Kultur som en arena för identitetspolitik : En diskursanalys av internationella konflikter i Eurovision Song Contest.

The cultural event Eurovision Song Contest has shown signs to contain international conflicts where countries have not been able to keep them out of the competition, which has created a “spill over effect” on the event. This thesis has aimed to investigate why culture, in this case the Eurovision Song Contest, has become an arena for international identity politics, as the contest should be a depoliticised arena. The thesis has been studied as a case study and international conflicts have been investigated as the cases. The selected conflicts that are investigated in this thesis are the one´s between Russia and Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, as well as Israel, Lebanon and Palestine. The conservative LGBTQ-discussion has also been analysed as a fourth conflict. The study has been analysed from a discourse analysis and with the theoretical perspective of constructivism, which has been used as an explanatory theory. The selected empirical material mainly involve media reports related to the Eurovision Song Contest. The analysis shows that the countries demonstrated a lack of mutual understanding of each other's interests, which the theory constructivism claims are a requirement for cooperation. The conflicts have arisen and appeared in different ways, but all of them have also been about fragmented identity perceptions. This has partly been an explanation of why conflicts have arisen in a cultural context such as the Eurovision Song Contest. The explanation on the LGBTQ-discussion has also been about different perceptions of identity and interests but it has mainly been about a new norm, where love can exist between the same sexes and where identities do not need to be defined based on just men and women. According to constructivism, this new norm will need time to be accepted and until it will belong to social constructs. Eastern Europe and Western Europe differ in this fact where Eastern Europe has not come as far in the development with the LGBTQ-discussion.