Over the past decades, a convergence between civil and political human rights non governmental organisations (NGOs) and development NGOs have occurred. The fusion of the two disciplines have led to the construction of so called ‘Rights-Based approaches’ (RBA). One principal concept for RBA’s is the question of accountability. Functional accountability is no longer seen as sufficient and more focus on social accountability have advanced. In previous research NGOs are repeatedly questioned for their level of accountability. This comparative qualitative case study therefore aim to examine how three Swedish based NGOs perceive accountability, with the purpose to contribute to the academic discussion of NGO accountability.

By using grounded theory and selective coding, this study will contribute with new empirical data to the ongoing development of RBA theory. Empirical data is collected through interviews, NGOs official strategies documents and analysed in relation to the empirically grounded theory. The main findings in this comparative case study is that organisations different backgrounds and values influence how they perceive RBA and accountability, and which methods are used to reconcile with accountability claims. The collected empirical data concludes perceptions of accountability mostly focuses on four interconnected key principles; power relations, democracy, transparency and empowerment.

Islamic religious education in the United States and Europe has become a subject of intense debate after Muslims raised in the West carried out attacks against their fellow citizens. People worry their governments are doing too little or too much to shape the spiritual beliefs of private citizens. In a new analysis paper, Jenny Berglund explains the differences in publicly funded Islamic education in nine European countries and the United States. 

Berglund lays out the religious education framework of each country and explains the state policies governing the teaching of Islam in public schools. State involvement, Berglund writes, ranges from sponsoring religious education in public schools to forgoing it entirely. The policies vary according to the national political culture of each country, as well as the historical and religious norms that shape public perceptions and debates over religious education. 

In Germany and Austria, many public schools teach Islam to Muslims as a subject within a broader religious curriculum in which parents can choose their students’ religious courses. In the United Kingdom and Sweden, public schools teach Islam as an academic subject, and train teachers through comparative religious studies departments in universities. French and U.S. public schools do not teach religion, although students can lean about Islam in subjects such as art, history, or literature.

Despite the diversity of these approaches, Berglund notes three good practices that apply across the board:

1. Establishing rigorous academic standards of training for teachers of religious education courses.
2. Providing factual textbooks informed by academic scholarship, both for Islamic religious education and non-confessional school subjects that teach about Islam. 
3. Building upon current curricular and pedagological best practices through international exchange and dialogue of scholars.

By adopting these practices, Berglund argues, governments can further their citizens’ knowledge of important aspects of the human experience and promote inclusive citizenship and respect.

This article explores agonistic processes of peace, which are situated within and constitutive of different spaces and places. Three contested cities, Sarajevo, Mostar and Visegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina, provide us with local sites where peace and peace building in various forms 'take place' as people come together in collective action. Through a close reading of three symbolically and materially important bridges in the towns, we reveal meaning-making processes, as agentive subjects struggle around competing claims in the post-conflict everyday world. The collective, situated and fleeting agency that we explore through the Arendtian notion of 'space of appearance' invests space with meaning, belonging and identity. Thus, this article grapples with agonistic peace as it manifests itself in materiality and spatial practices. We use the social and material spaces of the city to locate agency and agonism in peace building as they relate to the conflict legacy in Mostar, Visegrad and Sarajevo in order to advance the critical peace research agenda.

Tanzania is close to reach one of the Millennium Development Goals; to reduce child mortality with two-thirds between 1990 until 2015. This qualitative case study focuses on under-five children’s health in Babati district, situated in the north-west of Tanzania. The empirical data used in this thesis has been collected through interviews with health personnel and mothers during three weeks in February to March 2012. The purpose of the study has been to identify direct and underlying reasons causing child mortality, and to investigate what measures are needed to improve the situation. The most prominent diseases creating death amongst children are pneumonia and malaria, and also diarrheal diseases are common. The prevalence of the diseases differs from wet and dry season, whereas there are more cases of illness and death during the wet season. Malaria and pneumonia are common causes of death during the wet season, and diarrheal diseases are more common during the dry season. Underlying reasons affecting child mortality in Babati district are the lack of infrastructure, such as few well-functioning roads to the main hospitals which affects the rural population in particular. Also the limited access to transport is a vast problem when there is acute illness or childbirth. The clinics available in Babati district are poorly equipped and have a lack of personnel, creating a stressful situation for both healthcare workers and patients. More governmental funds and infrastructure is needed in the area to be able to create a sustainable situation for future children.

What are the consequences of making cyberspace increasingly reliant on satellites and other types of space infrastructure? And what is the meaning and significance of an interplanetary cyberspace? The chapter addresses these developments specifically concerning infrastructure, militarization, and privatization. The consequences observed are summed up as fragmentation, vulnerability, and uncertainty. Cyberspace in space implies fragmentation in terms of stakeholders and governance, and ultimately in terms of power and accountability. Vulnerability increases as cyberspace becomes satellite-based (space is certainly not a safe environment, and satellites can be attacked by anti-satellite weapons as well as new forms of hacking and denial of service. Uncertainty of is tremendous particularly both in terms of what norms and principles will apply (compare the debate on Internet freedom vs. Internet sovereignty), and whether militarization or civilian and even utopian ideas will prevail.

The development and global diffusion of access to the Internet has—as is the case with most new and game-changing technologies—been accompanied with fears and threat perceptions. This chapter argues, on the one hand, that Constructivist IR theory is particularly suited for addressing and interpreting the threat discourses and identity issues which come in focus in cybersecurity. The ease with which cyber-culprits can hide their identity and location, operating through networks of hijacked computers across the world, makes fear-mongering threat and identity discourses a key issue in cybersecurity. On the other hand, this chapter presents content analysis—a set of quantitative methods focusing on key word searches—as a pertinent or even ubiquitous method for both the study and practice of cybersecurity. Through simple and globally accessible interfaces, the entire Web can be scrutinized using content analysis. Equipped with Constructivist theory and content analysis methods, the IR scholar stands prepared to uncover and better understand the massive discursive world of the Internet.

With the Internet being a truly global phenomenon, understanding how this is controlled should yield observations of relevance for the study of global governance more generally. The Internet, and how it is controlled, should therefore be a concern for all students of world politics, and not only for the smaller albeit multidisciplinary community of scholars engaging in ‘‘Internet studies.’’ A first step is to acknowledge that Internet control varies across time, space, and issue-areas. To better understand such complex patterns of governance, we need to go beyond universal generalizations. In an attempt to support the middle-range theorizing, which arguably is needed, this essay introduces and briefly unpacks three analytical questions: What are the key aspects of Internet control? What actors might control what aspects of the Internet? And, finally, under what conditions are different types of actors likely to control various aspects of the Internet?

Introduction In recent years Western pundits and politicians have played up the specter of a new digital divide, between opposing democratic and authoritarian information orders, by at times even labeled an Internet cold war 2.0. The term digital divide originally explained unequal access to the Internet and digital information resources inside and between countries (Norris 2001). The new digital divide was not about unequal access to the Internet and digital information resources. It was political in nature due to different conceptions of liberties, freedom of expression, and how information flows should be governed nationally and internationally. Most notably, former US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in her by now well-known talk in Washington DC on January 21, 2010, emphasized that an “information curtain” had descended between free and closed nations of the world (Clinton 2010). Clinton, invoked and echoed Winston Churchill’s famous words on the iron curtain that came to divide Europe for more than fifty years when she in Washington DC said: “an information curtain now separates the free from the unfree.” Two years later, the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU) World Conference on International Communications (WCIT-12) meeting, which negotiated a revision to the 1988 international telecommunications regulations (ITR), broke down on vague wordings on Internet governance in the final resolution on December 14, 2012. Subsequently, The Economist magazine ran the headline “A digital cold war?” (Dubai 2012). However, the leaks by Edward Snowden in June 2013 radically changed the nature of the debate on Internet freedom and Internet security, although black-and-white dichotomies between the “free world” and the “unfree world” remain remarkably persistent, even after Snowden, a former employee with a contractor of the National Security Agency of the United States, revealed the enormous extent of surveillance and monitoring of individual citizens worldwide and in the USA. As statements by US congressmen about Chinese spyware infiltrating the mobile phones of Hong Kong activists illustrate, hypocrisy and myth making about “good” and “evil” surveillance is very much alive (Farrell and Finnemore 2013). Internet governance issues, however, are not black-and-white uncomplicated issues on either side of the imagined cyber curtain separating the free from the unfree (cf. Stalla-Bourdin et al. 2014). Russia, China and Iran are autocratic but not totalitarian countries. They showcase complex authoritarian-capitalist settings, which in the cases of Russia and Iran entail constrained but, nevertheless, electoral politics. Unlike totalitarian North Korea, these countries are not isolated from the rest of the world, but are deeply involved in social and economic globalization. And in China, interestingly, the state cannot fully trust private commercial companies to fully comply with the party-state’s intent to censor and monitor citizens’ communication over social networks. The remainder of this chapter discusses Swedish and Chinese cyber-security strategy, focusing on threat perceptions, cyber-security methods and organization. Why compare Sweden and China? The main reason is that while both have relatively advanced information societies and cyber-security measures, they represent on the one hand a parliamentary democracy, and on the other an autocratic political system. While many other democracies and autocracies could have been chosen, Sweden and China are particularly interesting given their difference in size and position in the global system. Also, while the USA is a leading cyber power, and thus in a sense a major geopolitical counterpart of China, we are not here analyzing the balance of cyber power, but are mainly interested in differences and similarities between democracy and autocracy concerning cyber security. And while US cyber-security policies have been extensively discussed elsewhere (Mueller and Kuehn 2013; Dunn Cavelty 2008), there is hardly any studies on Swedish cyber security (for exceptions, see Eriksson 2001a, 2001b, 2004). Moreover, our particular expertise on Swedish and Chinese cyber politics is a pragmatic reason for studying these rather than any other countries. It should also be made clear that we conceive of cyber security in a broad sense. Cyber security, as we understand it, includes defensive measures against cyber attacks such as firewalls and CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) functions, offensive measures such as computer hacking and denial of service attacks, and cyber surveillance and cyber espionage (Andreasson 2012; Dunn Cavelty 2008).

This chapter presents an introduction to and brief overview of the study of technology and international relations, including a discussion of research gaps and new horizons. In particular, this contribution addresses whether and how prevailing theoretical approaches have been able to analyze the relationship between technological and international political change. This includes how the personal, social, societal, and, to an extent, also biological worlds are becoming increasingly interconnected through new technologies – what has been referred to as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ (Newlove-Eriksson and Eriksson, 2021; Schwab, 2017). How then is technology addressed within the field of international relations (IR)? Given the considerable attention IR literature pays to globalization and global structural change – core themes of contemporary IR – it might be expected that the role of technology in world politics would be a major focus. What would global politics and globalization be if the rapid development and diffusion of global information and communications technologies (ICTs) were not taken into account? It would seem, nonetheless, that technology has received rather mixed and selective attention within IR.

This paper argues that past research has overlooked how the way problems and solutions are framed contribute to a prevailing gap in the global governance of climate and energy. Empirically, this paper investigates the frames of energy and climate change as expressed in key documents from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and International Energy Agency (IEA). Partly in contrast to past research, this paper finds (1) that there is a growing similarity in how the IPCC and IEA frame climate and energy; (2) that the IEA has gone from ignoring to acknowledging climate change and the transformation to a low-carbon energy system; and (3) that there is a prevailing difference in emphasis, whereas the IPCC only marginally discuss energy, while the IEA is still mainly talking about energy needs and fossil fuels even if climate change and renewables have entered their agenda.

Formalized land tenure systems in Tanzania have witnessed a shift towards recognizing customary land rights. The shift has advanced into a framework in which land owners can either apply for a Certificate of Granted Right of Occupancy (CGRO) or a Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO). 

This study investigates local perceptions of the formalized tenure system and its effect on the local democratic settings in Babati, Tanzania. The thesis is based on a field study carried out in early 2024 and employs a qualitative approach that utilizes semi-structured interviews conducted in the rural villages of Mwada and Matufa. The study incorporates an inductive comparative analysis to examine distinctions between certificate holders and non-certificate holders. The investigation relies on a theoretical adoption of land titling and democracy. 

Findings reveal that the absence of a certificate is associated with perceptions of lower levels of autonomy and security. In contrast, certificate holders, specifically CGRO holders, exhibit increased agency and security. The economic advantages achieved through the CGRO as opposed to a CCRO drive competition and consequently pressures non-certificate holders, leading to exclusionary dynamics within the community. The differences between certificate holders and non-holders consequently have an impact on the democratic setting. This calls for re-evaluation of the effect that land tenure formalization has in the broader democratic discourse. 

The Paper analyses the voluntary action of the London-based Committee for Relieving the Distresses in Germany and Other Parts of the Continent, a set of humanitarian relief campaigns in the years 1805-1815, and its connections with the advocacy work of the anti-slavery movement and that of the British and Foreign Bible Society. While advocacy is a well-known dimension of early transnational civil society, early humanitarian relief services across borders are virtually unknown to research. This paper argues that advocacy and service were always interrelated and co-evolved as the two principal dimensions of global civil society already at the turn from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

The ascendency of executive power in the presence of weak parliamentary and societal control has given rise to a need for deliberative forms of diplomacy in international relations. As Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden regularly include members of parliament, party representatives, and representatives of civil society in their delegations to the General Assembly of the United Nations, does this imply that a Nordic model exists? This book reviews the practice of these countries and finds that the role of societal representatives has diminished from participating members of delegations to mere observers. The Nordic examples illuminate the difficulties of achieving international governance through the practice of deliberative democracy.

Sweden's relationship with the United Nations fluctuated considerably between 1941 and 1946. This article examines how the Nordic country's own security interests were sometimes viewed as compatible and sometimes at odds with membership of the United Nations. The discussions surrounding Sweden's accession to the United Nations and actions of its first delegates to the international organisation are explored at length. So too is the discrepancy between Sweden's reputation for neutrality and its enthusiastic support for the United Nations, on the one hand, and its internal debates and policy decisions during the 1940s, on the other. Finally, the article explores the ways in which Sweden used the United Nations as an arena in which to manifest both its indifference to security alignment and its exceptionalism in world affairs.

This article challenges E.P. Thompson’s definition of ‘moral economy’ as a traditionalconsensus of crowd rights that were swept away by market forces. Instead, it suggests thatthe concept has the potential of improving the understanding of modern civil society. Moraleconomy was a term invented in the eighteenth century to describe many things.Thompson’s approach reflects only a minor part of this conceptual history. Hisunderstanding of moral economy is conditioned by a dichotomous view of history and bythe acceptance of a model according to which modern economy is not subject to moralconcerns. It is on principle problematic to confine a term conjoining two concepts asgeneral as ‘moral’ and ‘economy’ to a specific historical and social setting. Recentapproaches that frame moral economy as an emotively defined order of morals are alsomisleading since they do not address economic issues in the way they are commonlyunderstood. The most promising current approaches appear to be those that consider themoral economy of welfare, humanitarianism, and civil society. The concept of moraleconomy may help us to clarify alternative ways of ‘utility maximisation’ through theconstruction of altruistic meaning for economic transactions.

Die Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik der im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert entstandenen skandinavischen Nationalstaaten hat unterschiedliche Phasen durchlaufen. Eine in den 1930er Jahren zunächst noch gemeinsam verfolgte Neutralitätspolitik blieb angesichts der machtpolitischen Konstellationen während des Zweiten Weltkriegs erfolglos. Nach 1945 waren die nordeuropäischen Länder bestrebt, ihre Souveränität zu wahren und sich im beginnenden Kalten Krieg zu positionieren. 1948 wurde eine skandinavische Verteidigungsunion erwogen, die letztlich an den Differenzen der nordischen Staaten scheiterte. Dänemark, Norwegen und Island wurden Gründungsmitglieder der NATO, während Schweden seine neutralitätspolitische Tradition fortführte und Finnland aufgrund der Grenzlage zur UdSSR einen pragmatischen Kurs verfolgte. Um die unterschiedlichen sicherheitspolitischen Orientierungen zu kompensieren, wurde 1952 der Nordische Rat gegründet. In den 1960er Jahren wurde der Kurs einer aktiven und in internationaler Hinsicht stärker politisierten Außenpolitik eingeschlagen. In der Europapolitik hingegen zeigten sich die nordischen Länder eher zögerlich. Ambivalent gestaltete sich auch die Kooperation mit den baltischen Ländern Estland, Lettland und Litauen. Die seit 2005 zu beobachtende Renaissance der nordischen Zusammenarbeit vermag die Heterogenität der von den skandinavischen Staaten verfolgten Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik nicht zu überdecken.

Sweden has been one of the major providers of development aid to Third World countries, measured in per cent of the gross national income (GNI). Since the mid-1970s the country has always surpassed the 0.7 per cent goal propagated by the United Nations and sometimes exceeded the own, more ambitious goal of one per cent. The paper examines a variety of explanations for this extraordinary donor behavior and concludes that it may best be explained by ideological and strategic considerations made public by Swedish decision makers on both the national and the global level. Development aid has been an investment in international prestige and influence and, during the Cold War, also a marker of Swedish non-alignment in security policy matters. At the same time, the consonance of having a comprehensive domestic welfare system alongside the idea that international assistance should be given to those in need has given the country a consistent image. Domestically, development aid has been an issue that created an opportunity for social democrats to characterize the centre-right parties as divided on a foreign policy issue.

The famine of the 1840s is a historical landmark, a lieux de memoire not only of Irish, but of European and transatlantic history. Like writing on the wall it bears witness to the malfunction of the then hegemonic liberal doctrine and to the ignorance of the mightiest power of the time – the British Empire. Whereas these issues are recurrent subjects for discussion, the voluntary relief effort at the time has been little studied. This paper argues that this effort highlights the transnational capacity of civil society at the time and it shows the ambiguity of voluntary transnationalism with roots in imperial and diaspora constellations and in a wider context of religious and humanitarian driving forces.

This paper examines one of the earliest transnational voluntary relief efforts, the British campaign for relieving the distresses in Germany, other parts of the continent, and Sweden 1805–1816. The focus is directed on accounting for (a) the subscription paid by individual donors, (b) the appropriation of aid for different locations and purposes as well as (c) for the en detail provision of relief on the level of individuals. The questions asked are what function the public accounting had for the campaign, including the shaming of non-donors such as the German-born Queen Charlotte, what kind of structures it required and what it meant for the relation of donors and recipients of aid, and what effect it had in terms of export of specific traits of civil society and political culture from one country to another.

Voluntary transnational humanitarian aid dates back to the Napoleonic Wars, when affiliates of the British and Foreign Bible Society and some other British subjects, frequently of immigrant background, organized a relief campaign to the benefit of certain allied nations, in particular in Germany and Sweden. The paper accounts for the little known origins of transnational relief and asks for the driving forces of donors, examines the impact of their help, and problematizes the interaction of providers and recipients of aid. The focus will be  on how morality, politics, and economy were interwoven with one another. The paper also discusses the lessons that can be drawn from this early example of humanitarian aid, and which lasting structural problems were evident already two-hundred years ago.

This overview begins with a discussion of how the term NGO entered international relations in connection with the UN Charter conference. It continues with a chronological sketch of the emergence of NGOs in the nineteenth century. It then discusses the quantitative development of NGOs until today, periodisation issues, and major trends, suggesting a politico-economic perspective in tension with geopolitical IR approaches.

The London-based Committee for Relieving the Distressed Inhabitants of Germany, and Other Parts of the Continent is an early example of a large-scale voluntary relief programme that has gone unappreciated in the annals of humanitarianism. The present article examines the period in 1808 and 1809 when this committee redirected its relief efforts to Sweden. The case highlights many issues that beset humanitarianism today. With well-preserved recipient records, it offers insight to aspects of humanitarian encounters that have been markedly under-researched. It examines how foreign-policy interests fostered mis-conceptions about those in need and how such misconceptions resulted in corrupt distribution structures. It shows that asymmetries in the development of civil society impeded the relief effort and that the divergent interests of donors and distributors caused the forms of relief to be inadequate and agency to be lost. Moreover, it illustrates how local elites resisted advice from abroad and how the individual personalities involved shaped policy outcomes. These factors remain issues at the present time and the case of two Protestant European countries with a cultural affinity illustrates how significant they are.

This is an innovative new history of famine relief and humanitarianism. The authors apply a moral economy approach to shed new light on the forces and ideas that motivated and shaped humanitarian aid during the Great Irish Famine, the famine of 1921-1922 in Soviet Russia and the Ukraine, and the 1980s Ethiopian famine. They place these episodes within a distinctive periodisation of humanitarianism which emphasises the correlations with politico-economic regimes: the time of elitist laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century as one of ad hoc humanitarianism; that of Taylorism and mass society from c.1900-1970 as one of organised humanitarianism; and the blend of individualised post-material lifestyles and neoliberal public management since 1970 as one of expressive humanitarianism. The book as a whole shifts the focus of the history of humanitarianism from the imperatives of crisis management to the pragmatic mechanisms of fundraising, relief efforts on the ground, and accounting.