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This article prepares the ground for contributions included in the special issue by unpacking the concepts of stability, democracy and rights, which are included in the overall theme. It is concerned with how these concepts have been defined in the literature and how they relate to issues of potential threat to stability in fragile post-conflict communities. The purpose of the article is to add more insight into how war and conflict may disrupt the everyday practices of communities, and what possibilities or constraints citizens may be facing when dealing with the challenges in the aftermath of war and conflict. In the article we open up to a discussion of democratic lapses and how this may jeopardize legitimation of the state, focusing in particular on the specific situations of Kenya, Uganda and Nepal. We argue that to guarantee stability and rights, there is a need for developing new forms of democracy that find a balance between state autocracy and citizen involvement through good governance. We further argue that citizens have collective agency and are capable of developing new strategies for survival. The article is organized as a literature study of key concepts.

The Danish health care sector currently undergoes changes that imply a gradual transition from an evidence based activity model to a value based quality model centred on patient involvement and value-based governance (Mainz, Kristensen and Bartels 2015; Porter 2010; Rostgaard 2015). The patient naturally occupies a central position in health care, and the transition therefore raises important questions about health care quality and how successive national health quality strategies value quality and ascribe roles and agency to patients. To explore the complexity of these quality strategies, we analyse and discuss how political discourse moments (Rancière 1999; Gamson 1992; Carvalho 2008) influence the contents of the national health quality strategies and how variation in the construal of patient roles and agency indicate discursive struggle in Danish national health care policy. Underlying theoretical concepts are informed by New Public Management, the welfare state, health communication and discourse theory. Our analytical approach is inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995; 2003; 2015) and combines content analysis with linguistic analysis.