Johanna Kettenbach
Johanna Kettenbach is a PhD fellow in the Research Group on Peace, Conflict and Development. She is a PhD student in Sociology at the University o...
Libya after Gaddafi: What went wrong, and what role did Norway play?
Ian Martin, the UN’s former representative in Libya, critically reflects on the international intervention in 2011, and subsequent events.
More than just a petrol station: Norway's contribution to European Union's green strategic autonomy
The past five years have seen far-reaching changes in international politics and trade, all of which forced European policymakers to reconsider the role and place of the ‘Old World’ in global affairs. The continuous rise of China and its ambition to play a larger role, matching its economic weight, requires new approaches to international trade. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed Europe’s import dependencies and the fragility of long and complex global value chains on which it relies. These vulnerabilities are visible in many strategically important sectors, from semiconductors (chips) through medicine to the production of items on which European Union’s visions of future decarbonization rest: photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, nuclear fuel etc. This Policy Brief has also been published as a Policy Brief within the GreenDeal-NET project
Climate Security Language in UN Peace Operation’s Mandates
Article 24 of the United Nations Charter confers the responsibility of maintaining international peace and security to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). This task requires a comprehensive engagement with the complex systems driving conflict in the world to understand and respond to threats to international peace and security. The UNSC has over the last 30 years gradually adopted a non-traditional security approach by incorporating economic, social, humanitarian and ecological instability as threats to international peace and security.
Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea
The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. The authors contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. Rowe and Beaumont illustrate their argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. They reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere.
Leaving the UN Security Council: Norway steps down
Makt og avmakt i FNs sikkerhetsråd: Valgte medlemslands veier til innflytelse
The UN Security Council consists of five permanent and ten elected member states. The latter is elected on a rolling basis, for two years at a time. In 2021-22, Norway has been one of these elected member states. The research literature often refers to how the Security Council's room for action is limited by superpower interests and the power struggle between the five veto countries: the United States, China, Russia, Great Britain and France. Russia's attack on Ukraine illustrated these challenges. In this policy brief, we take a closer look at how elected member states work to exercise influence while sitting on the Security Council.
EU-NATO cooperation: competition or complementarity?
Which challenges and possibilities lie within a closer EU-NATO cooperation? This is what we will dive into in this seminar with Daniel Fiott.
China’s multilateral stretch: Crafting influence with international organizations
China’s rise as a multilateral power is stirring reactions internationally, with many actors worrying about Chinese influence over specific international organizations (IOs), and its rippling effects on multilateral governance overall. In this brief, we discuss how and why China is working to craft its proactive IO diplomacy, by building position in many established and development oriented IOs, especially, and by initiating new institutions, incorporating to wide range of relations and issues. We show how expanding engagements within the UN and other multilateral arenas demonstrate China’s readiness to both follow, modify, and ignore established rules and norms, while working to ensure that multilateral institutions better reflect Chinese interests and conditions.
PODCAST: Putin’s potential headache: The anti-mobilization protests in North Caucasus