Publications
Religiøs autoritet og tynnslitt stat: Valgkamp i sjia-Irak
(Available in Norwegian only) Artikkelen diskuterer sjia-muslimske religiøse lærdes relasjon til statsmakt og analyserer hvordan religiøs autoritet tas i bruk som politisk valuta i Irak. Den tar utgangspunkt i fredagsprekener holdt i forkant av parlamentsvalget 12. mai 2018. Religiøse ledere har måter å generere autoritet på som politikere i svak tilstand mangler. Fremfor alt har Storayatollah 'Ali al-Sistani enorm prestisje, som var tydlig i valget. Artikkelen gjør opp status for Sistanis holdning til irakisk politikk og sammenstiller budskapet med posisjonene til systemkritiske Muqtada al-Sadr samt Jalal al-Din ‘Ali al-Saghir, som målbar interessene til den Iran-vennlige valgalliansen al-Fatah. Den viser hvordan Sadr og Saghir tøyer Sistanis autoritet for å tjene konkurrerende agendaer og setter storayatollahen i en vanskelig situasjon.
Territorialstatens tilstand i dagens Midtøsten
How to understand the contemporary Middle East? Despite a growing literary landscape attempting to illuminate this complex region, this question should not be taken lightly. This essay discusses how the following books contributes to our understanding of the region today: Brennpunkt Midtøsten: Byene som prisme (Butenschøn & Maktabi 2018), Fra opprør til kaos: Midtøsten etter den arabiske våren (Nordenson 2018) and Israel: Historie, politikk og samfunn (Heian-Engdal 2018). While the books have different thematical approaches, all three describe and analyse the current state of the region’s territorial entities. Although concepts such as sovereignty and territorial integrity does not necessarily make much sense in the region today, the authors explain why it is unlikely that we are going to see any changes in existing state formations in the foreseeable future.
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Taliban i Moskva og Doha
Forrige uke møttes en delegasjon fra Taliban og sentrale afghanske politikere til samtaler i Moskva. Møtet var det mest omfattende av sitt slag siden 2001, året da USA gikk til krig mot Taliban. Møtet kom like etter at Taliban har vært i banebrytende forhandlinger med USA i seks dager i Doha, Qatar. For første gang ble Taliban og USA enige om et utkast til et mulig rammeverk for fred.
Participatory Democracy and Evidence-based Decision Making at the Local Level in Ukraine
Comparative Analysis for Theory Development: Reflections on a Study of Women’s Empowerment
Methodological texts about comparative work have focused overwhelmingly on controlled comparisons aimed at causal inference. To show the range of possible goals and approaches, this piece reflects on our own choices while studying the state and women’s empowerment in Norway, Japan, and the United States. We show how our research design evolved with our theoretical thinking, and explain that we did not select comparative “cases,” but rather diverse contexts with interesting variation in our main concept of interest. Finally, we discuss how we constructed multi-cultural research teams to take advantage of insider and outsider perspectives during fieldwork.
Finding a European response to Huawei’s 5G ambitions
This policy brief suggests that European countries should institute national reviewing boards overseen by intelligence agencies to vet Huawei equipment. If that is not feasible due to a lack of resources or capabilities especially among smaller countries, European governments should consider pooling resources and create a common reviewing board. This would also prevent duplication of efforts on national levels. European authorities should also demand from Huawei to clearly separate its international from its domestic business operations in order to further reduce the risk to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of European mobile networks.
Rational choice theory and demand for petty corruption
This article studies corruption as a rational choice phenomenon. Unlike the widespread game-theory approach to explaining corrupt behaviour, this article attempts to describe corruption as continuous utility-maximizing problem. It comes up with a demand for corruption function, which shows how the readiness of a rational person to accept corrupt income depends on several factors such as official wage rate, severity of punishment, awareness of those penalties, probability of being detected and probability of being prosecuted.