NUPI-podden #23: Hva mener norske velgere om utenrikspolitikk?
13. september skal befolkningen velge hvem som skal styre landet de neste fire åra. Men hva slags tillit har velgerne egentlig til de ulike partie...
NUPIpodden #24: Et styrt valg i Russland
Ikke overraskende kunne det regjerende partiet i Russland, Det forente Russland – også omtalt som Putins parti, erklære valgseier 20. september 20...
Revisiting the Case of Ethnography and International Relations
This article revisits the debate on the role of ethnography in International Relations. It primarily does this by elucidating three points of tension in the literature on ethnography in International Relations. Firstly, it tackles the challenges related to ‘getting on’ with ethnography after the reflexive methodological developments that have taken place within anthropology since the 1980s. Secondly, it investigates how to overcome certain matters of scale and how to conceptualise the ‘international’ methodologically, or more specifically, ethnographically. When looking at issues that somehow exist and operate on the international scale, the ethnographic task of immersion in local scenes does sometimes seem like an ill-suited approach. However, I argue, this problematisation is dependent on a certain methodological understanding of what the international is. I attempt to formulate an alternative methodological approach that takes seriously the idea that international relations always can be accessed locally. This paper suggests that one of the main solutions to the obstacle of scale is methodologically abandon the imaginary of totalities as a higher level. In this way, ethnography can enable important understandings of social relations that exist across scales of local and global.
The EU’s international cyber and digital engagements
Digital transformation is a key priority for the European Union. It drives economic growth and enables societal development. However, the EU’s leadership in digital matters and its capacity to deliver are not universally recognised. There is skepticism about the EU’s leadership and its vision for a human-centric digital future - one that places human rights and the rule of law at the center of technological innovation and digital transformation. Simultaneously, the EU’s global influence is limited by its own ability to deliver certain critical capabilities in the digital and cyber domains. While expectations for the EU’s role have grown, cyber and digital policies are governed primarily by an intergovernmental method. This policy brief looks at how the EU frames and implements its international cyber and digital engagements with third countries. What drives the cooperation and and what are the specific tools and mechanisms deployed by the EU? The policy brief also considers implications for Norway.
Friendship in International Politics
In the international political discourse of the early 21st century, claims of friendship and “special ties” between states and their leaders are commonplace. Frequently reported by international media, such claims are often used as entry points for scholars and pundits seeking to evaluate the contents, relative strength, and present-day conditions of a given state-to-state relationship. Advancing the claim that friendships not only exist but also matter in and to the international political domain, international relations scholars began in the mid-2000s to trace and explore friendship—as a concept and practice—across time, societies, cultural contexts, and scientific disciplines. As part of the research agenda on friendship in international politics, scholars have explored why, how, and under what conditions friendships between states emerge, evolve, subsist, and dissolve; how amicable structures are typically organized; how they manifest themselves on a day-to-day basis; and what short- and long-term implications they may have for international political processes, dynamics, outcomes, and orders.
Putinism – Regime Ideology in Post-Soviet Russia
How can we understand post-Soviet ideological developments in the context of the Russian tradition of political philosophy?
Norway’s strategic dependencies in global supply chain networks
Economic interdependence and global supply chains are being investigated anew. For a long time, a belief in the ability of growing economic ties to foster cooperation, dampen conflict, and enhance prosperity was predominant in academic and political thinking alike. However, these assumptions have recently proven to be half-truths at best. Rather than dampen conflict, the asymmetries of global supply chains have turned them into coercive tools for the powerful to wield against the powerless. Through sanctions and export controls, states controlling vital chokepoints in global economic networks can cause harm in targeted states, and through controlling the nodes of information highways, intelligence agencies can gain access to sensitive information by leveraging the key position of their domestic companies. For states with small, open economies, this development poses a thorny problem: the toolbox for realigning global supply chains is limited, but reliance on supply chains beyond national control is extensive. The problem is not limited to being in a position of dependence, however. For smaller states, being in control over global assets, or being a key provider of a product or resource others depend on can be a double-edged sword. As economic coercion becomes more widely deployed, the impetus for protecting and securing assets increases, and the risk that they might drag smaller states into geopolitical contests grows. Addressing these concerns, it is vital to develop tools, frameworks, and methodologies for assessing supply chains from a national perspective, with a focus on how economic interdependence might introduce geopolitical risks. Against this background, this report builds on recent theoretical and methodological developments for analyzing global supply chains in light of their potential for geopolitical weaponization. More precisely, it will study Norway’s position in global value chains by combining recent methodological developments on the network analysis of supply chains and recent analysis of country-level aggregated analysis of supply dependencies. This allows for a study of supply chains as networks of economic relations, in which the position of different national economies contains both strategic capacities, or assets, by being central suppliers on which other countries depend, and vulnerabilities, by depending heavily on other countries. The report thus uses network analysis to identify Norway’s positions and their related strategic vulnerabilities and assets. Link to the Annex for this report: https://www.nupi.no/en/publications/cristin-pub/annex-to-the-report-norway-s-strategic-dependencies-in-global-supply-chain-networks
Energy justice and energy democracy: Separated twins, rival concepts or just buzzwords?
Many new concepts have emerged to better capture socio-technical change in energy systems from a normative perspective. Two of the most visible, popularized, and politically charged are Energy Justice and Energy Democracy, but it is the tension between them that has drawn recent controversy. Instead of arguing for the superiority of one over the other, this paper's aim is to demonstrate their differential contribution and areas of productive overlap using both quantitative and qualitative measures. It presents the results of the systematic review of 495 articles on Energy Democracy and Energy Justice in the Web of Science database, with attention to the geographical focus, scale, technology, and social groups dominant in both literatures. We find that both the concepts and literatures employing them are very closely related, almost like twins. The key difference is the failure of the Energy Democracy literature to engage with questions of energy poverty and distributional (in)justice. For Energy Justice, we find that despite lip service paid to, for example, the Global South, normative research in energy transitions sphere remains highly Western-centric. We highlight, too, that both terms are most often used as buzzwords and that this undermines knowledge building and the radical potential for change which is inherent in the two concepts and their applications.
External Voting among Central European Migrants Living in Western Europe
Non-resident citizens’ participation in national elections is known as external voting. This report presents the first comparative dataset of external voting, both in parliamentary and presidential elections. We gathered voting results among migrants from nine Central and Eastern European countries, with the main analysis focusing on six where most data were available: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Romania. The analysed countries of residence where diasporas cast their votes were Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden (EU members) as well as two countries belonging to the European Economic Area (Norway and Iceland) and Switzerland. How different are external voting results from those seen in countries of origin? What are the ideological differences between voting migrants and the ‘mean’ voter back home, and to what extent does that matter? These are some of the questions the data gathered may help shed light on.
On the formation of content for 'political remittances': an analysis of Polish and Romanian migrants comparative evaluations of 'here' and 'there'
Migration may affect migrants’ ideas as they become exposed to different contexts over time. But how does such exposure and opportunities for comparative evaluation of origin and settlement contexts, translate into content for potential political remittances? To answer this question, we analyse 80 interviews with Polish and Romanian migrants living in Barcelona (Spain) and Oslo (Norway). Starting from the established ‘social remittances’, literature, our contribution is to unpack the process of their formation by focusing on what happens at the content-creation stage. We do so through analysis of migrants’ comparative evaluation of their ‘origin’ and ‘settlement’ contexts in regard to three explicitly political issues: corruption, public institutions and democracy. We analyse how exposure to, and comparative evaluation of, different contexts inform migrants’ views, and find non-linearity and inconsistency between migrant groups’ and in individuals’ own patterns of views. This underscores the salience of, first, recognising how the change that migration prompts in migrants’ outlooks may or may not be stronger than preceding political preferences, anchored in ongoing processes of (re)socialisation; and second, of better understanding how migration impacts migrants’ outlooks, by considering the specifics of exposure and comparative evaluation, whether or not ultimately articulated in forms traceable as ‘political remittances’.