Researcher
Halvard Leira
Contactinfo and files
Summary
Halvard Leira is Research Professor and Research Director at NUPI.
Halvard Leira’s main areas of research is foreign policy and diplomacy, with a special emphasis on the Norwegian varieties. He also has a long-standing research interest in historical international relations, and international thought. Leira completed his PhD thesis in May 2011, titled «The Emergence of Foreign Policy: Knowledge, Discourse, History».
Expertise
Education
2011 PhD, Political Science, University of Oslo
2002 Cand. Polit., Political Science, Department of political Science, University of Oslo
Work Experience
2024 - Research Director, NUPI
2003- Research Fellow/Phd-candidate/Senior Research Fellow/Research Professor, NUPI
Aktivitet
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Clear all filtersStories we live by: the rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts
Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we risk closing down opportunities for different ways of imagining both the present and the future. In this article, we acknowledge the advances made in HIR over the last decades but suggest that a closer engagement with conceptual history would enhance its potential even further, making it possible to explore how a wider space of experience can also widen our horizon of expectations.
The future is just another past
Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discarded, new ones adopted, and existing ones modified. This implies that any exercise in ‘futurology’ must necessarily come with an openness towards conceptual change, and that a key challenge for International Studies going forward will consist in matching our conceptual toolbox to an ever-changing world. The importance of conceptual change has until recently been neglected in the study of global politics. Thus, in this paper we start by presenting the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change by laying out key past and present conceptual changes in the international realm. We then move on to a presentation of conceptual history and the tools it provides us for grasping conceptual change, before discussing how to tackle conceptual developments when thinking about the future of global politics.
How do our concepts of the world shape how we understand the world?
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The ugly duckling of the foreign services
Visiting prisoners, assisting lost travellers and distressed expats. Consular work is often considered the ugly duckling of the foreign services,...
Book presentation: The Counterinsurgent Imagination
How and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures?
Book Launch: Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders
We invite you to this book launch with Ayse Zarakol and her new book on the rise and fall of world orders.
CHIP Annual Lecture 2020-2021: On Becoming International
NUPI's Center for Historical International Politics (CHIP) invites you to this seminar with Jens Bartelson.
The value of diplomatic history in a changing world
This chapter argues for the value of a careful reading of diplomatic history in approaching our changing world. Diplomatic history does not hold unambiguous and clear lessons or analogies, but can alert us to both contingency and the existence of different developmental trajectories.