Is Sweden a failed state in the making or a paradise on earth? Neither. Sweden is a functioning democracy but it faces serious challenges. This article attempts to make sense of them. It considers issues of law and order and the emergence of parallel structures of power. It shows that Sweden, following an unprecedented wave of immigration, is experiencing an ongoing struggle to define the nation.

There is a widespread feeling that globalization represents a major system change that has or should have brought world society to the forefront of international relations theory. Nonetheless, world society remains an amorphous and undertheorized concept, and its potential role in shaping the structure of the international society of states has scarcely been raised. We build on Buzan's (2018, 2) master concept of ‘integrated’ world society (‘a label to describe the merger of world and interstate society’) to locate the integration of world society in the globalization of social networks. Following the advice of Buzan (2001) and Williams (2014), we use conceptual frameworks from international political economy to systematically explore the structure of integrated world society along six dimensions derived from Mann (1986) and Strange (1988): military/security, political, economic/production, credit, knowledge, and ideological. Our empirical survey suggests that, on each of these dimensions, power has centralized as it has globalized, generating steep global hierarchies in world society that are similar to those that characterize national societies. The centrality of the United States in the networks of world society makes it in effect the ‘central state’ of a new kind of international society that is endogenized within integrated world society.

Abstract: After decades of growing acceptance of LGBTQI human rights in the West, Uganda began an African backlash in 2009, when it introduced an Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Even if the Bill was eventually defeated, it signaled the beginning of a new era of state-sponsored homophobia and wide-spread societal discrimination. State-sponsored persecution has however not silenced the Ugandan LGBTQI community and the following contribution (ongoing research) explores the Ugandan LGBTQI community’s remarkable resilience and quest for social change and in particular their use of ICTs for empowerment. Based on a pilot study conducted in Kampala November 2016, and ongoing online observations, tentative results are that the community organizes their communication practices around a division between intra-group organization and support (so-called deep information), and broadcasting and human-rights advocacy (surface information), due to perceived risks as well as opportunities of different communication modes and platforms

Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia's party system has suffered a difficult and turbulent infancy. Moscow based parties have had only very limited territorial penetration, and fragmentation has been one of its most significant features. Based on extensive fieldwork in three Russian regions, this book examines the development of the country's party system and the role played by parties in regional politics. Using a comparative approach, it scrutinises the internal structures and activities of the parties, looks at their decision-making processes, their everyday party life, the activities of party members, and the role of regional party organisations in federal and local election campaigns.

Through a case study of the Copenhagen-based activist television channel TV Stop (1987-2005), this chapter examines how social media are used as archives in ways that seek to facilitate connective memory between past, present and future protest movements. Drawing on in-depth key informant interviews and a thematic analysis of the online spaces former activists appropriate to store, organise and reinvigorate the historical video material, the case of TV Stop is used to reflect upon memory, archival activism and media time/temporalities in relation to social media materialities. The chapter is concerned with materiality in the specific context of video and television production and the pre-digital properties of the media landscape in which the channel first operated. It follows a shift in the cultural form that the channel uses to express itself along with a general transition from analogue to digital video materiality, which involve different forms of temporality, storage and memory. The analysis shows how the relaunch of TV Stop in social media can usefully be understood as driven by three interlaced incentives to store and preserve time; to catch up with times and as impelled by the urge to remember times passed and reminding people of the value of remembering and making connections between past and present struggles.