Publications
Internasjonal politikk og Forsvaret: Internasjonalisering og akademisering av den militære utdanningen
Norsk forsvarsdiskurs post-1990: Internasjonalisering og nasjonalt forsvar i nytt samspill
Russia’s Return as True Europe, 1991–2017
Since the reign of Peter the Great, Russia has identified itself in opposition to Europe. In the late 1980s, Michael Gorbachev and associates forged a liberal representation of Europe and initiated a Western-oriented foreign policy. Against this westernizing or liberal representation of Europe stood what was at first a makeshift group of old Communists and right-wing nationalists, who put forward an alternative representation that began to congeal around the idea that the quintessentially Russian trait was to have a strong state. This article traces how this latter position consolidated into a full-fledged xenophobic nationalist representation of Europe, which marginalized first other forms of nationalism and then, particularly since 2013, liberal representations of Europe. The official Russian stance is now that Russia itself is True Europe, a conservative great power that guards Europe’s true Christian heritage against the False Europe of decadence and depravity to its west.
Intelligence Oversight and the Security of the State
A key task for intelligence oversight in democracies is to ensure that the intelligence services operate and carry out their mandated duties within the constraints of national and international law. As the control of the activities and methods of intelligence services necessarily involves a group of overseers who gain access to classified information about state secrets, democratic oversight inherently entails a security dimension. To date, the degree to which democratic oversight might affect state security has not been investigated in depth by Security or Intelligence Studies, although the issue has occasionally come up. After the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S., somewhat risk-averse services, due to extensive oversight, were mentioned as possible explanation for the intelligence failures leading to the catastrophic events. Most mature Western democracies have lately established various mechanisms of independent intelligence oversight, as part of their system of checks and balances with the executive power. Thus, the question of how oversight might, or might not, harm the security concerns of the state is of considerable interest. As intelligence oversight is a fairly new institutionalized activity in many democracies, and as the matters discussed by the “overseers at work” are often classified, a deficit exists in public knowledge about this topic. Important, therefore, is greater knowledge and appreciation of the factors and issue areas likely to be the most important when assessing how intelligence oversight affects state security concerns. Interviews in 2016 with security experts from the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands provide in-depth knowledge of how intelligence oversight relates to matters of state security. They offer a better understanding of what factors should be considered by oversight bodies, secret services, and legislators when setting up and implementing effective democratic oversight of intelligence activities, in order not to weaken the security of the state.
Vilje til omstilling - før og nå
(Available in Norwegian only): I dagens forsvarsdebatt er Forsvarets evne til å håndtere et bredt spekter av trusler under mer usikre internasjonale rammebetingelser sentralt. Det er stor oppslutning om at Forsvaret bør ha en viss avskrekkende effekt, kunne håndtere mindre episoder alene, og delta i utenlandsoperasjoner - også for å verne om folkeretten, som ikke lenger kan tas for gitt. Dagens forsvarspolitikk, som virker åpenbar, selvfølgelig og ‘naturlig’, har likevel ikke alltid vært det. Kronikken viser denne politikken er et resultat av kampen mellom ulike virkelighetsforståelser i norsk forsvarsdebatt fra 1990 og til i dag.
Usikre rammer for norsk forsvarspolitikk
(Available in Norwegian only): USAs utenrikspolitikk og et militært potent Russland skaper uforutsigbare internasjonale rammevilkår. Både NATO og Norge har vendt «hjem» igjen både mentalt (forsvarsidentitet og trusselbilde) og fysisk (kollektiv sikkerhet og territorielt forsvar). Men nye internasjonale rammevilkår krever nytenkning, framfor nostalgi for gamle tenkemåter og løsninger. Tiden er moden for å tenke strategisk om hvordan de sikkerhetspolitiske pilarene som norsk forsvarspolitikk hviler på, herunder NATO, kan gi størst mulig sikkerhet og forutsigbarhet.
Security, ethnicity, nationalism
In this article, Neumann asks which aspects of ethnicity and nationalism that may be brought into sharper focus if we read these two phenomena with a view to how they have been shaped by security concerns. The first part of the article clears up some problems inherent in such exercises in diachronic concept analysis, and establishes the temporal area of validity for the analysis. The second part argues that the very emergence of the concept of ethnos (and its Roman translation, gens) was immersed in security thinking. It emerged as a way in which Greeks and Romans imposed order on what was outside that was not there before. Ethnic groups became ethnic by being interpellated by a stronger polity, and the process was driven first and foremost by security concerns. The third part illustrates this with a case study of the emergence of Slavic ethnicity. The fourth part of the article discusses how, with the advent of nationalism, there is an inversion. If ethnicity was imposed on subaltern groups, then European empires attempted to deny nationalism to such groups by insisting that they did not have the history to deserve it. Once again, security concerns played a key role, for as rightly seen by empires, nationhood could be an important anti-colonial resource. The paper ends by noting how nationalism invariably underlines the vitality of the Self, and juxtaposes it with the decrepitude of Others. With reference to present-day Russia, I note how the use of such organic metaphors in and of themselves securitize the relationship between nations, for the implication is that the old should disappear for the new to live, and that highlights security concerns on both sides of the relationship.