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"What were the ideas about conflicts and conflict resolutions in the Nordic countries during the Vendel Period and the Viking Age? What role did i.e. gender and power hierarchies play in the conflicts? All of the contributing texts are, in one way or another, related to the theme 'war and peace'. They present new interpretations of some of the Old Scandinavian texts as well as of archaeological material: the runic inscription on the Eggja stone (Andreas Nordberg), texts about the fight between the god Thor and the giant Hrungnir (Tommy Kuusela), about the valkyries (Britt-Mari Näsström), about a phalos cult (Maths Bertell), about fylgjur, a type of beings regarded as related to the fate of a person (Eldar Heide), about enclosed areas for fights and battles (Torsten Blomkvist), about the defilement of sacred areas and places as a power strategy (Olof Sundqvist), about ritualisations of peace negotiations (Stefan Olsson), and about Ragnarök, the end and renewing of the world (Anders Hultgård).
The book has been edited by Hakan Rydving and Stefan Olsson, both from the The Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion (AHKR) at the University of Bergen.
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This book is published in Swedish:
Vilka idéer om konflikter och konfliktlösningar hade man i Norden under vendel- och vikingatid (från ca 550 till ca 1100)? Hur uppfattades gudar som Oden och Tor och andra väsen som valkyrior och fylgjor kunna påverka krig och fred? Hur reglerades användningen av våld och hur utformades fredsprocesser? Vilken roll spelade kön och makthierarkier i konflikterna? Hur förhåller sig de förkristna skandinaviska föreställningarna om den sista striden till motsvarande kristna och forniranska traditioner? Det är några av de frågor som bidragen i den här boken diskuterar. Undersökningarna baseras i huvudsak på texter från den aktuella perioden och från tidig medeltid, men också på arkeologiskt material. De ger intressanta exempel på hur källorna till vendel- och vikingatida traditioner kan analyseras om man tar utgångspunkt i frågor om krig och fred.
Boken har redigerats av Håkan Rydving och Stefan Olsson, båda verksamma vid Institutt for arkeologi, historie, kultur- og religionsvitskap (AHKR) vid Universitetet i Bergen."

Based on a poststructural discourse-theoretical perspective, the aim of this thesis is to critically examine the construction of the Swedish compulsory school's democratic education and its consequences for the teacher subject, in educational policy texts. Set against the backdrop of what is commonly referred to as a crisis of democracy, the study takes its point of departure in changes in educational politics in recent decades and the new national curriculum for the compulsory school in 2011. The thesis uses the poststructural discourse-theory of the political philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as its theoretical and methodological framework. Their main objective has been to revive socialist politics by suggesting a radical, plural democracy as an alternative for a new left. A number of national policy texts were chosen for the analysis. The selection covers official reports and government bills on the Education Act and on the Teacher Education Reform Act, the Education Act, the National Curriculum and a selection of documents from the Swedish National Agency for Education, ranging from 2008 to 2018. The main results show that democratic education rests on a notion of the democratic society which creates relations between a democratic universalism based on individual rights and an unspoken national homogeneity. Democratic education is constructed as a broad and complex task aiming at the fostering of democratic competence, assuring equivalent education and counteracting abusive behaviour. The impact of neoliberal policy and new public management philosophy is evident in the empirical material analysed. The study concludes that democratic education is constructed as part of a management perspective where democracy becomes the means of achieving a goal – the governed subject – which relates to pupils and teachers alike. In addition, the focus on consensus and rational thinking as well as the tendency to locate conflict resolution in the legal sphere contribute to the notion of a school free from abuse. ; I många demokratiska samhällen har skolan ett ansvar att förbereda unga människor för sin roll som demokratiska medborgare. En vanlig utgångspunkt tas i att utbildning om, genom och för demokrati är avgörande för demokratins fortlevnad. I en tid där högerpopulistisk retorik, desinformation och hot mot folkvalda hör till vardagen förefaller det viktigare än någonsin att utbilda för demokrati. Avhandlingens syfte är att kritiskt granska konstruktionen av grundskolans demokratiuppdrag och vilka konsekvenser den får för lärarsubjektet. Baserat på de politiska filosoferna Ernesto Laclaus och Chantal Mouffes poststrukturella teorier om diskurs, hegemoni och radikal demokrati konstrueras ett ramverk för att analysera ett urval av nationella utbildningspolitiska texter mellan 2009 – 2018. Tidigare forskning visar att debatten om det demokrati- och medborgarfostrande uppdraget närmar sig en marknadsliberal position och flera diskurs- eller textanalytiska studier indikerar diskurser och språkbruk som influerats av nyliberal ideologi. Resultatet från studien visar hur uppdraget tar form i relation till mål- och resultatstyrning, dokumentation och kvalitetssäkring där demokratiuppdraget tar form som en del av ett managementperspektiv. En särskild form av styrning i skärningspunkten mellan en juridisk reglering av mellanmänsklig samvaro, deliberativa samtalskvaliteter och betoningen av konsensus resulterar i att demokratiuppdraget konstrueras som den kränkningsfria skolan. Avhandlingens bidrag består i att ställa nya frågor om skolans demokratiuppdrag och belysa hur uppdraget tillskrivs mening och vilka konsekvenserna av detta blir.

This thesis is about the conflict between participation and bureaucracy. This conflict is illustrated by a case study within the Swedish Armed Forces under the activity that preceded the 1996 Resolution on Defence. More closely it focuses on the decision-making process that led to the Swedish Armed Forces report that were handed over to the Government in March 1996. In this decision-making process the Supreme Commander tried different ways to create participation among all the high- ranking officers, from local up to Headquarters level, to make them participate in the process. The thesis answers the question if it is possible to create participation in a bureau­cratic organisation such as the Swedish Armed Forces, and the conclusion that I draw is that participation is hard to establish. First there is a conflict within the bureaucratic form itself, since a bureaucracy implies a diversification of assignments and responsibilities in different functions and at different levels in a hierarchy. Every level has its own task to fulfil and this states how reality is to be understood. In the Swedish Armed Forces the bureaucratic structure is reinforced by the fact that the officer is promoted to a higher rank after his or her military training. Both the bureaucratic structure and the military training will lead to a differentiation between individuals, and they will be placed in different skills and status levels within the organisation. Besides this, individuals will gather information mostly from their own level, which will further fortify the difference between the levels. Furthermore there are also individual factors connected to the bureaucratic structure that have shown to complicate participation. For example individuals choose not to participate since they experience that they lack necessary competens for the task, that they do not have time, that they have not been consulted or that they consider the task to be solved at a higher level. So even if the military decision-making model encourages and advocates partici­pation, there is a big difficulty to break the bureaucratic design. Leaders often show inability to go from a bureaucratic leadership style to a democratic one. At the same time the subordinate support their leaders when they act as a traditional leader. ; digitalisering@umu

With continued pressure on biodiversity and ever-growing conflicts with human development, qualified systems for scenario modelling, impact assessment and decision support are urgently needed. Such systems must be able to integrate complex models and information from many sources and do so in a flexible and transparent way. To that end, as well as for other complicated and data-intensive biodiversity research purposes, the concept of LifeWatch has emerged. The idea of LifeWatch is to construct e-infrastructure and virtual laboratories by integrating large data sources, computational capacities, and tools for analysis and modelling in an open, serviceoriented architecture. To be efficient and accurate, a continuous inflow of large quantities of data is essential. However, even with new techniques, government-funded monitoring data and research data will not feed the system with up-to-date species information of sufficient scale and resolution. To fill this void, skilled amateur observers (citizen scientists) can contribute to a very valuable extent. After a preparatory phase, a Swedish LifeWatch (SLW) consortium was initiated in 2011. Swedish LifeWatch developed an infrastructure where all components are accessible through open web services. At the SLW Analysis portal, different formats of species and environmental data can be accessed instantly, and integrated, analysed, visualized and downloaded at selected temporal, spatial or taxonomic scales. Swedish LifeWatch currently provides 46 million species observations from eight different databases, all harmonized according to standardized formats and the Dyntaxa taxonomic backbone database. Almost 40 million of these observations were provided by citizens through the online reporting system named the Species Observation System (SOS) or Artportalen. This paper describes this system, as well as the incentives that make it so successful. The citizen science data in the SOS are accessible, together with data from research and monitoring, in the SLW infrastructure, making the latter a powerful instrument for large-scale data extraction, visualization and analysis.