Mali and the Sahel – finding the balance between security and development
Ambassador and former Malian foreign minister Abdoulaye Diop comes to NUPI to discuss the balance between security and development in Mali and the broader Sahel region, and the balance between the priorities of external stakeholders and local needs.
The Market for Anarchy
The Market for Anarchy project seeks to better understand how state behaviour is shaped by assessments of and responses to different types of risks....
Israel og moralsk balansegang
Kritikere av lsraels overgrep mot palestinere blir ofte urettmessig beskyldt for antisemittisme. Samtidig er antisemittisme et økende problem i deler av Europa og USA.
Can a new approach change the UN?
The world is facing enormous challenges in light of protracted crises and conflicts. The United Nations are looking for answers with the new ‘sustaining peace’ approach. What are the chances of the new approach to change the UN and create sustainable peace? Cedric de Coning offers a current overview.
Sustaining Peace: Can a new approach change the UN?
When António Guterres started as UN Secretary General, he emphasised that conflict prevention had to be a top priority of the United Nations. This is why the United Nations are currently working on specifying the new ‘sustaining peace’ approach, passed by concurrent resolutions of the UN General Assembly and the Security Council in 2016. What are the challenges with their implementation? How does the current geopolitical situation impact the concept? And does it have the potential to make the UN fit for the 21 century?
Is Russia on a collision course with the West?
Vladimir Putin has made several statements on the West as “the bad guy”. What will this mean for the relationship between the East and the West?
A humanitarian mission in line with human rights? Assessing Sophia, the EU’s naval response to the migration crisis
This article adds to our understanding of the role of norms in the European Union’s (EU) response to the migration crisis by conducting a critical assessment of the EU’s anti-smuggling naval mission “Sophia”. Is Sophia in line with the normative standards the EU has set for itself in its foreign policies? Conducting the analysis in two steps in line with the main criteria of a humanitarian foreign policy model – first exploring Sophia’s launch and then assessing Sophia’s in theatre behaviour – findings suggest that although concerns for migrants at sea mobilised the initial launch of the mission, the mission is not conducted in line with key human rights principles. As the operation mandate is amended and updated with new tasks, and as the EU-NATO in theatre cooperation increases, the EU is moving further away from what one would expect of a humanitarian foreign policy actor.
Teheran. Revolusjon og reaksjon.
(Norwegian only): Temaet for kapitlet er Teherans rolle og betydning i et Midtøsten i endring og konflikt. Jeg ser byen som brennpunkt for tre store slag som står i regionen: kampene over Vestens rolle, folkets makt over politiske avgjørelser og islam som samfunnskontrakt. Jeg viser hvordan kampene spilles ut i Teheran, og hvordan de speiler Irans utfordringer som regional makt. Kapitlet drøfter forholdet mellom innen- og utenrikspolitikk og tar konflikten med Saudi-Arabia som eksempel.
Everyday sovereignty: International experts, brokers and local ownership in peacebuilding Liberia
The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded experts about the elusive meaning of ‘local ownership’, we argue that while sovereignty may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community ‘constructs’ rogue or failed polities in ‘faraway’ places, this view overlooks that these places are still spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy.
Brexit and the future of European and Norwegian Security
Steven Blockmans, Garvan Walshe and Øystein Bø are visiting NUPI to share their insights and perspectives on Brexit, the possible implications for Norway, and how it may impact the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP).