Upholding Moral Responsibilities: a normative analysis of the Joint Way Forward on migration issues between Afghanistan and the EU

Strict deportation policies have emerged as an increasingly popular way for more developed countries to tackle the issue of irregular migration. Estimations tell us that more that 3 million Afghan refugees will be deported in 2017 and it is argued that such massive returns to Afghanistan, despite the ongoing and escalated conflict, will risk contributing to severe human right violations as well as risk worsening the economic, social and political instability that the country is struggling with. In this study, I explore what normative obligations developed states should have towards developing countries in terms of the consequences of their deportation polices. Using methods of a normative policy analysis, the analysis specifically examines whether a declaration between the European Union and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan that focuses on strengthening deportation efforts, lives up to those obligations. The findings include that the deportation policies enforced by this declaration do not meet the normative obligations of developed states and this thesis argues that greater attention on how the political response in receiving countries affects the development prospects in refugee generating countries needs to be incorporated into deportation policies to a greater extent

Dependencies and Separation of Duty Constraints in GTRBAC

A Generalized Temporal Role Based Access Control (GTRBAC) model that captures an exhaustive set of temporal constraint needs for access control has recently been proposed. GTRBAC’s language constructs allow one to specify various temporal constraints on role, user-role assignments and role-permission assignments. In this paper, we identify various time-constrained cardinality, control flow dependency and separation of duty constraints (SoDs). Such constraints allow specification of dynamically changing access control requirements that are typical in today’s large systems. In addition to allowing specification of time, the constraints introduced here also allow expressing access control policies at a finer granularity. The inclusion of control flow dependency constraints allows defining much stricter dependency requirements that are typical in workflow types of applications

Impressions of Interculturality and Health Care in Bolivia: Three Cases from Cochabamba

Considerable health disparities exist that result in both poorer health outcomes and relatively low accessibility of health care for the world’s indigenous populations. States and global/international health organizations have prioritized indigenous health. Intercultural health care plays a pivotal role in this prioritization. Recent governmental changes in Bolivia, a country in which two thirds of the population self-identify as indigenous, have resulted in state discourse centered on decolonization and interculturality that advocates indigenous rights as well as economic and popular democracy. Research that focuses on how intercultural policies are practiced on the ground or on how individuals are experiencing these policies is lacking. Using qualitative data gathered from semi-structured interviews of three individuals living in and around Cochabamba, Bolivia, this thesis explores participants’ thoughts and experiences of interculturality, health, and the Bolivian healthcare system. Results are contextualized 1) through a discussion of the intercultural health care literature based on Latin American examples and 2) according to two health behavior theories: Social Cognitive Theory and the Structural-Ecological Model. The results presented here raise concerns about the implementation and effectiveness of intercultural healthcare policies. Participants have noticed very little change as a result of new polices and are skeptical of the motivations driving interculturality. Additional factors, such as substantial financial barriers, impede intercultural health care. Research that investigates how intercultural health care functions on the ground and in practice in Bolivia has repercussions for health policy on a global scale. The research presented here is of public health importance because, if the goal is to improve the health of indigenous peoples worldwide, a more critical consideration of the implementation of intercultural healthcare efforts, of which this thesis is part, is necessary

Contesting identities - Sweden's foreign policy and the creation of the Self

This paper engages in the study of identity formation in Swedish foreign policy debate. The study is situated within a broad constructivist field of research, drawing upon theoretical debates on subjectivity and the performative making of the state. The study draws upon the notion of ontological security and claims that sub-state actors, just as individuals, search for stable identities and a sense of continuity between self-esteem and action. Through the analysis of policy declarations and parliamentary debates, this study outlines two contrasting narratives of the state of Sweden represented by the two leading political coalitions. The analysis shows how Sweden's state identity continues to move through a process of europeanization while simultaneously experiencing a reawakening of an internationalist foreign policy brand. Sweden's candidature to the United Nations Security Council is used as an example to illustrate this development and to demonstrate the link between biographical narratives and political decision making