Harold Pinter: A Night Out : A Study in the Political ConnotationsAnd the Abuse of Power

Harold Pinter’s A Night Out is a significant but rarely produced piece of drama. Therefore, there is very little criticism to support or contradict my argument. The reason why I chose to do my essay on this particular play is to open doors for academic research and to try and make it an equal to its sister plays. I will raise questions and topics to prove the play is worth the readers’ time and effort and that A Night Out is a sharp piece of political theatre. Although at first glance it is a simple enough story, a straightforward tale of the nasty consequences of motherly love when it is pushed to the limit, on deeper inspection, a more far reaching and complex analysis of the abuse of power can be observed. The play offers a variety of themes, including: interpersonal power struggles, failed attempts at communication, antagonistic relationships, the threat of impending or past violence, the struggle for survival or identity, domination and submission, politics, lies and verbal, physical, psychological and sexual abuse. The prevailing theme in the play is the abuse of power: powerful parties oppressing weaker ones, and the results of the oppressed party looking for a vent in someone even weaker than themselves.

A comparative study of immigrants’ political participation in Sweden and the Netherlands

This study deals with immigrants’ political participation in Sweden and the Netherlands. Scholars have recognized low level of political participation of immigrants in Sweden compared to the Netherlands. The main goal of this study is to analyze the institutional influence, mainly from political parties over immigrants’ motivation for active electoral participation. The modified actor-context model uses here as the main theoretical framework. In addition, social capital theory employs to analyze immigrants’ voluntary organizational membership. This study confirms that, Swedish immigrants have the lower participation rate in the political sphere, at lest to a certain extent, than its counterparts the Dutch immigrants. This study also confirms the argument that contextual factors can influence actor’s motivations in integration-oriented action, and similarly it validates the necessity of enlargement of the actor-context model.

The Evolution of a Responsibility to Protect in Africa : The African Unions Emerging Peace and Security Regime

The thesis focuses on, and tries to evaluate, the role that the African Union (AU) plays in protecting the peace and security on the African continent. The thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the topic by both utilizing international relations and international law theories. The two disciplines are combined in an attempt to understand the evolution of the AU’s commitment to the pragmatist doctrine: responsibility to protect (R2P). The AU charter is considered to be the first international law document to cover R2P as it allows the AU to interfere in the internal affairs of its member states. The R2P doctrine was evolved around the notion of a need to arrive at a consensus in regard to the right to intervene in the face of humanitarian emergencies. A part of the post-Cold War shift in UN behaviour has been to support local solutions to local problems. Hereby the UN acts in collaboration with regional organizations, such as the AU, to achieve the shared aspirations to maintain international peace and security without getting directly involved on the ground. The R2P takes a more holistic and long-term approach to interventions by including an awareness of the need to address the root causes of the crisis in order to prevent future resurrections of conflicts. The doctrine also acknowledges the responsibility of the international community and the intervening parties to actively participate in the rebuilding of the post-conflict state. This requires sustained and well planned support to ensure the development of a stable society.While the AU is committed to implementing R2P, many of the AU’s members are struggling, both ideologically and practically, to uphold the foundations on which legitimate intervention rests, such as the protection of human rights and good governance. The fact that many members are also among the poorest countries in the world adds to the challenges facing the AU. A lack of human and material resources leads to a situation where few countries are willing, or able, to support a long-term commitment to humanitarian interventions. Bad planning and unclear mandates also limit the effectiveness of the interventions. This leaves the AU strongly dependent on regional powerbrokers such as Nigeria and South Africa, which in itself creates new problems in regard to the motivations behind interventions. The current AU charter does not provide sufficient checks and balances to ensure that national interests are not furthered through humanitarian interventions. The lack of resources within the AU also generates worries over what pressure foreign nations and other international actors apply through donor funding. It is impossible for the principle of “local solutions for local problems? to gain ground while this donor conditionality exists.The future of the AU peace and security regime is not established since it still is a work in progress. The direction that these developments will take depends on a wide verity of factors, many of which are beyond the immediate control of the AU.

Automating condition monitoring of vegetation on railway trackbeds and embankments

Vegetation growing on railway trackbeds and embankments present potential problems. The presence of vegetation threatens the safety of personnel inspecting the railway infrastructure. In addition vegetation growth clogs the ballast and results in inadequate track drainage which in turn could lead to the collapse of the railway embankment. Assessing vegetation within the realm of railway maintenance is mainly carried out manually by making visual inspections along the track. This is done either on-site or by watching videos recorded by maintenance vehicles mainly operated by the national railway administrative body. A need for the automated detection and characterisation of vegetation on railways (a subset of vegetation control/management) has been identified in collaboration with local railway maintenance subcontractors and Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration (STA). The latter is responsible for long-term planning of the transport system for all types of traffic, as well as for the building, operation and maintenance of public roads and railways. The purpose of this research project was to investigate how vegetation can be measured and quantified by human raters and how machine vision can automate the same process. Data were acquired at railway trackbeds and embankments during field measurement experiments. All field data (such as images) in this thesis work was acquired on operational, lightly trafficked railway tracks, mostly trafficked by goods trains. Data were also generated by letting (human) raters conduct visual estimates of plant cover and/or count the number of plants, either on-site or in-house by making visual estimates of the images acquired from the field experiments. Later, the degree of reliability of(human) raters’ visual estimates were investigated and compared against machine vision algorithms. The overall results of the investigations involving human raters showed inconsistency in their estimates, and are therefore unreliable. As a result of the exploration of machine vision, computational methods and algorithms enabling automatic detection and characterisation of vegetation along railways were developed. The results achieved in the current work have shown that the use of image data for detecting vegetation is indeed possible and that such results could form the base for decisions regarding vegetation control. The performance of the machine vision algorithm which quantifies the vegetation cover was able to process 98% of the im-age data. Investigations of classifying plants from images were conducted in in order to recognise the specie. The classification rate accuracy was 95%.Objective measurements such as the ones proposed in thesis offers easy access to the measurements to all the involved parties and makes the subcontracting process easier i.e., both the subcontractors and the national railway administration are given the same reference framework concerning vegetation before signing a contract, which can then be crosschecked post maintenance.A very important issue which comes with an increasing ability to recognise species is the maintenance of biological diversity. Biological diversity along the trackbeds and embankments can be mapped, and maintained, through better and robust monitoring procedures. Continuously monitoring the state of vegetation along railways is highly recommended in order to identify a need for maintenance actions, and in addition to keep track of biodiversity. The computational methods or algorithms developed form the foundation of an automatic inspection system capable of objectively supporting manual inspections, or replacing manual inspections.