Researcher
Benjamin de Carvalho
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Summary
Benjamin de Carvalho is a research professor at NUPI, working in the Research group on Global Order and Diplomacy (GOaD). His research interests have, broadly speaking, been between three areas: (i) historical international relations, (ii) UN peacekeeping, and (iii) status in international relations.
Within these fields, he has published on issues of broader historical change such as the formation of the nation-state in Europe, sovereignty, and the role played by confessionalization and religion. He has also been involved in a number of projects on UN peacekeeping, and has worked on the protection of civilians and sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia, Chad, and the Sudans. He is also involved in projects addressing status as a key driver of foreign policy, focusing on Norway and Brazil. Central issues here are the role played by small states in international politics, emerging powers and great power responsibility. Other research interests include hegemony, popular culture and international relations theory.
De Carvalho is currently involved in work of more historical character. He is currently the Principal Investigator of Empires, Privateering and the Sea (EMPRISE), a project funded by the Research Council of Norway addressing the importance of privateering for the formation of overseas empires in the Atlantic (1556-1856). He is also the main collaborator in Conceptual History of International Relations (CHOIR), led by Halvard Leira.
In addition, de Carvalho has played an important role in the institutionalization of Historical International Relations as a subfield of the discipline of International Relations. Together with Leira, he was instrumental in setting up the Historical International Relations Section of the ISA, of which he has served as section program chair (2015-2017) and section chair (2017-2019). Leira and de Carvalho are also co-editors of the four-volume set Historical International Relations.
He is formerly a co-editor of the leading Scandinavian-language International Relations-journal Internasjonal Politikk.
Benjamin is Editor in Chief of the journal Cooperation and Conflict, 2023-2027.
Expertise
Education
2009 PhD in International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
2001 MA, New School for Social Research, New York, USA
Work Experience
2006- PhD student/Senior Research Fellow/Research Professor, NUPI
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Belated Courtship? The Uneasy Partnership between Brazil and the EU
The EU accorded the status of “strategic partner” to Brazil in 2007. While the aim of this was to foster more effective cooperation with the Latin American giant, the record of the partnership is less than clear. While the strategic partnership was a clear acknowledgement of Brazil’s aspirations and status potential, it may have been sealed too late to have an impact on Brazil’s trajectory towards a more prominent global role and may mean too little for actually changing the course of EU–Brazil relations. For, viewed from Brasilia, the extent to which the special partnership has affected the relationship between the EU and Brazil remains an open question. Despite its new status as a strategic partner, Brazil’s foreign policy has been surfing on the waves of South–South cooperation schemes. So, while the EU remains a market for Brazilian exports which can-not be overlooked, Brazil’s search for new partners and China’s increased prominence in its trade balance have provided a new range of opportunities in foreign policy. As other states, including Norway, are now working out strategies to seal more formalized relationships with Brazil – and other emerging powers, for that matter – the strategic partnership between Brazil and the EU offers important lessons to take into account. While the strategic partnership was initially more valuable for Brazil, this did not last. Further-more, it was unclear what the new label entailed in practice, and how it was supposed to affect actual cooperation patterns.
Systems of Tax Evasion and Laundering (STEAL)
The project seeks to identify Global Wealth Chains that are the articulation of organized activities between individuals or international entities, developed countries, developing countries, and tax h...
Conceptual Unclarity and Competition: The Protection of Civilians and the Responsibility to Protect
The Protection of Civilians in UN Peacekeeping: Concept, Implementation and Practice
Training in Vain? Bottlenecks in Deploying Civilians for UN Peacekeeping
UN peacekeeping missions suffer from cumbersome recruitment processes, high vacancy rates and a shortage of civilian staff. This article explores the bottlenecks hampering the recruitment and deployment of trained personnel, especially civilians. Paradoxically, an increased number of trained personnel has not translated into higher deployment rates. Individual factors and structural bottlenecks together accounted for half of the nondeployments. Of the latter, the informal nature of the UN’s recruitment system and the central role played by personal contacts stands out. The article makes the case for an improved link between the recruitment architecture of the UN and its training programmes, and a significant overhaul of the UN recruitment architecture per se. Unless the UN and international training programmes address this paradox, the risk of training in vain will remain.