political visions.

Purpose – By studying the marketing of advertising space, this paper aims to study how class, gender and region were portrayed in terms of economic considerations in adverts selling advertising space to potential advertisers. The paper studies how readers were discursively transformed into consumers in this material and how different consumer groups were depicted, divided and framed during Sweden’s early consumer culture. By doing so, the paper highlights the tensions between aiming at a mass audience, on the one hand, and striving to reach more and more specific consumer groups on the other hand.

Design/methodology/approach – Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are made in order to follow the changes of highlighted consumer groups in the ads. Intersectional analysis is used to see how notions of class and gender intersected during the analysed period.

Findings – The sectioning of the press is in the paper stressed as a prerequisite for market segmentation and the economic history of mass media is lifted as essential for understanding it. The gendering and classing of market segments were also based on how common interests were interpreted by political movements and their press forums. For surviving in the long run, however, the paper argues that the political press needed to commercialise their readerships to attract advertisers and survive economically.

Originality/value – The paper concludes that mass marketing and segmentation processes were in many senses parallel in the studied material. Statements of reaching all social classes diminished over time, but notions of the masses were prevalent in both the worker and the women categories. However, how advertisers choose between different media for their advertising campaigns or how they adopted different marketing methods towards different segments are beyond the scope of this paper.

The article studies commercial actors and advertisements in the Swedish weekly press in order to trace how the transformed gender roles during the Second World War were handled and negotiated in the commercial sphere. Two key dimensions of consumer society constitute the objects of study: 1) the weekly press’ and advertising industry’s actions and promotion of the role of female consumers during the war; and 2) how commercial advertisements represented female consumers. The weeklies we study, Svensk damtidning, Hemmets Veckotidning and Vecko-revyn reached national readerships and were directed towards households and especially women. The paper concludes that although women were described as essential to national defenseby keeping up home front morale, the war was largely absent in the advertisements. Instead, the latter tended to remind consumers of peacetime affluence and family-based gender ideals. This meant that while many women’s everyday lives changed dramatically as a consequence of national wartime mobilization, their desires were commercially channeled just as they had been in peacetime: toward looking after their appearance, caring for the household and choosing the right consumer goods.

Since the 1990s, a new model for market control organized through tripartite standards regimes (TSR), has expanded globally and affected most market exchanges through standard-setting, accreditation, and certification. This article investigates business-consumer relations under this regime, with a specific focus on the functions of accreditation and certification. In our case study of Sweden, a new picture of consumer protection under late capitalism evolves. Seeing it as a form of neoliberalization, the article uncovers a transition between two regimes of control; from one built on a potential conflict between consumer and business interests, to one based on the assumption that business interests are beneficial for all parties. Although business interest was formulated as pleasing the consumer-or the customer-by both certification firms and the Swedish Accreditation Authority, in practice consumer interest as something worth protecting was made abstract in the era of the TSR.

In line with recent research that regards the Second World War as a “defining moment” rather than a temporary disruption to the development of consumer societies, this paper explores how consumers were imagined in nonbelligerent Sweden. The main empirical source material consists of business-to-business advertisements from newspaper and magazine publishers aimed at potential advertisers. There, publishers portrayed their readers as suitable consumers, and, given that the division of the press constituted the main infrastructure for reaching different consumer groups, this is interpreted as a key to understanding market segmentation processes. The findings show how geographical, demographic, and psychological factors were considered in optimizing advertising influence and reaching classed and gendered target audiences. Although the segmentation process consolidated during the war, focusing on stable, large consumer groups, the imagined consumer also underwent fundamental changes, combating anxiety and despair through dreams of both future and present patriotic consumption.

This article highlights the transfers and practical uses of thecommercial knowledge of window dressing in early twentieth-century Sweden through the analysis of the professional careerand family business of Oscar Lundkvist, Swedish display pioneerand former window dresser in chief of the largest and firstSwedish department store,Nordiska Kompaniet. Building on richsource material including unique written and photographicdocuments from the Lundkvist family, educational material andtrade journals, we show how the innovative and spectacularbecame ordinary and mundane in retail praxis. We argue that theemergence and professionalization of window display broughtwith it the dissemination and trivialization of the same practice.By focusing on not only the most conspicuous aspects andcultural meanings of window displays but also on the materialsand competences involved, we explain how setting up thedisplays became an everyday commercial practice and how it waspositioned between advertising and retail as well as between theartistic and the commercial.

Könspolitiska nyckeltexter är en mångfacetterad introduktion till svensk genushistoria. Genom ett pärlband av originaltexter, från C.J.L. Almqvists roman Det går an 1839 till #metoouppropen 2017, ges en fördjupad förståelse av hur kön har diskuterats, politiserats och iscensatts under nästan 200 år. Varje nyckeltext är kommenterad och analyserad av en forskare.

Arbete, sexuella rättigheter, familjeliv, diskriminering, våld, försörjning, värnplikt, rösträtt, preventivmedel, skönhet och barnomsorg är några exempel på de många frågor som behandlas i boken, nu i omarbetad och utvidgad upplaga.

Official Development Assistance (ODA) to primary education has constituted a significant portion of Sweden’s ODA since the 1960s. Sweden is a strong advocate of aid to primary education and for many years, support to primary education was a priority across Sweden’s many partner countries. However, since at least the early 2000s ODA to primary education has seen a decline in the number of partner countries where this is a priority area and bilateral ODA to primary education has decreased as a share of total ODA. One possible explanation for this decline is the simultaneous rise of the so-called Results Agenda in Sweden’s ODA, characterised by an increasing focus on measuring results and managing aid efficiently. The purpose of this study is to explore to what extent the Results Agenda has influenced the decline in Sweden’s ODA to primary education since the early 2000s, by answering the following research question: “To what extent can the Results Agenda explain the decline of Sweden’s official development assistance to primary education since the early 2000s?”. 

The theoretical foundation of the study is the Results Agenda, based on research conducted by Therese Brolin and Janet Vähämäki on the Results Agenda in Sweden’s ODA. A case study design is applied, using qualitative elite interviews to gather empirical data. 

The results indicate that there seems to be a connection between the rise of the Results Agenda and the decline of Sweden’s ODA to primary education, however only in the number of partner countries where primary education is a key thematic priority and not in the total amount of ODA to education. The most conclusive result of the case study is that ODA to primary education has been redistributed from mainly bilateral ODA through public institutions in partner countries to multilateral ODA in order to increase efficiency and focus ODA on fewer thematic areas in fewer partner countries. 

• The report builds on two unique surveys of a group of European and Indian observers with deep insights into EU-India relations, as well as analyses of official documents to detail how EU member states engage with India on global issues and India’s response.

 • There is growing interest in cooperation with India on global issues, among the EU member states collectively and the member states individually. The current momentum is partly due to the changing circumstances and increased uncertainty in world affairs, and partly due to mutual perceptions of shared values. At the same time, there is also growing scholarly interest in EU-India relations. Analysis, however, has focused on German and French engagement with India, as well as that of the EU institutions, rather than the rest of the EU member states. 

• By examining the preferences and perspectives of a cross section of eight small and mediumsized EU member states, this report explores engagement with India and the EU member states through a wider lens. The authors categorise EU-India relations as a first and second circle. The first circle encompasses the EU institutions, France and Germany, while the second circle captures small and medium-sized EU member states.

• India engages with EU member states on a wide range of global issues, conducting diplomatic talks in different formats with different member states on a number of issues ranging from security and development policy to cybersecurity and renewable energy. Since 2014, the level of political attention paid by India to “second circle” member states has been almost as high as that paid to the major actors. Nonetheless, there are still variations among the member states and some manage to attract India’s attention better than others. There is also a broader trend for the member states studied to align their engagement with India’s agenda.

• While several factors foster cooperation on global issues, notably China’s growing global footprint, engagement is primarily driven by the quest for business opportunities and awareness of India’s global weight and influence. That said, a lack of both political priority and institutional capacity impede deeper ties.

• The report finds that some EU member states engage with India on global issues more through the EU Common Foreign and Security Policy than their own bilateral relationships. Given the opportunity to engage at both the EU level and in their bilateral relationships, EU member states tilt towards the EU level, whereas India tilts towards the bilateral level.

• There is untapped potential for second circle EU member states to engage with India on issues related to the digital age, such as 5G, Artificial Intelligence and cybersecurity. For demanding high-profile issues, such as human rights, the EU level remains the primary arena of engagement as the EU collectively is more influential than EU’s small and medium-sized member states individually.

• To realise the full potential of the EU-India strategic partnership, both the member states and India must act in a more coordinated manner and increase their parliamentary diplomacy. 

The authors are grateful for the insightful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts by Björn Jerdén and August Danielsson. They would also like to thank the consulted experts from the Europe India Research and Dialogue Network (EIRDN) for sharing their expertise. The authors consulted India experts affiliated with the Centre for European Policy Studies, Corvinus University of Budapest, Chatham House, Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Friends of Europe, German Marshall Fund, Institut français des relations internationales, Observer Research Foundation, Polish Institute of International Affairs, and Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik.

A case study research strategy and secondary and content analysis was adopted to investigate what blocked a comprehensive discourse from the agenda of Trident renewal from 2015 to 2016 and the constraints that blocked action. Trident renewal was a policy window, which is a critical fleeting opportunity to change the agenda. A comprehensive discourse raises the problem of the military industrial complex and links this problem to the solutions of general and complete disarmament (GCD) and conversion. Agendas change when problems, policies, and politics are coupled at policy windows. Results showed that conversion was available, but activities in the politics stream constrained it, and conversion was made more available and circulated than GCD, which was entirely absent as a solution. Despite this, the problem of the underlying military industrial complex was given very little visibility by the media. On the other hand, opponents to Trident renewal linked conversion not to the problem of the military industrial complex but to problems of declining military spending and conventional forces, in contravention of GCD. 

Despite its rising relevance, the cyber crisis is a largely unexplored phenomenon empirically and conceptually. This article suggests that cyber crises can be understood specifically as transboundary crises. Through the comparative analysis of two cases of cyber crises, Estonia 2007 and UK 2017, the study investigates whether the time gap and the difference in cyberattack type between the cases (untargeted ransom-ware vs. targeted DDoS) correlate with variation in transboundary crisis features and crisis management challenges during the performance of central crisis management tasks in the national settings of the cases. The analysis identifies some variation be-tween  the  cases  in  terms  of  transboundary  crisis  features  but  finds  that  the  cases  entailed  similar  prominent  crisis  management  challenges  during  the  performance  of  central  crisis  management  tasks.  Implications  are  discussed  in  terms  of  how  to  advance our understanding of cyber crises and the practical strategic management requirements they entail.

Large-scale cyber incidents have figured prominently in securitizing speech acts over the last decade. This thesis demonstrates how conceptualizations of cybersecurity as a public security problem connects to and shapes cybersecurity governance in national and international settings. It explores how theoretical lenses drawn from the securitization, riskification, crisis and socio-technical systems literatures can improve our understanding of the phenomena of large-scale cyber incidents, and how such incidents are interpreted by key actors. The thesis includes four articles comprising case studies which utilize in-depth interviews, text analysis and discourse analysis. The findings reveal a steady development towards an increasingly threat-based security logic in both national and international cyber policy settings. The case studies also highlight the volatile nature of malware proliferation, the tendency of collateral damage from directed cyberattacks, the transboundary characteristics of large-scale cyber incidents, and the central role of civil contingencies actors and the private sector in cybersecurity governance. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the increasing securitization and militarization of cyberspace. Overall, this thesis contributes to our understanding of how cybersecurity is constructed as a security problem in theory and practice, and it employs analytical approaches which facilitate the exploration of international cybersecurity along more than just traditional ‘hard’ security lines.

Despite an increasing scholarly interest in cyber-security issues, the phenomenon of large-scale cyber-crises affecting critical infrastructure is largely unexplored. While some characteristics of its consequence dynamics have been identified—prominently its transboundary features—the underlying conditions that allow such dynamics to unfold have not yet been thoroughly explored. This chapter aims to contribute to bridging this gap by applying the classical theoretical perspectives of Normal Accidents (NA) and High Reliability organisations (HRO) on the sociotechnical systems of modern critical infrastructure. It argues that NA characteristics (the combination of interactive complexity and tight coupling) can be found in multiple layers of critical infrastructure operations (technical, cognitive, organisational and macro). Implications are discussed in terms of its connection to transboundary crisis dynamics.

In a relatively short time, cybersecurity has risen to become one of the EU's security priorities. While the institutionalisation of EU-level cybersecurity capacities has been substantial since the first EU cybersecurity strategy was published, previous research has also identified resistance from member states to allow the EU to have more control over their cybersecurity activities. Despite a growing literature on EU cybersecurity governance, there are currently extensive gaps in the understanding of this tension. This study suggests that an explanatory factor can be found in the so-far overlooked dynamic of the relative prevalence of risk vs. threat-based security logics in the EU cybersecurity approach. By distinguishing between risk and threat-based logics in the development of the EU cybersecurity discourse over time, this study highlights a shift towards an increasing threat-based security logic in the EU cybersecurity approach. The identified development highlights securitising moves enacting to a larger extent than before objects and subjects of security traditionally associated with national security. The study identifies specific areas of member state contestation accompanying this shift and concludes with a discussion on the findings in relation to the development of the EU as a security actor in the wider international cybersecurity landscape.

This article draws on a comprehensive new data set of crisis management capacities at the European Union level to highlight key patterns in their development and use. Organised within the categories of detection, sense-making, decision-making, coordination, meaning-making, communication, and accountability, the data show considerable accumulation of capacities in detection and sense-making, while decision-making capacities lag behind. We find that most capacities are sector-oriented rather than cross-sectoral, and reside primarily within the European Commission rather than other EU institutions. Comparing the data to previous studies, we note that capacities overall are increasing and some are undergoing evolution; for example, horizon-scanning tools once limited to collecting information have increasingly been given an analytical, information enrichment function akin to sense-making.

El objetivo principal de este estudio fue identificar, describir, si-tuar y explorar los principales significados complementarios y contra-puestos atribuidos a la expansión de la soja, incluyendo sus idealesy supuestos subyacentes. Este enfoque constructivista social difieresustancialmente de investigaciones anteriores que, en la tradición po-sitivista, intentan únicamente “revelar” una “verdad objetiva” basadaen “hechos neutrales” sobre los diferentes aspectos de la expansión dela soja. Así, mientras que las áreas de estudio y las conclusiones de lasinvestigaciones previas fueron divergentes, todos afirmaron que suspropias conclusiones son “correctas” y que las conclusiones divergen-tes son “incorrectas”. Al conceptualizar la expansión de la soja en Uru-guay como un campo discursivo, este estudio no se pregunta qué es laexpansión de la soja actual sino que antes bien explora la dinámica desu (re)producción de significado.