Brazil's Rise to the Global Stage (BRAGS)
BRAGS seeks to understand the drivers behind Brazilian humanitarian action and participation in peacekeeping and peacebuilding activities....
Cooperation between NUPI and the Moscow School of Civic Education (MSCE)
Follow the money: the role of cross-border networks in natural resource extraction, stolen assets recovery, and tax havens and the regulation of cross-border capital flows from extractive industry in East Africa (FOLLOW)
The project will examine the formal and informal regulation of cross border flows of natural resource wealth, with a particular emphasis on the crossborder networks that are at the heart of much of th...
Understanding the conflicts in the MENA region
The purpose of the activity is to systematically explore and better understand the reconfiguration of violence in the MENA region....
Regional dimensions of the nuclear diplomacy with Iran
The project discusses the relationship between the P5+1/Iran talks and regional Middle Eastern affairs....
Energy security in the Baltic Sea region: Regional Coordination and Management of Interdependencies (BES)
The project is to provide deeper insights into recent dynamics of energy cooperation in the Baltic Sea region....
National and European Governance: Polish and Norwegian Cooperation Towards More Efficient Security, Energy and Migration Policies (GOODGOV)
The aim of the project is to analyse the current situation in three fields of governance – national security, energy and migration – in both Polish-Norwegian bilateral and in broader European context....
Russian aluminium (RUSAL)
The main aim of the project is to provide detailed insights into development of Russian aluminum sector in a broader Russian and international political and economic context....
Semi-cores in imperial relations: The cases of Scotland and Norway
Recently, the field of International Relations has seen increased interest in international hierarchy, and also an upswing in the analytical study of imperial logics of rule. Nonetheless, existing structural models of empire focus on core-periphery dynamics, and so cannot explain polities that display elements of both core and periphery. Therefore, I offer the new concept of ‘semi-cores’. Semi-cores are a specific form of historical political associations whereby certain imperial provinces are different from the others in terms of the close relationships it maintains with the imperial metropolis. Semi-cores are different by virtue of being relatively similar. The conceptualisation of semi-cores is followed by a section illustrating its logic, examining the relatively unfamiliar cases of Scotland and Norway and their position within the Danish and British empires, respectively. Although being separate imperial provinces, these were tightly connected to an imperial core. This concept helps us better understand imperial logics, and in the process shows how cultural factors can be formalised into accounts of structural logics of rule, impacting our understanding of both historical and contemporary hierarchical international affairs.