Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 2,0, College of Europe (Department for European and Governance Studies), language: English, abstract: In the years 2015 and 2016, the European Union (EU) and (some of) its member states were facing a very high number of asylum-seekers. This inflow revealed the shortcomings and dysfunctionalities of the European asylum system and plunged the EU into one of its biggest crises: Member states could hardly agree on common measures, and different national preferences for dealing with asylum-seekers led to profound and ongoing political divisions. Germany, which particularly was affected by the inflow, sought to ‘europeanize’ the phenomenon and to distribute the loads more evenly across the EU – but met major resistance. Contrarily to the widely held view – both in the academic literature and the European public – that Germany, in recent years, has shaped and even dominated European politics, it largely failed with its main policy proposals in the refugee and migrant crisis. To uncover the reasons, the present thesis applies an analytical model of ‘political leadership’. Based on current academic research, relevant newspaper articles and self-conducted expert interviews, it is argued that there might have been supply but not sufficient demand for successful German political leadership. In doing so, this thesis so far is the only larger academic paper that explicitly links the latest research on political leadership with Germany's role in the EU's refugee and migrant crisis.

In 2015 and 2016, the European Union (EU) and (some of) its member states faced a very high number of asylum-seekers. Germany, which particularly was affected by this inflow, sought to 'europeanise' the phenomenon and to distribute the loads more evenly across the EU - but met major resistance. Contrarily to the widely held view that Germany, in recent years, had shaped European politics, it largely failed with its main policy proposals in the refugee and migrant crisis. To uncover the reasons, this contribution applies an analytical framework of political leadership and post-functionalist theory. Based on the latest academic research, relevant newspaper articles and self-conducted expert interviews, it is argued that there might have been supply of but not sufficient demand for successful German political leadership. The largely failed German leadership is illustrated by two characteristics: first, the setting-up and poor implementation of a European relocation mechanism for refugees; and second, a course correction with regards to its policy proposals by the German government itself in the course of the crisis.

Examines embodiment and emotions in long-term solidarity activism among three communities contesting US torture, militarism and immigration policies.

WINNER of the 2015 ICA Outstanding Book Award This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.

This book presents a new view on the concept of solidarity and explains how it complements justice in health and social care.

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.