This dissertation's primary objective is to analyze the lack of gender-balanced parliaments within the European Union. Worldwide, women continue to be highly underrepresented in the legislature, and only five countries globally have reached gender parity in parliaments. The European Union offers comprehensive …

This research aims to examine how the EU and its Member States can advance its support for the ICC’s complementarity principle. The principle of complementarity is one of the ICC’s core principles and its paramount importance is acknowledged by the EU. Subsequently, the ICC is a court of last resort …

More than three decades after the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the expected triumph of the liberal democracy did not prove to be a straightforward phenomenon. The post-communist states entered the process of democratization with the plan of reuniting with their Western …

Although Grodzka Island is located in the heart of the city, many citizens of Szczecin have forgotten this piece of land. The island is surrounded by a very strong historical context of the popular cultural centre and an upcoming new hotspot in the city: the post-industrial harbour. Today, the city of …

Since 2011, over 500 Belgian nationals have become radicalised and left Belgium for a Jihadist conflict zone. The Brussel bombings, on the 22nd of March 2016 were carried out by two Belgian nationals who were also returning Jihadists. This dissertation explores whether Belgium can improve its current …

Since the 1960s, the structure of the German population has significantly changed as a result of a number of migration waves. This structural change, and the fact that is was rather ignored by German governments, created a democratic deficit. Large parts of the permanent population were structurally …

After the failure of the League of Nations after World War I, the Allied powers (the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union) came together to form a new international organization – the United Nations - that could save future generations from war and the atrocities experienced during …

Community forestry is a way to combine forest conservation with economic development of forest depending communities. In the Pacific zone of northern Peru, the rural population heavily relies on the endemic dry forest ecosystem as a source of firewood, timber and as grazing area. Bad management, overuse …

The objective of this dissertation is to investigate the reasons for a low political participation in Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Velvet Revolution, which started on 17 November 1989, by a literature review. The Czechoslovak citizens reacted on several developments in their surrounding countries, …

The nation-state had a long history of success, but today it is failing its citizens on a global scale. Over the last hundred years, nation-states focussed on maximizing internal unity and jurisdictional sovereignty. Benjamin R. Barber’s ‘If Mayors Ruled The World’ is the central source of this thesis …