The presented work investigates root causes behind contemporary ‘witch’ hunt in Tanzania and is based on a four months research in the region Shinyanga in Tanzania. For many years elderly women in Tanzania’s north-western region have been victims of brutal collective violence, accused of being ‘witches’. While some manage to flee, others are killed in their home villages. The perpetrator is the ...

The brief examines how regional developments in Central/South Asia may affect the stabilization process in Afghanistan. Given that regional security dynamics played an important role in aggravating the conflict in Afghanistan in the 1990s, the report juxtaposes the situation in the 1990s with the present state of affairs. The brief argues that the regional dynamics in 2010 are very different ...

The objective of this thesis is to map out the NGO-practitioners reflections on male and female survivors of sexual gender based violence (SGBV), in violent “peace” post conflict Gulu, Northern Uganda. To better understand how the NGO-practitioners make sense of sexual violence, perceive its survivors and how they address the survivors’ needs. The empirical data is analysed through a gender lens, ...

Western Sahara has been called “the last colony” of Africa. The territory was colonized by Spain in 1884. During the pan-Maghreb liberation period in the 1950s, the local population, Sahrawi people also joined the resistance against colonial powers. However, when Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Mauritania obtained own independence as nation-state, the “Maghrebian dream” ended. Western Sahara has not ...

In 2001 ended a 21 years long violent conflict between the Peruvian state and the Peruvian Communist Party (PCP). During the violent period were hundreds of women and men imprisoned for affiliation to the PCP. The PCP had a significant number of women participating in the violence, these women were present in all levels of the party. The PCP represented a higher level of female political participation ...

This thesis focusses on the perspectives of community level actors in Liberia regarding their efforts to pursue locally valued human security objectives. It utilizes a theoretical framework based on human security, the capabilities approach, and the Copenhagen school of securitization to evaluate local actor agency and how that agency is impacted by imbalanced power relations with national and ...

This study explores the potential assets of informal living as a consequence of historical spatial planning and urbanization in Cape Town South Africa. Micro realities of informal living are illustrated against a backdrop of wider socio-political policies that effectively produce informal settlements through arguably flawed housing delivery systems. Qualitative interviews conducted across a small ...

This thesis examines the problem of girls’ illiteracy in one of the poorest and most disadvantaged indigenous communities of Nepal – the Chepang community. The problem of education in this community is very serious, since a significant portion of its members have never been to school and can neither read nor write. The vast majority of uneducated Chepangs are women. The aim of the thesis is to find ...

Restorative justice is an alternative way of thinking about crime and justice which views crime as a violation of a relationship among victims, offenders and community instead of putting a state as a sole victim, and has the objective of “putting right” or “healing” the wrong and to restore the broken relationship in the community. Unlike the restorative justice perspective, the Ethiopian criminal ...

This thesis examines draft-avoidance in the context of contemporary Russia. The objective of the research is to shed light on army-avoiders' views and reflections, not only for a better understanding of the issue of the conscription crisis, but also to provide insights into the transition from the Soviet to the Russian era and how young men negotiate and relate to processes of social change. To meet ...