Anni Roth Hjermann

Summary

Anni Roth Hjermann is a PhD fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she is working on a monograph provisionally entitled The global politics of scapegoating: Russia’s ambivalent contestation of the international social order 1999-2022. At NUPI, Anni works in the Research group for Russia, Asia and interntational trade.

Anni is interested in critical IR theory (widely conceived), in particular critical approaches to international socialisation structures (recognition, status, stigmatisation and norms, in particular human rights and democracy) and their contestation, and how socialisation/contestation relate to state identity, sovereignty and sovereign agency, and international (dis)ordering. Her empirical work is focused on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

In her doctoral research, Anni studies Russia’s narrative(s) about its international socialisation, historically and presently – especially about the experience of adjusting to externally (western) set standards and giving up agency and authentic identity in this process. The monograph develops the argument that Russia’s narrative constructs scapegoats that difficult socialisation experiences (self-betrayal, but also failing at westernisation) are projected onto, and interrogates the wider implications of scapegoating in the context of international social ordering.

Anni has researched and published on Russia-NATO security relations (in Arctic Review on Law and Politics) and on Russian authoritarianism and its internal-external dynamics (in New Perspectives and Internasjonal Politikk). Anni is also the former co-Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed IR journal Cambridge Review of International Affairs (CRIA).