Publications
The Duty of Care in International Relations Protecting Citizens Beyond the Border
This book offers a first overarching look at the relationship between states and their citizens abroad, approached through the concept 'Duty of Care'. How can society best be protected, when increasing numbers of citizens are found outside the borders of the state? What are the limits to care – in theory as well as in practical policy? With over 1.2 billion tourists crossing borders every day and more than 230 million expatriates, questions over the sort of duty states have for citizens abroad are politically pressing. Contributors explore both theoretical topics and empirical case studies, examining issues such as as how to care for citizens who become embroiled in political or humanitarian crises while travelling, and exploring what rights and duties states should acknowledge toward nationals who have opted to take up arms for terrorist organizations.
How Do Droughts Impact Household Food Consumption and Nutritional Intake? A Study of Rural India
This paper investigates the impacts of droughts on food expenditure and macronutrient consumption among rural Indian households. To isolate causal effects, I exploit random year-to-year variation in a dry shock, defined as the absolute deviation of rainfall below its long-run mean. I find that the dry shock has a statistically significant and negative effect on household nutrition. For a median dry shock, I estimate that households spend 1 percent less per capita per month on food and consume up to 1.4 percent fewer calories, protein, and fat. Disaggregating the effects by food group, I demonstrate that household diets become less balanced as a result of droughts: the dry shock leads households to rely primarily on cereals and to purchase less vegetables, fruits, pulses, and animal-sourced foods. Hence, droughts negatively impact not only the quantity but also the quality of rural household diets. Finally, I explore the potential channels for these effects. I argue that rather than higher food prices, a decline in household market and non-market income is the primary reason for lower household food consumption and nutrition during droughts. Taken together, these findings suggest that attaining food security amid extreme weather conditions requires an integrated approach that focuses on food not only for survival but also for leading a healthy and active life.
Preface
Foreign and security policy have long been removed from the political pressures that influence other areas of policymaking. This has led to a tendency to separate the analytical levels of the individual and the collective. Using Lacanian theory, which views the subject as ontologically incomplete and desiring a perfect identity which is realised in fantasies, or narrative scenarios, this book shows that the making of foreign policy is a much more complex process. Emotions and affect play an important role, even where ‘hard’ security issues, such as the use of military force, are concerned. Eberle constructs a new theoretical framework for analysing foreign policy by capturing the interweaving of both discursive and affective aspects in policymaking. He uses this framework to explain Germany’s often contradictory foreign policy towards the Iraq crisis of 2002/2003, and the emotional, even existential, public debate that accompanied it. This book adds to ongoing theoretical debates in International Political Sociology and Critical Security Studies and will be required reading for all scholars working in these areas
corporaexplorer: An R package for dynamic exploration of text collections
This article presents the 'corporaexplorer' open source software. 'corporaexplorer' is an R package that uses the Shiny GUI (graphical user interface) framework for dynamic exploration of text collections. The package is designed for use with a wide range of text collections. The intended primary audience are qualitatively oriented researchers in the social sciences and humanities who rely on close reading of textual documents as part of their academic activity. However, the package should also be useful for those doing quantitative textual research and wishing to have convenient access to the texts under study. Main elements in the interactive apps: 1) Input: The ability to filter the corpus and/or highlight documents, based on search patterns (in main text or metadata, including date range). 2) Corpus visualisation: An interactive heat-map of the corpus, based on the search input (calendar heat-map or heat-map where each tile represents one document, optionally grouped by metadata properties). 3) Document visualisation and display: Easy navigation to and within full-text documents with pattern matches highlighted. 4) Document retrieval: Extraction of subsets of the corpus in a format suitable for close reading. While collecting and preparing the text collections to be explored requires some familiarity with R programming, using the Shiny apps for exploring and extracting documents from the corpus should be fairly intuitive also for those with no programming knowledge, once the apps have been set up by a collaborator.
Introduction: Making liberal internationalism great again?
At a time when liberal internationalism and institutions of multilateral cooperation are being dealt almost daily blows, this special issue revisits the notion and practice of middle power liberal internationalism. The introduction suggests that while liberal internationalism is far from dead, the challenges are serious and multiple. Reflecting on the seven essays contained in the volume, it argues that the biggest challenge for a future liberal internationalism is not to double-down on its normative virtues, but critically to reflect on how it can be retooled to respond to new challenges.
Statsbesøk som scenekunst
(Available in norwegian only): Theresa May lyktes ikke med brexit, men viderefører i dag forestillingen om det spesielle forholdet mellom USA og Storbritannia, skriver Kristin Haugevik i denne kronikken.
Brexit and the future of EU defence: a practice approach to differentiated defence integration
What consequences will Brexit have for EU defence integration? Answering this question, the article analyses the new visions for the future of EU defence that emerged in the debate after the Brexit vote. In doing so, the paper moves beyond institutionalism and argues that a practice approach to Brexit paves the way for a deeper understanding of EU integration as a social process and of the effects of Brexit. Through a study of the debates and concrete developments in EU defence since the Brexit referendum, the article shows how defence - an area already subject to differentiation - has enabled innovative visions for defence integration in post-Brexit Europe across three dimensions: the military, the political and the economic. Building on this analysis, the paper concludes on the possible consequences of Brexit for EU defence and the value of a practice approach to differentiated defence integration.
Russian Public Opinion and the Confrontation with the West
What do most Russians think about President Putin, the policies of the Kremlin and the West? Is Russia on the right track? How do Russians view the future? President Vladimir Putin has, since he was elected in 2000, scored high in public opinion polls. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 the polls reached new heights with support from nearly 90 % of the population. However, after the announcement of a comprehensive pension reform in summer 2018, the support decreased. In this working paper, Lev Gudkov provides an overview of how the Russians see the West, Ukraine and the politics of the Kremlin, and how the public opinion on these issues have changed over time. The working paper is based on the regular public opinion polls carried out by the Levada Centre since 2003.
Discourses of Russian-speaking youth in Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan: Soviet Legacies and Responses to Nation-building
Research into post-independence identity shifts among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities has outlined a number of possible pathways, such as diasporization, integrated national minority status and ethnic separatism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people in Almaty and Karaganda, I examine how Russian-speaking minorities identify with the state and imagine their place in a ‘soft’ or ‘hybrid’ post-Soviet authoritarian system. What is found is that Russian-speaking minorities largely accept their status beneath the Kazakh ‘elder brother’ and do not wish to identify as a ‘national minority’. Furthermore, they affirm passive loyalty to the political status quo while remaining disinterested in political representation. Russian-speaking minorities are also ambivalent towards Kazakh language promotion and anxious about the increasing presence of Kazakh-speakers in urban spaces. This article argues that two factors are central to these stances among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities: the persistence of Soviet legacies and the effects of state discourse and policy since 1991.
Russland og det ytre høyre
(Available in Norwegian only): Båndene mellom Russland og ytre høyre i Europa er mer kompliserte enn man kan få inntrykk av i vestlig media, skriver Minda Holm i denne kronikken.