This thesis looks at the National Unity and Brotherhood Process (2009–2015) that’s one aim was to solve the decades long conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The failure of the process created more violence in the country; hence, it is essential to look back and try to reflect what the process was about. The thesis aims to understand the governmental party’s (AKP) (self-)perceptions of the process and link them to the history of the Turkish Republic. When the Turkish Republic was established, the founding ideology was Kemalism that emphasized exclusive Turkish national identity, secularism and statism. It left little or no space for expressions Kurdish identities. For decades, Kurds were not directly mentioned in public and were spoken of trough frames of terrorism and underdevelopment. The conflict itself started at the turn of the 1980s when Kurdish bationalism found more leverage. Especially in the 1990s the violence in Kurdish regions escalated. Even though the situation had been more peaceful in the 2000s, the AKP wanted to solve the conflict once and for all. In this thesis the perceptions from the time of the process are researched from a governmental publication and from pieces of news by the state-run Anadolu Agency. In the qualitative analysis that was inspired by framing theory, it was notable that the voice of the state became more rigid throughout the process and enemy-images were reproduced more frequently towards the end. The analysis shows that in the process the Turkish state and party leading the state did not challenge pre-existing conceptions of the Kurdish population. Kurdish political movements were presented trough frames of terrorism, which has been a political strategy at least for a century. In addition, the state’s externally and internally created ontological insecurity was not addressed in the process, which highlighted the state’s ambivalent relationship to the minority. This thesis notes that the AKP had a wish to include the Kurdish minority into the political ideology of the party. However, it had little tolerance to Kurdish political movements that challenged the political power of the AKP. The wish and the lack of tolerance show that the state replicated patterns from the its history.

Tourism is one of the largest industries in the world, raising billions of euros a year and employing millions of people worldwide. Tourism is also an integral part of the leisure activities in Western Europe in which travelling is commonplace and mainstream, looking for a new vacation spot draws many to seek guidance and inspiration to plan their next vacations. It is here that the reader, coming from the place I will call Origin, will look for the Destination. One of the most mainstream sources of information are the travel segments of periodicals in paper format or online. The intricacies of travel journalism connect both leisure and news with a touch of advertisement. Travel journalism is, as I will show further in this thesis, more connected to literature and adventure than its other counterparts. Travel segments in newspapers are directed at these potential travelers, inspiring them for their next vacation. In the contemporary world in which social media has spread the reach of pictures from all over the globe My research will focus on European travel journalism articles about Brazil. My analysis will be conducted using CDA and postcolonial theory, aided by feminist theory. This research is qualitative. I argue that the world scenario is unbalanced and that contemporary inequalities between countries stem from the not so distant colonial past. My aim is to spot and analyze these intrinsic relationships of power that are imbedded in discourse through the critical reading of travel journalism articles.

The focus in the debate on exclusion is often placed on excluded people and their assumed characteristics: passivity, deviance, helplessness. Less attention has been paid to the society that produces this discourse. This study aims to turn the focus away from the periphery and place it on the centre, on the context in which exclusion is construed as a social problem. It asks what 'the society of exclusion' is like. How does the society that has given rise to discourse on exclusion and that this discourse produces look like? The exclusion debate is understood as a diagnosis of our time, as a horizon for investigating its sore points. The sorest pertain to the issue of community and that of the disappearing social. Exclusion is more than a social problem: it is a problem of 'the social'. This approach has been influenced by French research. The perspective is relational: exclusion is seen to arise in relation to other people, society and its institutions. The study also draws on constructionism, particularly its critical branch. It takes the disputability of the concept of exclusion as its starting point and presumes that exclusion is not a social fact or state but something that is constantly reproduced by social discourses and mechanisms. These mechanisms are ideological, linked with governance. As discourses and politics are not detached from each other, it is appropriate to criticise discourses that legitimate otherness and scapegoating by essentialising excluded people. The goal is to increase the degrees of freedom of those defined as excluded. The exclusion discourse includes numerous paradoxes. Efforts are made to include excluded people within the sphere of society and its normality. The presumption is that community is something existent and unproblematic, which the very fact that we speak about exclusion undermines. Moreover, the discourse on exclusion lays down boundaries, weakening our sense of community. The genuineness of the efforts to include excluded people can be doubted. Nor is the attitude towards the community building of the excluded positive. The concept of exclusion was brought into use as there was a need for a concept that describes processes. Nevertheless, excluded people are localised socially, spatially and symbolically. They are located in the periphery or beyond it, in a moral and spatial otherness. Drawing boundaries is, however, becoming increasingly problematic nowadays, as more and more positions are becoming uncertain. The fact that excluded people are described as passive individuals supports policies in which public policy is replaced with activation efforts. The discourse joins the trends that have undermined faith in social insurance and contributed to the shift towards neoliberal private prudentalism. Society is increasingly governed by individualisation. However, in order for a society to be a society, both a sense of community and a language for it are needed. The exclusion discourse is also aiming at these, but its language may not be ideal for the purpose. The book consists of a summary and five articles.

This thesis studies women in peacebuilding and concentrates on questions: why women are excluded from peacebuilding, and in vice versa how women could be involved in peacebuilding processes. The case study within this research focuses on the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) and young women’s experiences and opinions about which factors either prevent or improve women’s participation in peace processes. In this master’s thesis, the data was collected by emailing the questionnaire surveys. Five young women from Rojava answered the questions, which were analyzed using conventional content analysis to find respondents’ opinions on barriers and enablers for women’s participation in peacebuilding. The findings of the study demonstrate that women from Rojava emphasized very similar enablers what the literature also underlines. These are an access to formal and informal education, allowing social norms, non-violent environment, political will and participation, and economical and other resources. In addition, a key finding of this research was, that in the case study women stressed their participation in the army and how this empowered them also for being part of peacebuilding. All these enablers are interlinked with each other and to have encouraging environment women to participate in peacebuilding, most of these factors should be in place. In addition, when these factors are lacking, they become barriers for women’s participation. The result of this thesis shows the main factors that are impacting women’s participation in peacebuilding. In addition, an increased understanding about women’s participation in army, and how it may empower women for peacebuilding is a finding worth of deeper study.