Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Institutionen för globala studier

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/9824

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The processes, practices, and consequences of international ceasefire monitoring
(2025-09-10) Verjee, Aly
Third-party ceasefire monitoring is a common conflict response intervention generally correlated with ceasefire durability. However, how ceasefire monitoring’s routine practices contribute to ceasefire compliance and noncompliance is little understood. This dissertation aims to theorize and explain how third-party ceasefire monitoring influences, or seeks to influence, the behaviours of conflict parties in civil wars. Challenging the conventional view that ceasefire monitoring invariably promotes peace, this study develops a practice-orientated, mechanism-based approach to explain the effects of monitoring. Drawing on over 100 interviews, archival research, and document analysis from four different contexts—Kosovo, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Ukraine—this study examines monitors’ practices of reporting, public speech, and remote sensing. The research takes a qualitative, abductive, and inductive approach, integrating insights from bounded rationalism, practice theory, discourse analysis, and surveillance studies. Identifying a range of causal mechanisms, the study shows that ceasefire monitoring can both constrain and provoke conflict actors. These mechanisms—such as how ceasefire monitoring provides conflict parties with new signalling options, establishes expectations of conflict parties, and enables conflict party resistance to surveillance—recur across conflict contexts. By nuancing understandings of how monitoring operates in practice, this study contributes to peace and conflict studies by showing how monitoring can produce both ceasefire compliance as well as ceasefire noncompliance. Going beyond the generally positive, sometimes idealized, understanding of monitoring interventions, the study shows that monitoring brings with it both risks and unintended consequences.
How to think differently about difference: convivialities and contentions in the postmigration condition
(2025-05-21) Askersjö, Signe
In the Swedish integration debate, difference is often framed as an inevitable problem. This notion has become a taken-for-granted truth, echoing across political and social spheres. As a result, the debate frequently reinforces a rigid divide between so-called ‘natives’ and ‘migrants’. This thesis problematises that framing by proposing a novel approach to understanding how difference and sameness are socially produced, using the concept of the postmigration condition as its analytical lens. By utilising the postmigration concept, the thesis explores how difference and sameness are experienced in contentious and convivial ways and thereby challenges normative assumptions about what constitutes differences and sameness, while also exploring how the obsession with migration intersects with exclusion and racism. The thesis investigates these dynamics through ethnographic fieldwork at a large DIY store in Sweden. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork amongst the employees, the thesis moves away from ideas about inevitable conflicts or specific cemented categories as it delves into how convivialities and contentions are evoked and experienced in everyday life. This thesis revisits classical anthropological themes—such as kinship, solidarity, humour, and language—and situates them within the postmigration condition to rethink difference and sameness. With the thesis, I contribute to ethnographic practices that are attuned to fluid social categories. As such, this thesis offers theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to an understanding of how to think differently about difference and sameness. The primary contribution of this thesis is in its rethinking of the entrenched narrative of “problematic integration” (and migration) in Sweden, by bringing forward alternative, often overlooked, narratives.
Infrastructural care: Repairing railway trains, maintaining Mumbai's lifeline
(2025-05-09) Chakraborty, Proshant
Mumbai’s suburban railway trains are one of the oldest, most densely-packed, and widely-used public transport networks in the world. These trains—colloquially known as local trains or Mumbai locals, and technically as electric multiple unit (EMU) rakes—carry around 8 million commuters and operate more than 3,000 services every day. Mumbai’s local trains provide vital connectivity between the Island City, its populated inner suburbs, and the distant peripheries of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. For this reason, local trains are known as Mumbai’s lifeline. However, these trains face banal and spectacular forms of failure and breakdown and, therefore, require constant repair and maintenance—activities that span workshops, car sheds, railway lines, and even moving trains. This thesis looks at how the repair and maintenance of local trains not only involves fixing broken objects or technical systems, but also entails caring for the wider suburban network at large, including how millions of commuters continue to access cheap and reliable means of transport. Between 2021 and 2022, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with engineers and workers at one of the oldest car sheds in the city’s railway network, where I followed what they called preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance. Drawing on the anthropology of infrastructure, STS, feminist technoscience, repair studies, and more-than-human perspectives, I use infrastructural care as the central analytic framework to explore engineers and workers’ reparative interventions and maintenance practices. The analytic framework of infrastructural care opens up ways to uncover causal mechanisms and pathways that link diverse forms of sociotechnical engagements and more-than-human relations, which seek to restore form and function, with the production and sustenance of urban spatiotemporal rhythms generated by public transport networks. In doing so, this thesis productively engages with scholarship on repair and maintenance, as well as ethnographies of urban infrastructure.
The Living Papyrus: Ritual, Cosmology and Immanent Divinity among the Sihanaka of Madagascar
(2025-04-17) Norge, Anders
This thesis in historical anthropology of religion examines ritual and cosmology among the Sihanaka of Madagascar. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the rizicultural community of Anororo (2015–2022) and drawing on recent theoretical developments in the study of religion, it explores the immanentism of Sihanaka cosmology—how hasina, a divine power immanent to the cosmos, sustains life and underpins both social and agricultural prosperity. At the apex of the Sihanaka ritual cycle stands Feraomby, a communal ritual in which the royal hasina of the immortal ruler Ndrianampanjaka is renewed, sustaining fertility and abundance. As this ritual illustrates, hasina is an invisible yet workable substance—fundamentally unknowable, yet accumulated, preserved, and transmitted through the gathering of potent plants, shrine reconstruction and water aspersion. Comparable to Polynesian mana and Indonesian semangat,hasina does not belong to a transcendent otherworld; it is an immanent divinity embedded in the cosmos, differentiating into divinities (zanahary) and mediated through ritual practice. Offering the first comprehensive anthropological study of Sihanaka society in Western scholarship, this thesis addresses a significant gap in Malagasy studies. By tracing historical trajectories—from Austronesian antecedents to Indic, Islamic, and Christian influences, and the conquests and colonisation by Sakalava, Merina and the French—it reveals how Sihanaka traditions have continuously absorbed external elements while maintaining an immanentist framework. Engaging with the theory of immanentism and transcendentalism developed by Marshall Sahlins and Alan Strathern, it provides a rare ethnographic case of an enduring immanentist tradition that has persisted despite extensive exposure to transcendentalist influences.
The politics of fish as food: sustaining the unsustainable
(2025-03-31) Vesterberg, Viktor
In this compilation thesis Viktor Vesterberg explores the politics surrounding the Swedish seafood system as they manifest in different contexts and at different levels in the Swedish society. Through an interdisciplinary Environmental Social Science approach that addresses the complexities of human- environmental relations, the politics of fish as food and the political rationalities that underpin them are investigated. In three case studies and four articles the politics that shape the Swedish seafood system are described and analysed; from the national level policy sphere to the practices of fishers, cooks and others that are trying to imagine a different seafood system. Through multiple methods that include policy analysis, ethnography as well as participant and action research oriented approaches this thesis engages with the interrelated questions of why we have a seafood system that undermines sustainable human-nature relationships, and how we can work to support a different system. Food is explored as an arena where we can witness how the politics of the dominant food system and fisheries management play out, but also as a point of resistance towards their consequences for communities, ecologies and culinary culture and heritage. Through close co-operation with stakeholders in the seafood system, such as fishers, cooks and cultural heritage organisations, this thesis contributes with knowledge on how researchers can work to establish communities of concern that further a seafood system that is attuned to thriving ecologies and communities, and one that produces diverse and vibrant experiences centered around fish as food.
The (im)possibility of being a peasant: Narratives and lived experiences of the avocado boom in Cajamarca, Colombia
(2025-03-05) Esguerra Rezk, Juanita
Over the past decade, avocados have become a fashionable fruit with a rising demand in global markets and Colombia has emerged as a major exporter worldwide. This thesis delves into the interrelated sociocultural, economic and ecologic transformations caused by the avocado boom taking the reader all the way to the small town of Cajamarca in the Colombian Andes, where this fruit is cultivated by both smallholder peasants in their farms and landless peasant workers in large plantations. Throughout the research, the protagonists of these stories deliberately self-identify as peasants, as this category captures the long and rich histories of social struggle that shape how they understand themselves. Guided by the research question “How does the engagement of peasants with the avocado boom in Cajamarca transform their identities and subjectivities?”, this work is grounded in post-structural feminist political ecology, critical agrarian studies and discussions on coloniality. It draws from narrative interviews and participant observation to explore three different, yet interrelated dimensions of peasants’ lives: their livelihood trajectories, the divisions of labor throughout the avocado crop cycle and their embodied experiences, and the environmental impacts of the boom. The thesis shows that although peasants are continuously hailed into occupying subject positions that facilitate the expansion of the boom, they strive to maintain their peasant identity and struggle to live a life they consider fulfilling –sometimes openly resisting, sometimes negotiating, and other times reproducing the terms of their subjectivation. The findings also reveal that the boom generates contradictory yet inter-dependent processes of integration (the articulation of a unified, idealized, and nostalgic collective identity) and differentiation (the reproduction of gender and class differences) of the peasantry. Ultimately, the thesis shows that this differentiation does not result in an erasure of peasants’ collective identity. Rather, it places peasants in different positions and endows them with different resources in their struggle for achieving the same idealized agrarian aspirations.
Resisting the Return of Military Rule - Coalition Building, Armed Struggle and Governance by Myanmar’s Spring Revolution Movement
(2024-11-05) Vrieze, Paul
Social movements are a powerful form of collective struggle for democratic change that often involves a strategy of nonviolence. When met with harsh repression protest movements can escalate to armed resistance, while movements may also create governance to replace authoritarian rule over civilian populations. What prompts movements to go beyond protests and how they develop different contention strategies remains, however, largely underexamined. Building on Contentious Politics and Social Movements studies, this thesis provides insights into these issues by tracing the key actors, turning points and processes in the development of Myanmar’s Spring Revolution. This protest movement emerged after the 2021 military coup ousted the National League for Democracy (NLD) government, ending a decade-long democratic opening. Based primarily on extensive original interviews, the thesis includes four articles that analyze the formation of the movement’s ethnically diverse coalition, its escalation to an armed uprising, and its establishment of a National Unity Government and local governance. The thesis found the movement united new and established opposition actors across Myanmar, including the NLD and existing ethnic resistance organizations, by channeling widespread outrage and framing an inclusive collective identity around political ideas, experiences and civil society structures that developed during the opening. Brutal junta repression prompted the movement to strengthen coalition cooperation, legitimize armed resistance and mobilize resources across its networks for an uprising. The movement also created an important shared political space for coalition actors to establish governance systems, though negotiating a new government was challenging and governance developed mostly at regional level. Overall, the thesis’ insights contribute to theory on how a movement’s socio-political context influences mobilization campaigns. As it argues that recent democratization supports the building of a broad movement with the resources to launch different strategies against the return of repression, which may include armed resistance. The thesis helps develop theory on movement escalation by showing how a diverse coalition can unite and combine resources to mount armed resistance, a trajectory that remains poorly understood as movements often fragment during escalation. The thesis also deepens our understanding of the establishment of authority and governance by armed resistance organizations, as it shows how a protest movement can drive such political developments and unite diverse resistance forces in an emergent form of statehood.
The Aftermath of Mass Starvation: Rethinking the Politics of Accountability for and Commemoration of Famines in Africa
(2024-10-23) Tefera, Fisseha Fantahun
Famines have a deep socio-economic and political impact on states and societies and have recurrently occurred in many African countries. The aftermath of famines draws attention to important questions about accountability and memorialization, which have not been adequately explored in academic research. This thesis studies how famines are accounted for (or not) and how they are integrated into (or excluded from) state-led commemorative work in Africa. By examining six countries that have experienced major famines since the period of independence (Nigeria, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo), the thesis aims to gain a deeper understanding of how African countries address past famines through transitional justice processes and official commemorative efforts. Various popular beliefs, misconceptions, and political sensitivities affect both the understanding of famines and the pursuit of accountability and commemoration in their aftermath. By framing famines as violence, this thesis draws attention to their preventability and the role of human action or inaction in causing them. The thesis finds that there is a noticeable exclusion of famines from transitional justice processes and official state-led commemorative efforts in the studied countries despite their profound impact. While transitional justice mechanisms have become a common method for addressing accountability for past violence, famines remain marginalized, particularly in legal mechanisms such as trials. Even where famines were directly linked to armed conflicts, attempts to investigate famine-related cases often failed to result in legal accountability in the form of prosecution. Although human rights advocates have attempted to push for famine accountability, the dominant focus of transitional justice remained on direct forms of violence. Furthermore, official state commemorations tend to neglect famines, favoring the commemoration of past violence that supports the national or group identity construction efforts of the state and the political legitimacy of those in power. However, the memories of famines persist within society through oral traditions, artistic expressions, and digital platforms, where political actors invoke the memory of past famines on social media to engage in current political contestations.
Resource Stress and Violent Conflicts in Borderlands: Toward A Mechanism-Oriented Approach
(2024-09-19) Ashagrie, Bizusew Mersha
This thesis explores how socio-ecological processes induced by resource stress in borderland contexts contribute to the dynamics of violent conflict. It adopts an actor-focused and context-sensitive approach to break down these processes into analytically smaller components through the theoretical lens of mechanisms. In doing so, the thesis responds to the growing call within the environmental conflict research field to reorient the analytical focus toward causal mechanisms in order to better understand the relationship between resource stress and violent conflicts. The study uses the Ethiopia-Kenya borderland as a case study and examines how the construction of Gibe cascading dams by the Ethiopian state and climate change have jointly impacted the Turkana (Kenya) and Dassenech (Ethiopia) borderland communities. The analysis reveals that these combined resource stressors have led the Turkana and Dassenech borderland communities to experience significant declines in flood-retreat agricultural output, fishery yields, and livestock productivity. Traditional adaptation strategies, such as fluid movement between livelihood systems and extensive herding mobility, have proven inadequate under these new pressures. Additionally, traditional and informal institutional arrangements for resource sharing and conflict resolution have struggled to cope effectively with the increased stress. Collectively, these processes have exacerbated cross-border competition and violent conflicts between the Dassenech and Turkana communities. The thesis contributes to the broader environmental conflict research field in several ways. First, it identifies several case-specific mechanisms that substantiate existing conceptually aggregated understanding of them and sheds light on new ones. Second, by showing these mechanisms interact and produce cascading effects, the thesis underscores the need to consider interactions between mechanisms within the broader literature. Third, the thesis offers empirical insights related to borderland contexts by demonstrating how socio-ecological, governance, economic, and security conditions in borderland areas intersect with resource stress and violent conflict. Fourth, the thesis demonstrates the usefulness of actor-focused, context-sensitive, and mechanism-oriented approaches in furthering our understanding of the relationship between resource stress and violent conflict. Fifth, by focusing on the Omo-Turkana Basin's recent socio-ecological transformations and their broader societal implications, the study provides original data and analysis from the perspectives of the affected communities on the impact of these changes on the conflict dynamics between the borderland communities of Ethiopia and Kenya.
Gendered Dynamics of Child Protection in UN Peacekeeping
(2024-04-24) Johnson, Dustin
Since the mid-1990s, the United Nations (UN) has developed a substantial chil-dren and armed conflict (CAAC) agenda, aimed at preventing and responding to the Six Grave Violations of children’s rights: killing and maiming, child soldier-ing, abductions, sexual violence, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian access. UN Peacekeeping missions, particularly its large multi-di-mensional missions that are or were deployed across five central African states, are important implementers of this agenda through their child protection practices. These practices depend on and reproduce certain conceptions of childhood and assumptions about gender dynamics between peacekeepers and children which this thesis investigates. In this thesis I analyze child protection guidance documents including policies, training materials, and manuals, and interviews with peacekeepers and humanitar-ian workers to understand how gender, childhood, and protection are constructed through UN peacekeeping child protection practices. I do this through a compila-tion of four journal articles, which discuss how UN documents portray children and gender dynamics in child protection, how gendered subject positions of women peacekeepers are produced and challenged through community engage-ment practices, tensions between the complexities of children’s agency during war versus how it is understood by peacekeepers, and the logics of protection that help structure child protection. Three key aspects of child protection in UN peacekeeping were illuminated in this analysis. First, logics of protection that inform the portrayals of and relationships between peacekeepers, children, and threats to children primarily rely on gendered stereotypes about peacekeepers and conceptions of children as only vulnerable and lacking agency, though there are shifts and implicit disruptions in these and more explicit challenges to these logics from peacekeepers themselves. Second, gen-dered subject positions of peacekeepers also draw on these stereotypes and as-sumptions, but peacekeepers’ experiences of the complexities of gender dynamics in child protection and shifts in UN policy indicate openings for these to be trans-formed. Third, children continue to be understood in limited and narrow ways, focused on their vulnerability and without acknowledgement of their agency, by peacekeepers and in UN policy, which may foreclose more effective practices for preventing harm to children. Taken together, this analysis helps to reveal some of the intricacies of how gender, childhood, and conceptions of protection interact in peacekeeping practice.
The martial politics of biodiversity protection: Wildlife conservation practices in northern Kenya
(2023-06-08) van der Hoeven, Sara
Wildlife conservation is entangled with broader conflict dynamics in pastoral and semi-arid northern Kenya and tackles livestock theft, road banditry and inter-communal conflict. The thesis aims to better understand this ‘war by conservation’, in which conservation and military-like practices address and tie into wider security issues. What is the role of ‘the military’ here, and how are such practices different from dynamics thus far explored in green militarisation literature? This dissertation further develops the concept of martial politics as a process of ordering through war-like relations, technologies and knowledge. It challenges the liberal myth that conservation is a ‘civilian’ space that is temporarily ‘militarised’ to solve the extinction crisis and argues that there is no peaceful domestic order to return to. The thesis draws on 64 interviews and analyses policy documents, legislation and National Assembly debates. The three empirical chapters on community conservation, rangers and guns, first, demonstrate conservation’s historical interlinkage with military endeavours. Colonial counterinsurgency and anti-poaching operations shaped each other, and the historic uneven flow of guns constructed social differences and hierarchies which fed into national governments perceiving and treating pastoralists as a ‘security problem’. Second, the chapters analyse various contemporary war-by-conservation practices, such as anti-livestock theft. Rangers occupy ambiguous positions in-between social categories like ‘civilian’-‘military’ and ‘public’-‘private’, and are integrated into the state security sector as Police Reservists, while conservancies also herald rangers as community-based (civil) conservation actors in the (threat of the) use of force. Additionally, Western donors draw on a conservation-security nexus to finance conservation and open possibilities to sponsor conservation through security, rather than environmental funds. Third, the thesis examines how the above practices order society and nature. Conservancies carve out political power by drawing on the language and the idea of the state, whereby war-by-conservation practices reorder power relations amongst conservancy residents, regional elites, County governments and the state. The thesis demonstrates the usefulness of martial politics as the contingent ordering of politics, in which dichotomies and social categories are filled with meanings that help establish social order.
Building futures through Refugee Education: Aspirations, Navigation, and (Non- )citizenship
(2023-05-23) Aden, Hassan
This study explores how Somali secondary school and graduate-level youth in Kenya’s Dadaab camps attempt to build their futures through education, despite challenges posed by their non-citizen status. Using ethnographic data, the study specifically analyses the educational journeys, aspirations, and experiences of these refugee youth, shedding light on the everyday practices and dynamic strategies they employ to pursue their goals and manage obstacles. The study demonstrates how secondary school youth actively pursue educational aspirations, which they believe can enable them to exit the camps and potentially overcome their non-citizen status – through routes such as the resettlement-based scholarships for post-secondary education in Canada. Anchoring in their hopes in education, these students leverage various social resources, networks, and strategies to cope with challenges facing their education and aspirations, while simultaneously reflecting on various pathways to navigate post-graduation crossroads. Graduate-level youth, faced with limited opportunities, often adjust their aspirations to align with the available options to move forward, such as scholarships or incentive- (as opposed to wage-) paying jobs in the camps. More and more graduate youth opt to return to Somalia in seek of better employment opportunities, despite the potential security risks. The study also underscores the intergenerational solidarity and support system that emerge as academically successful refugee youth establish and manage nationally accredited schools, significantly contributing to students’ performance in national exams and the quality of education overall. By examining refugee youths’ enterprise of future-building through education within the context of long-term camps –characterised by perpetual precarity and uncertainty due to inhabitants’ exclusion from citizenship rights, freedoms, and advantages – this study provides theoretical insights into the complex and dynamic interplay among aspirations, navigational strategies, and non-citizenship status.
Working towards Modernity. Migration and Skills Development at the Frontiers of Racial Capitalism in Tunisia
(2023-05-02) Jung, Alexander
In the wake of the political salience of migration, projects that target employability and/or entrepreneurial thinking have become important components of European development interventions that address ‘irregular’ migration in Tunisia and elsewhere in recent years. Working towards Modernity investigates the rationales behind and consequences of such skills development projects. To this end, this dissertation draws on interviews with donors and implementing organisations as well as documents to analyse the implementation of fifteen skills development projects funded by European donors in Tunisia. In doing so, this dissertation reveals that these projects do not simply aim to prevent Tunisian migration. Instead, being aware of the limitations of using development to reduce migration, stakeholders promote an individualised idea of development in Tunisia and hold out the prospect of selective mobilities to Europe. More specifically, these projects circulate ideologies of (soft) skills and work ethic as signifiers of modernity. These allow for striking a balance between demands to prevent migration, which have shaped European political and public debates, and the interests of private companies in their search for labour and new markets. In unpacking the material and ideological interests underpinning these projects, this dissertation argues that migration and development interventions reproduce structures of racial capitalism. This involves an articulation of race that drives calls to exclude racialised subjects as well as capitalism’s reliance on the reproduction of racialised hierarchies. Yet, given that Europe needs to uphold a liberal self-image, (soft) skills and work ethic ideologies become important signifiers of modernity that exclude subjects on the grounds of seemingly apolitical market logics. Ultimately, these projects reproduce Europe as a self-proclaimed container of modernity that is committed to liberal values and maintain a racialised liberal order which extends rights to a few selected subjects, while denying them to most others.
Regional citizenship regimes: Comparing ECOWAS and ASEAN
(2023-03-28) Weinrich, Amalie Ravn
This thesis investigates the relationship between citizenship and regional organisations in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Specifically, it studies variation in regional citizenship regimes, how regional actors interpret the notion of regional citizenship, and what these variations and interpretations mean for our understanding of regional citizenship regimes. The thesis takes a qualitative, comparative case study approach and draws on empirical data from official documents and 49 semi-structured interviews conducted with ASEAN and ECOWAS officials and staff from non-governmental organisations. The study is guided by a four-tired concept of citizenship regime that provides the analytical framework for the analysis and comparison of a legal citizenship regime (ECOWAS) and a non-legal citizenship regime (ASEAN). The study is motivated by the increasing development and regulation of citizenship by regional organisations which create a new, ‘added-on’ membership status beyond national citizenship. As intra-regional movement is vast within many regions, these new citizenship statuses impact the lives of millions of people. In spite of their increasing importance, there is little research on regional citizenship regimes outside of the European Union (EU). The EU-dominance results in limited attention to informal and legally non-binding forms of regional citizenship and, thus, a limited understanding of the ways in which these forms of regional membership shape the formation of regional citizenship regimes. The study presents three important findings: first, a high degree of legalisation is not a necessity for regional citizenship regimes. Second, even in cases where regional citizenship regimes can be characterised as having a higher degree of legalisation, other aspects, notably those that touching on identity and belonging, are considered equally important by those designing the regimes. Third, the level of socio-economic development in a region has a direct impact on how regional citizenship regimes are constructed. Consequently, this thesis makes a series of contributions which advance our understanding of regional citizenship regimes by illustrating the need for revising the criteria for what we consider a citizenship regime. It also provides a rare, in-depth comparative account of the assumptions upon which regional organisations base their citizenship regimes. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of the ways in which political realities shape institutional design and citizenship policies in West Africa and Southeast Asia.
Forest Governance: Gendered Institutions, Practices, and Resource Struggles in Burkina Faso
(2022-12-08) Friman, Jenny
This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of forest governance and practices in rural Burkina Faso. Approximately, three billion people worldwide rely on trees for their everyday life. In West Africa, women, are often responsible for collecting tree resources such as firewood, edible leaves, and fruits. Trees also provide valuable income, especially for the poorest. NGOs, supranational organizations, and states have promoted and supported decentralized forest institutions to make local communities manage forests and take a share in the benefits and income. This study asks why institutional forestry frameworks so often provide unexpected and adverse social and ecological outcomes by exploring forest users’ navigation and struggles to access firewood and shea. To meet the objective to analyze the interrelations between institutions, gendered power relations, and forest use, the study develops a theoretical framework for analyzing forest governance. Forest governance is approached as structured by, and structuring, the gendered power relations of subjectivities, divisions of labor, access and control relations, and institutions. With an ethnographic approach, the data have been collected using various methods, such as structured observations, semi-structured interviews, and focus-group discussions, primarily in the villages of Boessen and Tonogo. Overall, this study develops an understanding of how formal forest governance arrangements reinforce gender inequality and marginalization in Boessen and Tonogo. Gendered power relations that are embedded in informal and formal forest institutions form unequal opportunities to access and control firewood and shea. Forest governance arrangements reinforce feminized labor norms of cutting and transporting wood to impede over-harvesting and exclude women in forest management arrangements. The findings show how forest governance arrangements, in combination with the lack of available deadwood, tend to situate women at continuous risk of being punished for illegal forest practices and add extra work burden. The study moreover shows that uneven power relations at the household level and the increased value of shea have increased male harvesting and control of the shea kernel and profits. With that, men challenge the notion of the product as a feminine resource and rearrange masculinity norms.
Security Controversies along the LAPSSET Infrastructure Corridor in Kenya
(2022-11-23) Kilaka, Benard Musembi
This Ph.D. thesis accounts for the changing political relations between different actors in northern Kenya through a focus on controversies emerging from the securing of the LAPS-SET mega project. Through the controversies, the thesis provides a useful lens for understanding how state authority becomes visible in areas with limited state presence and how different actors navigate the new reality. As the thesis shows, efforts by the national government and private actors to secure key components of the infrastructure project, such as the oil fields in Turkana and the Lamu Port, have elicited mixed reactions due to the adverse implications of the security practices on people’s livelihoods, dignity, and public security, amongst others. Therefore, this thesis examines the different security practices around the project. Furthermore, it analyses the different controversies that such practices generate and how they are resolved (or not). Since the project is still under construction, the thesis focuses on the Lamu Port and the oil sites in Turkana, where the controversies are, so far, the most visible. Theoretically, this study draws inspiration from scholarly works on the politics of infrastructure in diverse fields, such as International Relations, Political Theory, Science and Technology Studies, and Anthropology. Moreover, this thesis pursues a practise-based approach and therefore puts practices in the foreground. In analysing the controversies emerging from the security practices around components of the LAPSSET project, the thesis draws inspiration from pragmatic sociology and critical institutionalism, which present a useful framework for understanding how different actors react and interact during periods of uncertainty. To understand how the controversies play out and how they are reconfiguring political relations between different actors in Northern Kenya, this thesis draws on insights from community members in Turkana and Lamu, civil society activists, national and county government officials, and employees of private commercial companies, who are, in one way or another, involved with the controversies tied to security practices around the LAPSSET project. The thesis relied on empirical material collected during a fieldwork exercise in Ken-ya (Lamu, Turkana, Mombasa, and Nairobi) in 2018, 2019, and 2021.
Förändring och kontinuitet: Giftermål, släktskap, identitet och generationsskiften i den assyriska diasporan
(2022-11-16) Garis Guttman, Maryam Maria; Guttman, Maryam
Denna avhandling undersöker uppfattningar om släktskap och giftermål bland assyrier i Sverige, i relation till gruppens diasporaidentitet. Den tar sitt avstamp i historiska processer under mitten av 1970- talet vilka tenderar påverka ungdomars vardagsliv för att sedan fokusera på hur en ny syn på kategorin ungdom och normalitet tar form. Därefter ringas ungdomars uppfattning om giftermålstraditioner och släktskapsrelationer in, men också hur de ser på sin sociala och etniska identitet. Syftet med avhandlingen är att kasta ljus över sociokulturella förändringar bland assyrier i Sverige och deras innebörd för den enskilda individen men också för gruppen som helhet. I förståelsen av förändringarnas omfattning har utgångspunkten varit i parallella processer som inte är helt oberoende av varandra, nämligen hur synen på släktskap, giftermål och ungdom i mötet med det svenska samhället har tolkats och omtolkats och därigenom fått annorlunda innehåll och innebörd. Den relevans giftermålet och släktskapet hade i hemlandet skiljer sig i många avseenden från den betydelse dessa institutioner kommit att få i Sverige. Äktenskapet kännetecknas inte längre av tidiga och arrangerade giftermål och patriarkatet som ideal håller på att omvärderas av många i den yngre generationen. Den etnoreligiöst baserade endogaminormen har skiftat i Sverige och håller på att luckras upp, då dess betydelse för reproduktion av religiös och/eller etnisk tillhörighet inte är lika viktig bland en del unga medlemmar. På liknande sätt har synen på ungdom bland assyrier förändrats och anpassats till de förhållanden som råder i Sverige, processer som ungdomar sedan ankomsten till Sverige varit med och påverkat i en viss riktning. Det organiserade inhemska föreningslivet inom gruppen öppnade under gruppens första tid nya möjligheter för ungdomar i allmänhet att på ett konstruktivt sätt bryta mot vissa normer utan större konsekvenser, till exempel att inte vilja gifta sig med den av föräldrarna utvalde. Många föräldrar fick en ny konkurrent som de inledningsvis försökte bekämpa men som de fortsättningsvis kom att betrakta som komplement i vägledning av de unga. Från omkring 2010 och framåt har familjen, primärt kärnfamiljen, återigen kommit att spela större roll än föreningen i ungdomarnas liv och svenskfödda ungdomar håller på att förhandla om föräktenskapliga förhållanden och annat som begränsar deras frihet. Familjen anses stå dels mellan individ och kollektiv, dels mellan det svenska samhället och det assyriska kollektivet. Utifrån att det ställs krav på familjen från dessa skilda håll har den fått en ambivalent funktion i Sverige: å ena sidan förväntas den att upprätthålla kulturella normer och ideal och å andra sidan förväntas familjen från både ”svenskt” håll och från deras barn att visa förståelse och acceptans för sina barns uppväxt i det svenska samhället och det assyriska kollektivet. Avhandlingen visar hur familjens roll skiftat över tid och successivt övergått ifrån att vara en ”traditionsbärande” till att vara en ”förändringsvänlig” institution, präglad av bilaterala släktskapsband. Därtill praktiserar många assyrier svenska traditioner som exempelvis kulturella och religiösa högtider på sitt eget sätt, i vad som skulle kunna beskrivas som ”mixkultur”. Allt fler börjar också i vissa sammanhang att identifiera sig som svensk-assyrier. Alla dessa kulturella förändringsprocesser har lett till en förändrad syn på den etniska och sociala identiteten. Vilken aspekt av dessa identiteter som lyfts fram beror på inbördes relationer i varje given situation. Nyckelord: Socialantropologi, assyrier, bilateral, diaspora, dubbelidentitet, endogami, familj, förändring, giftermål, ideal, kontinuitet, normer, patrilinjär, patriarkala traditioner, släktskap, svensk-assyrier, svenskar, ungdom
The Greatest Scam: Network Marketing and the Economization of Everyday Life in the United States
(2022-10-26) Kristiansen, Mathias
This thesis examines how neoliberalism has penetrated the everyday life of middle-class Americans, leading to new forms of living and new collective understandings of the capitalist economic order. In order to understand how neoliberalism has penetrated the everyday life of middle-class Americans, I conducted one year of ethnographic fieldwork among people participating in network marketing, a form of sales that also includes the recruitment of additional salespeople – what is known as building a network. Network marketers do not receive a salary or direct commission; they generate income through recruitment of customers and salespeople. This structure encourages network marketers to rethink their social relationships in financial terms, reframing their personal connections as opportunities to earn money. Network marketing is a particularly strong case to illustrate neoliberalism in the United States because it epitomizes core tenets of neoliberalism like individual responsibility and entrepreneurialism, while also illuminating how a financial logic has replaced employment as the ideal pathway to middle-class life. This is emerging as part of the large-scale economic transformation from post-war regulated capitalism to neoliberal capitalism which has created intense economic insecurity and inequality for many people in the United States. I introduce a framework called the neoliberal economization of everyday life to analyze how mundane aspects of daily life – social encounters, routines, and modes of self-representation – become saturated with a capitalist economic logic. I demonstrate how the economization of everyday life naturalizes economic inequality and fosters social relationships dictated by a capitalist logic, which limits other non- economic aspects of human life that bind people together.
The intergovernmental epistemologies of soil and land degradation
(2022-09-28) De Donà, Matteo
The role of science and scientific advice is crucial in global environmental governance. This thesis investigates this role by focusing on the practices and framings of the relationship between scientific advice and policy making in the United Nations (UN) context and by accounting for the agency and influence of relevant actors (member states, scientists, international bureaucracies) in these dynamics. Introducing new analytical concepts such as intergovernmental epistemologies, the thesis problematizes the “science–policy bridging” imperative that dominates the UN official discourse. The overarching argument made in the thesis is that the diverging knowledge-ways and political cultures existing across UN member states make the goal of bridging science and policy unattainable at the global level. Arguing that this science–policy bridging discourse is misdirected, I claim that efforts within intergovernmental environmental fora should be concentrated on bridging cultures and worldviews instead. By unearthing the performative dimensions of how diverging epistemic claims about soil and land degradation are understood, institutionalized and negotiated at the international level, the concept of intergovernmental epistemologies corroborates the argument that the political tensions emerging in relevant UN fora are strongly impacted by culturally specific ways of making sense of environmental issues. Theoretically, the thesis contributes to the interdisciplinary field of environmental social science (ESS) by developing a dialogue between the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and international relations (IR), claiming that these two social science traditions are complementary. As STS directs its attention to performative agency and epistemic aspects, IR problematizes power relations as well as the political weight of the actors operating in the international environmental governance sphere. Methodologically, the study adopts a comparative research design, relying on participant observation, elite interviews and qualitative content analysis. Thematically, the thesis focuses on the under-researched issue-area of soil and land degradation, comparing two cases of science–policy interplay within the UN system: the Science-Policy Interface (SPI) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (ITPS) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Even flows and deferred lives: The logistification of migrant settlement in Sweden
(2022-09-14) Rogat, Mauricio
In 2016, rebuilt containers and barracks accommodating so-called ‘newly arrived immigrants’ started to appear in Stockholm, Sweden. People who had been on the move for an extensive time, staying in refugee camps, and transit, reception and asylum centres, found themselves again in a state of deferral, this time within the refuge of the nation-state. This dissertation aims to deepen the understanding of how new thresholds arise and materialise, extending the migration trajectory within the nation-state. To this end, the dissertation attends to conflicting policies, bureaucratic practices and local conditions, focusing primarily on the logic and implementation of the Settlement Act, a Swedish dispersal policy enacted in the wake of the ‘summer of migration’ in 2015. The new law aimed to speed up the transition of ‘newly arrived immigrants’ into the labour market by creating ‘even flows’ between asylum centres and municipal accommodation. More specifically, this dissertation explores how the practices of deferral are enacted in the implementation of the Settlement Act through three separate empirical domains: 1) calculations of the dispersal and matching system at the state level, 2) municipal management and the dwellers’ experiences of temporary accommodation and resettlement in Stockholm, and 3) the professional and social dimensions of the encounters between street-level bureaucrats and ‘newly arrived immigrants’. The dissertation builds on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork in Stockholm between 2018 and 2019. It comprises participant observations and interviews with officials and with ‘newly arrived immigrants’ living in temporary housing. The dissertation brings together and analyses the separate empirical domains by drawing on the concept of the logistification of migration. This analytical lens encourages us to dissect the inclusive yet differential mechanisms in the migration apparatus, paying attention to the temporal management of circulation and mobility, on the one hand, and the ensuing friction and contestation, on the other hand. The dissertation argues that the logistification of migrant settlement management includes several practices that defer the housing shortage to sustain the acceleration from asylum centres to municipal accommodation, which produces a post-asylum threshold and incessant forced mobility. This continuous circulation of people operates as a filtering mechanism between asylum and integration, leading the ‘newly arrived immigrants’ into housing and labour precarity. Hence, the dissertation points to the linkages between the logistical management of settlement, practices of deferral and differential inclusion. This dissertation contributes to the growing literature dealing with the logistification of migration by following state policy through its implementation. While large parts of the literature on the logistification of migration have focused on the state level of managing migration and borders, this dissertation pays attention to how the logistification takes shape within the borders of the nation-state.

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