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Under conditions of polycrisis — the compound, reinforcing external shocks of the post-2022 period — the European Union has come under sustained stress that the inherited concept of convergence is only partially equipped to absorb. Convergence had largely been studied and developed under conditions of relative stability; the reviewed scholarship therefore offers a limited account of what convergence becomes under sustained external pressure, limited attention to the peripheral member states most exposed to divergence, and limited qualitative insight into the purposes and meanings of convergence. This study addresses that threefold gap through the research question: how do U.S. trade policy and Russia’s war policy influence convergence in the European Union? The study adopts a mixed-methods design weighted toward the qualitative component through the single case of Romania. The primary data originate from ten expert interviews with senior figures across Romanian public life, analyzed through grounded theory collected through an original semi-structured instrument. The study proposes three original contributions: the Neo-Convergence model, which recasts convergence as a crisis-activated, multidimensional, and reciprocal mode; the Technological Clubs framework, which reclassifies member states by command over technology into four clubs; and governance-mediated convergence, which identifies domestic governance capacity as the transmission through which external pressure is integrated as convergence or divergence, reframing Romania from a peripheral member state to a strategic frontier.

The thesis seeks to understand the major influencers behind Ukraine’s denuclearization outcome in the form of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, which stipulated vague security assurances from the US, the UK, and Russia to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for returning to Russia the Soviet nuclear weapons Ukraine inherited after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The thesis discusses five influencers or independent variables and their impact on the denuclearization outcome. Specifically, the variables involve Ukraine’s inability to control the inherited Soviet nuclear weapons, the nuclear weapons’ fast-approaching expiration dates, a multi-billion-dollar compensation for the inherited Soviet nuclear weapons, the US diplomatic and financial support, and security and economic threats posed by Russia. Furthermore, to support the premise that a nuclear Ukraine was feasible, the thesis explores a counterfactual scenario of Ukraine managing to retain and operate the inherited tactical nuclear weapons before their removal to Russia from 1991 to 1992. The thesis concludes that the inherited tactical nuclear weapons were the only route for Ukraine to become a nuclear power in the early 1990s, as obtaining the long-sought security guarantees from the US and the UK to deter Russia was not feasible. The thesis also points out that with the tactical and strategic nuclear weapons’ fast-approaching expiration dates, Ukraine would have to develop its own nuclear deterrent eventually. Such a scenario would have likely prevented the annexation of Crimea and a full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war with millions of casualties.

Our planet is approaching critical tipping points from accelerating climate change (IPCC, 2023). According to 2023 International Energy Agency (IEA)’s Net Zero Roadmap (2023), the required investment to put our world on track for net zero emissions by 2050 requires approximately USD 4.5 trillion annually by 2030. In response, ESG investing has grown rapidly as investors increasingly aim to align their portfolios with global climate goals (World Economic Forum, 2020). Yet, a fundamental debate persists: Can ESG investment strategies match the returns of conventional portfolios, or must investors sacrifice financial performance to achieve climate alignment? As trillions of dollars are concentrated in passive ETFs globally today, demonstrating that ESG or climate-aligned ETFs can deliver comparable, or even more resilient returns offers a powerful lever to redirect large-scale capital flows towards a low-carbon future without sacrificing financial performance. My research directly addressed this debate by evaluating the performance and investment implications of global passive equity ETFs aligned with the EU Paris-Aligned Benchmarks (PAB) over the period of January 2021 to May 2026. My primary research hypotheses were: 1) Climate-aligned PAB outperformed their conventional peers by 1% from calendar year perspective from 2021 to 2025; and 2) Given their systematic design, PAB ETFs demonstrated greater fund size resilience during market shocks. To test these hypotheses, I constructed a comprehensive global dataset of PAB equity ETFs launched since 2021. A pair matching methodology ensured robust analysis, pairing each climate-aligned ETF with an ETF tracking the parent conventional index. I evaluated portfolio performance using annual calendar year total return and I assessed the statistical significance of the paired return differentials using paired-samples t-tests and confirming the findings with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. Across 166 matched ETF-year observations from 2021 through 2025, PAB ETFs underperformed by an average of approximately 2.72% per year, with the shortfall widening after 2021 and reaching its largest gap in 2025. Fund-size resilience, however, told a different story. During the earliest market shocks, such as the COVID recovery and green rally, the energy and inflation surge, and the interest-rate hike cycle, PAB ETFs retained and grew assets more strongly than their conventional peers, though this advantage faded as markets stabilized and reversed modestly during the later tariff and trade policy shocks. These findings carry concrete implications for multiple stakeholders. For investors and asset managers, the results show that climate alignment through PAB ETFs carried a measurable short-term return cost over the sample period, underscoring the need to communicate this trade-off transparently and to set realistic risk-return expectations. At the same time, the stronger fund-size resilience observed during several shock periods indicates that demand for climate-aligned funds remained durable even when relative returns lagged, suggesting that many investors weigh sustainability objectives, mandate consistency, and long-term transition positioning alongside fund performance. For index providers and issuers, the persistence of the return gap highlights the value of scrutinizing the sector tilts and implementation costs embedded in PAB benchmark construction.

Vaccine hesitancy has evolved substantially since the World Health Organization (WHO) first identified it as a global health threat in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this evolution by introducing messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology as a named, scrutinized object of public concern. As mRNA platforms now expand beyond infectious disease into cancer immunotherapy, with over 120 active clinical trials underway, understanding how hesitancy themes have shifted across time may help anticipate public reception of these emerging applications. This thesis examines vaccine hesitancy literature across three periods: pre-COVID-19, the COVID-19 pandemic era, and the post-pandemic declaration era, using a scoping review and qualitative content analysis of peer-reviewed sources identified through PubMed and Web of Science. Articles (N = 134) were coded thematically across twelve categories. Across the reviewed literature, hesitancy themes shifted in character over three periods. Before the pandemic, concerns centered on safety perceptions, parental autonomy, and policy-driven exemption debates. During the pandemic, attention turned to mechanism-specific fears, most notably the persistent misconception that mRNA vaccines alter human DNA, alongside the emergence of political identity as an independently studied predictor of hesitancy. After the pandemic, the literature showed distrust generalizing into routine childhood immunization, objections reframed around autonomy, and medical racism named more explicitly as a causal mechanism rather than merely a correlate. Across all three periods, racial and structural disparities rooted in historical medical mistreatment persisted as a durable theme distinct from biological literacy gaps. Because this study reflects patterns in a relevance-ranked, non-exhaustive literature sample rather than population-level survey data, these thematic shifts should be understood as changes in scholarly attention and framing– not as direct evidence of change in public attitudes. Building on these patterns, this thesis proposes a hypothesis-generating communication framework for emerging mRNA cancer therapeutics. It is organized around four response pathways: mechanistic misconception correction, transparent acknowledgment of genuine evidentiary gaps, institutional trust-building, and autonomy-affirming framing, intended to guide future empirical testing rather than to predict how the public will in fact receive these therapies.

As the paradigm shifts from government-backed entities in spaceflight and exploration to private ventures, guidance and accepted regulation to define sustainability beyond the scope of Earth-centric initiatives is essential to the successful operations of space flight. There is concern that current regulatory guidance from space laws and treaties such as the Outer Space Treaty and Liability Convention do not adequately address the private space industry environmental and social impacts, as they were formed during the period of government-led space exploration (Di Tullio & Rea, 2024). While the Artemis Accords and UN’s Guidelines for the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities were established –in 2020 and 2019 respectively— during private & commercial space exploration, they are not legally binding (Maiwald, 2023). Additional guidance can be sourced from various sustainability reporting frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), Global Reporting Initiatives (GRI), and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB); however, they are Earth-centric and fail to provide a framework for space-centric sustainability initiatives, leaving management, accountability, and compliance entirely up to the discretion of private ventures to interpret material sustainability topics (Wilson & Vasile, 2023). I combined two studies to develop space-centric sustainability indicators, identify the most material indicators to Earth’s stakeholders, and understand the influence of organizational macro-determinants on sustainability reporting across four space company cohorts –Launch, Operators, Frontier, Servicing. In the first study, 62 space-centric sustainability indicators were developed across four categories – Cultural Heritage, Planetary Protection, In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), and Astronaut Health & Human Factors. A space sustainability stakeholder analysis survey was conducted across five stakeholder groups –Academic/Researcher, Business and Government, General Public, General STEM, Space Industry—to identify the most material indicators. Respondents provided feedback on indicators from “Not Important” to “Extremely Important”, then were instructed to perform a forced-choice ranking for all “Extremely Important” selections within each category. As evaluated by a derived Composite Materiality Index (CMI), overall responses ranked Planetary Protection as the most important, followed by Astronaut Health & Human Factors, then Cultural Heritage and ISRU. In the second study, 80 space companies across four company cohorts, different maturity levels, regions, years of operations, company size, sustainability leadership structure, and financial strength were audited to the 15 most material space-centric sustainability indicators utilizing a 4-level ordinal scale and a binary Boolean variable framework to account for localized low variance. Results were evaluated (by cohort) for quantity of reported indicators, qualitative depth of report, and balance of reports across indicator types. Greater financial strength and higher executive oversight of sustainability leadership were determined to be the two most impactful internal drivers for quantity, qualitative depth, and balance of reporting. Geographic location of primary operation was determined to be the single most impactful external driver for quantity, qualitative depth, and balance of reporting.