Browsing by Subject "United States"
Now showing items 1-9 of 9
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(2021)This thesis analyses the development of Danish foreign and security policy towards the Arctic ever since the end of the Second World War up until today. It draws primarily on Denmark’s relation to the United States, having been Denmark’s main ally for the last 75 years on all security related matters - but especially since the end of the Cold War. Both Denmark and the US are considered Arctic coastal states, with Denmark accessing the Arctic ocean through its sovereign claim over Greenland, and the US through the state of Alaska. The thesis supports other scholarly studies that argue that a ‘new Cold War’ has been taking place in the years following the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016 between the US, China and Russia, with potentially grave ramifications for Arctic regional security, given its growing importance as a region for resource extraction and commercial passage through the Northern Sea Route. For Denmark, this new Cold War threatens its sovereign claim over Greenland – a crucial geostrategic location for a potential Arctic militarization - being challenged as a small nation by the great power competitions accelerating in the Arctic. The thesis divides the last 75 years into three categorized eras: 1) The Cold War (1945-1991); 2) The post-Cold War era (1991-2017); 3) The ‘new Cold War’ as a developing era (2017 - ; denoted in the thesis), and analyses for each era the fundamentals of Denmark – US relations, first providing a more general overview of their political relations as security partners on non-Arctic related matters, in order to then draw parallels to the development of Denmark – US relations in the Arctic and their roles as state actors in shaping the geopolitical climate of the region. As I show, a lot can be learned from the Cold War to understand what is and may happen in the Arctic in the new Cold War. The thesis makes use of foreign policy analysis, as well as two variations of discourse analysis – poststructuralist discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis – as tools to engage with the empirical data available and answer the thesis’s main research questions: what is the perceived effect of the Trump administration's policy to the position of Denmark in the Arctic? The question is answered on the basis of two main theoretical frameworks: Securitization Theory and Region-Building Theory. These frameworks build the necessary foundation which along with the mentioned methodologies can provide a holistic overview and perspective on the matter with scientific validity. The thesis ends by discussing what can be expected in the near future, based on the knowledge acquired and the answers provided to the research question. A new administration led by president elect Joe Biden took over the White House on January 20st, and with it many new questions are yet to be answered, regarding the future of Denmark – US relations, the future of Arctic governance and the course of the new Cold War. I ponder on what options Denmark might have that could guarantee its security while also maintaining its sovereignty over Greenland – one option being a potential turn towards the EU as its new main security partner. Yet doing so would mean breaking a long-lasting relationship with the US while standing up to the world’s biggest economic and military superpower.
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(2020)In recent years, a resurgent leftist faction has arisen in the Democratic Party of the United States, emerging first in Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign to become the party’s nominee in the 2016 presidential election. Sanders’ campaign declared a ‘political revolution’, a left-wing project advocating socioeconomic and political transformation and problematizing inequality in American society. The primary election process drew deep factional lines in the party between Sanders’ and Hillary Clinton’s supporters, and ultimately resulted in Clinton’s candidacy and defeat in the general election. In the wake of Sanders’ campaign, multiple left-wing organisations emerged both within the Democratic Party and beyond it, adopting his policy goals and campaigning style. Among these was Justice Democrats, a factionally-oriented organization challenging Democratic incumbents and endeavouring to enact a political realignment towards the left on the intra-party level. The ongoing factional struggle is seen against the backdrop of a broader hegemonic crisis. The leftist faction of the party has produced a new populist discourse building a counter-hegemonic left-wing social imaginary. This thesis examines the discourse of the political revolution, and the discursive devices constituting its articulation of key dichotomies. The thesis applies a theoretical framework of Giovanni Sartori’s factionalism, Margaret Canovan’s populism, and Gramscian hegemony to conduct a discourse analysis of the resurgent leftist discourse on the meso and macro levels. This thesis asks: how does the discourse of the political revolution construct an adversarial dichotomy of an in-group and an out-group as part of its populist counter-hegemonic project? To answer its research question, the thesis develops its methodological approach by combining critical discourse analysis (CDA), discourse theory, and aspects of the complementary method of discourse tracing. This framework views discourses and social reality as mutually constitutive. The value of such analysis lies in practicing reflexivity and considering what kind of social reality the discourse strives to generate, reproducing and disrupting dominant ideas and structures. Examining a discourse yields insight into the possible real-world consequences of the adoption of the worldview it constitutes, and facilitates the tracing of shifts in political culture. The thesis finds that, on the meso level, the discourse constructs a logic of difference to dismantle the conception of the Democratic Party as monolithic, producing an ideologically-based factional challenge through the dichotomisation of two factional groups. The discourse articulates an ideologically committed left-wing factional in-group, and a clientelist party establishment out-group corrupted by established campaign finance practices. The adversarial in-group and out-group constitute factions of principle and interest (as per Sartori), drawing from the redemptive and pragmatic faces of democracy, respectively. On the macro level, the discourse constructs a logic of equivalence through articulating a populist people-elite binary. ‘The people’ are conceived of as a broad, diverse collective connected by class-based grievances and interests, sovereign but unrepresented. This is juxtaposed with the articulation of an out-of-touch, oligarchic elite configuration consisting of dominant economic forces, a political elite, and a discursive elite. The elite are likewise connected by class interests, exercising undue influence over the political system and reproducing a hegemony facilitating economic inequality. The elite is articulated as the common Other for ‘the people’ as the groups’ class interests conflict and systemic structures privilege the elite at the expense of the needs of the people. This people-vs-elite dichotomisation produces the articulation of ‘the people’ as a historical bloc, a class alliance with transformative capacity, whose political action is seen as necessary to usher in a democratic renewal at both the meso and macro levels. The discourse scandalizes the existing level of inequalities in American society and articulates campaign finance practices yielding wealthy elites influence over the political process as impermissible. These scandalisations challenge existing social structures and dominant ideas. The discourse seeks to thereby shift these ideas and practices beyond the hegemonic limits of intelligibility through the production of a left-wing social imaginary. Understanding the effects of discourses and discursive shifts on social reality, and vice versa, is useful for academics examining social reproduction and transformation. A discursive shift the like of which the political revolution seeks to achieve holds practical policy implications and has potentially wide-reaching consequences on U.S. political culture and social practices. Ramifications may be felt beyond borders in the political discourses of other nations due to the prominent position the U.S. holds in the international community. Should this counter-hegemonic discourse become more broadly adopted within the Democratic Party and beyond, it may provide a blueprint for similar movements in comparable contexts.
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(2023)Populist leaders are often studied when they are in opposition, providing an alternative to a failing democracy. The case of Donald Trump in the aftermath of the United States presidential election 2020 is different, as he is a populist leader in the position of power, trying to be re-elected as president. Thus, my aim in this thesis is to study the use of populist rhetoric by Donald Trump on Twitter following election day, 3 November 2020, as a populist who is no longer in the opposition, but rather a president trying to maintain office. By mainly drawing on the characteristics of populist rhetoric mapped out by Benjamin Moffitt (2014), I analyze a selection of tweets from November 2020 to January 2021 with the goal of identifying characteristics of populist rhetoric in his tweets. Moffitt identifies three main characteristics of populist rhetoric: ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’, performing a notion of crisis, and ‘bad manners’. My results show that both ‘the people’ versus ‘the elite’ and the performance of crisis are both explicitly present in Donald Trump’s tweets. He creates a typically populist binary, identifying himself and Republicans with the true American Heartland, ‘the people’. Trump elevates the election results to a level of crisis, claiming a stolen election and voter fraud as the reasons for Biden’s victory. ‘Bad manners’ is almost Trump’s trademark. While visible in his tweets, it is at times difficult to draw the line between the rhetoric of Twitter and populist rhetoric, as there is significant overlap between the two. My results show, that even when losing power, Trump follows traditional populist rhetoric. However, in an interesting turn of events, he also changes the limits of ‘the people’ and ‘the enemy’, calling out other Republicans and Fox News in his tweets when he feels that they are betraying him and no longer supporting him. Thus, he diverts from the traditional populist ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary, creating a third category, a sort of purgatory, where Republicans who formerly were ‘the people’ now reside.
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(2013)The thesis studies the economic policy of the United States from the first oil crisis of October 1973 to the 1980 elections via the perspective of Keynesian economic theorem. The main objective of the thesis is to analyze the perceived failure of Keynesianism during stagflation through practical policy and evaluate the policy connection to the economic theory paradigm shift that occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is done by reviewing primarily the fiscal policies of the Ford and Carter administrations coupled with an analysis of the policy recommendations made by the contemporary congressional Joint Economic Committees. The thesis aims to add a historically minded policy analysis into the mix when explaining the fall of Keynesianism and see how well it elucidates this on its own. In primary material the thesis relies on various documents produced by the Councils of Economic Advisors and Joint Economic Committees during the previously mentioned time period. In particular the annually or biannually formed economic policy publications and statements related to them are under scrutiny since by revealing the policy directions and proposals one can examine the wider economic theory context at play. In addition the primary material is complemented by using a wide-range of previous literature and contemporary newspaper articles. Methodologically the study employs directed qualitative content analysis as a research method which carefully takes into consideration the chosen contextual theory – Keynesianism – when analyzing the material. Furthermore, an adaption of Douglass C. North’s theory on economic change is applied to the subject in order to create a more comprehendible framework to examine the change in economic thinking taking place. The analysis of U.S. economic policy through the theoretical lenses of Keynes finds that the theory was badly miscomprehended and practiced already in the late 1960s which continued for the entire 1970s causing increasingly significant reputational damage to it. The study concludes that a lack of belief among the Ford and Carter administrations towards Keynesianism and the difficult politico-economic circumstances lead to economic policies that cannot be classified as Keynesian. Thus the results stand in opposition to the notion that the theory failed through trial and error during stagflation and indicate that intellectual preference towards neoclassical economics began to impact policy increasingly since the Ford administration. The study recommends that future research focuses more on linking economic policies and theories to their historical and political context. A further recommendation is made to increase the study of empirical policy analysis when explaining the fall of Keynesianism.
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(2020)The United States presidential elections are one of the most followed events in the world. The 2016 presidential elections will be remembered as one of the contentious elections ever. Donald Trump became the president against all odds. His campaign slogans “Make America Great Again” and “America First” promised to return the power to the people and redefine Americas’ role in the world. Trump’s campaign speeches were full of rhetoric that echoed the sentiments of the past presidents. His nativist speeches were full of anti-establishment appeals and racially heated language. The political polarization had divided the country, and amidst this Trump rose to presidency. His victory was rooted in the cultural and political changes that began decades earlier, and Trump’s presidency was the culmination of long-term developments. The thesis examines how Donald Trump used history politics in his general election campaign speeches. The primary sources of the thesis consist of general election speeches, from March to November in 2016. The thesis utilizes qualitative content analysis, in which primary sources are critically examined and compared, within the framework of history politics. The thesis relies on Jouni Tilli’s policy concept typology of history politics and Pilvi Torsti’s definition of history politics. The definitions of politicization and engagement in politics are a useful tool for analysing how Donald Trump blurred the line between myth, history and the past in his speeches. The theoretical framework of history politics refers to history being used in politics; it can manifest through political motives. Using history in political speeches is away to create a connection between the past and the present. The thesis also employs populism, which is used as analytical tool, when examining the political speeches. The thesis employs source-based analysis of primary sources, through research questions, within the framework of history politics. As well as looks how populism is expressed in the campaign speeches. The thesis also examines the rhetoric and themes of the Trump campaign, in order to understand the wider context and the outcomes of history politics. The analysation of the primary sources revealed that Trump exploited the conservative populist rhetoric that intertwined with history. His campaign message was appealing to the white working- and middle-class voters, who felt like they had been overlooked and left behind by the politicians and society. Trump capitalized on Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority” and Ronald Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” narratives and transformed it to fit his populistic rhetoric. Trump presented himself as an outsider who provided simple solutions to big issues. He used history to justify the political rhetoric of the campaign. The most important result of the thesis was that history was politicized and used as the pivotal narrative in Trump’s campaign speeches. The history politics framework provided the thesis platform from which the campaign speeches could be analysed, and it created a context for the motives of using history in politics. Trump reused the political rhetoric of the past and intertwined it with populism.
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(2018)The purpose of this thesis is to analyze and reveal the impact of epistemic communities on the formation of international space policy in the United States and Soviet Union following the end of the Apollo era in 1969. It argues that despite the dominant narrative of Cold War space history asserting that the space race and the developments that followed were based upon competitive/realist thinking, there were numerous actors in both countries operating transnationally to transform space policy to embrace cooperation. Furthermore, this cooperation had always been a part of space history, however, various turning points in the structure of the Cold War allowed cooperation to flourish in the 1970s and 1990s, but also attempted to prevent it in the 1980s. The thesis then analyzes the effects of the Soviet collapse on this process of shaping international manned spaceflight policy and its effects on the creation of the International Space Station and use of spaceflight as a means of accomplishing foreign policy goals of the United States in the post-Cold War era. This thesis primarily employs Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration to describe the process by which agents transformed international space policy from 1972-1992. This theory argues that agents, be they individuals or groups, can enact change to a system or structure by their ability to “act otherwise” meaning “being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.” This thesis identifies these actors as epistemic communities as described by Peter M. Haas, who defines them as are those which focus on collaboration between groups of scientists or technicians based on a scientific context and can result in the acquiescence of national decision-makers to epistemic communities in the cooperative policy process. Therefore, the primary body of research materials comes from personal correspondence, formal agreements and memoirs generated by the engineers, administrators and other agents involved in the space policy advisement process. The thesis concludes that the historical development of manned spaceflight during the Cold War was not exclusively characterized by competition, but rather cooperation had been an essential component from the beginning. However, while competition and gaining supremacy in space was the dominant approach taken by the United States and Soviet Union, scientists, engineers and actors constituting an epistemic community took it largely upon themselves to allow cooperative projects in manned spaceflight to take place. This process often ran counter to the expressed foreign policy goals of national leaders, but ultimately succeeded thanks to continuous persuasion from the bottom up. This incremental shift towards cooperation finally overcame competition once the Soviet Union collapsed and the physical manifestations of cooperation throughout, in the form of the Mir and Freedom space stations, became the basis on which post-Cold War manned spaceflight was built.
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(2024)This thesis is guided by the research question, how is policy to reduce homelessness influenced by the principles of the Housing First approach? The research explores how public policy is informed by the principles of Housing First nationally in the United States and Finland, and particularly in two cities, New York City and Helsinki. Housing First is an approach used both in Finland and the United States to reduce homelessness. The approach requires immediate housing once someone becomes homeless, without any preconditions and with the ability to choose supportive services. As defined in the Housing First Europe Guide, there are eight main principles of Housing First. The principles are housing is a human right, choice and control for service users, separation of housing and treatment, recovery orientation, harm reduction, active engagement without coercion, person-centered planning, and flexible support as long as is required. Research data is collected from national reports published in the United States and Finland during 2022-2023, supplemented by reports from New York City and Helsinki. The interest in examining Housing First in recent reports is to see if and how the principles are present and whether they have any influence on policy recommendations. Reports are supplemented by interviews with actors from different levels of governance and practice. Using Esping-Andresen’s welfare regime types as a theoretical framework, a thematic analysis is used to inquire into how the principles of Housing First are present in the data and what their application means for ending homelessness in each context. The analysis finds that Housing First principles are indeed present and their articulation is embedded within societal values, which align with the country’s welfare regime type. The discussion offers how this research can support the work being done to end homelessness, by presenting a perspective on the importance of societal value systems, and how by aligning these systems to Housing First principles, ending homelessness becomes possible. Conclusions are drawn on the research process and possibilities for future research are presented.
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(2021)Data privacy came to the forefront of public consciousness in March 2018, with the revelation that the data of upwards of 87 million accounts was misused due to a lack of privacy protections. Furthermore, the release of confidential court documents detailing years of anticompetitive conduct by Facebook, largely helped by the amount of data it has access to, through ways that many are beginning to characterise as immoral. The intersection of data privacy and competition law is a relatively new issue, but one that will have a significant impact in the coming years. Investigations into Facebook’s conduct by the United States and the European Union will determine if the social media giant, and by extension, any other companies that collect large amounts of data, will adjust or maintain its data-gathering practices.
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(2018)After the September 11 attacks in 2001 the President of the United States, George W. Bush, declared a global war on terrorism – and a war to rescue the Afghan women from their terrorist men. Feminist scholars and activists worldwide criticized the Bush government for using feminist rhetoric to justify the war. However, the development of this discourse throughout the tiring years of warfare and the co-optation of the U.S. rhetoric by other coalition partner countries have been overlooked in the research. This thesis examines the gendered narratives and the women’s rights rhetoric of U.S. and German state officials in 2001−2002 and 2007−2008. The theoretical framework of this thesis is located on the diverse and interdisciplinary field of feminist security- and international relations studies. The research questions are: How was the Afghan war justified through gendered narratives and rhetorical tools? How did the deployment of women’s rights rhetoric change during and in-between this period? Were there some distinctions in the use of rhetoric and gendered categorizations between the U.S. and German administration officials, two countries with very different foreign policy traditions? The source material of this thesis consists mainly of speeches, press briefings, debates and statements given by the state officials from the United States and Germany in 2001−2002 and 2007−2008. The speech material was collected from the online databases of the U.S. Department of State, the White House, the German Federal Government and the debate records of the German Parliament. The methodological framework of discourse analysis was used for analysing the rhetoric. Especially two tools of discourse analysis were utilized: the analysis of hegemonic discourses and the analysis of rhetoric and argumentation. By de-naturalizing the hegemonic discourses and identifying simplifying narratives, this thesis aims to reveal how discourses can consolidate power, essentialize gender roles and situate the human subjects through discourse to unequal positions of power. However, women’s rights rhetoric practised by major world leaders is not seen as necessarily positive or negative per se: What matters is the framing and the context of the rhetoric. By analyzing the gendered rhetoric, this thesis intends to find more nuanced ways of using and manipulating gendered categories to legitimize domination and control. In the years 2001 and 2002, the first two years of the war, the Bush administration utilized the image of the masculine hero, who must protect his country under threat. Even though this hero could be a woman or man, the virtues that he represented were congenitally masculine: strength, force, heroism and courage. He had to protect the country from a new type of an enemy: the mad, savage- or even animal-like, women-hating terrorist. His sadistic treatment of women was emphasized to show his barbarism. The depiction of a normal and civilized Muslim man was almost non-existent in the discourse, the image of the terrorist Muslim man was dominant. The corruption and human rights abuses of the Northern Alliance members in the Karzai government were left unaddressed. The role of the American woman in this discourse was to be calm, collected and supportive, as embodied in the First Lady, Laura Bush. The Afghan women were treated as one singular, homogenic group in the discourse – as objects to be saved. In the German discourse the masculine protector was not as celebrated as in the U.S., the discourse of the Afghan women was almost identical. The Gerhard Schröder administration also wanted to carry its responsibility towards the women-liberating West. By 2007−2008 the war had turned out to be tiring and extremely challenging, but the masculine protector was still standing strong in the U.S. discourse. There were no signs of hesitation, regret, admitting mistakes or a change of strategy with Karzai’s government, Northern Alliance and its alleged corruption. The situation of Afghanistan’s women was painted as a success story, with no real need to talk about the still prevailing misogyny. There were no separate big speeches discussing the still existing problems in women’s rights sector. The critical voices from the opposition parties were challenging the discourse of the government led by chancellor Angela Merkel in 2007−2008 in Germany. Yet again the German administration utilized the threat of Afghan women falling back in the hands of Taliban and women being massacred to silence the war opposers. Critical voices coming from Afghan women about the warlordization and corruption of Northern Alliance were still ridiculed or silenced, as demonstrated in the case of the Afghan activist and former parliamentarian, Malalai Joya. The voices of silent and grateful women were however accepted easily as representing “all” Afghan women. This thesis sheds new light on the feminist analysis of the War on Terror by demonstrating how easily Bush administration’s rhetoric was co-opted by another coalition country. The analysis shows that even after seven years of warfare, women’s rights were still strongly utilized in the war legitimizing discourse by both countries under scrutiny. This thesis concludes that the utilization of feminist rhetoric by major world powers should not only be criticized but it could also be used to push forward the implementation of feminist policies. The deconstruction of the hegemonic war narratives and listening also to criticism and contestation could open new discursive spaces for building long-lasting peace in Afghanistan.
Now showing items 1-9 of 9