'Our entire people are natural born friends of peace': the Norwegian foreign policy of peace
What makes a peace nation? In this article it is argued that the Norwegian foreign policy of peace is rooted in an historical self‐understanding of Norway and Norwegians as particularly peaceful, an identity which was first articulated around 1890. Norwegians hold a strong liberal/meliorist belief that the world can become a better place, and that Norway has an important role to play in this process. However, this general belief in peace and a Norwegian peaceful exceptionalism has been expressed in different ways over the last 120 years. Around 1900, the ideal was a passive state and an active people working for peace, while from around 1920 it was accepted that the state needed to take more active part. Where international peace activism was associated in particular with UN peacekeeping during the Cold War, and peace mediation during the 1990's, increasingly a broader panoply of ‘good’ issues have been tied to an ever expanding notion of peace. The last two decades have also seen increased Norwegian participation in offensive military actions, couched at least partly in terms of peace. That the Norwegian attachment to peace remains strong while still allowing for support to military action suggests both that the Norwegian self‐understanding as a peace nation is deeply rooted and that it allows for a self‐righteous understanding of ‘peace through war’.
Finnes det en norsk SSR-modell? En kartlegging av SSR i norsk utenriks- og sikkerhetspolitikk
International Diplomacy vol I-IV
Following on from where 2004's widely acclaimed three-volume SAGE collection, Diplomacy (ed. Jonsson & Langhorne) left off, this new four-volume major work takes a new look at a subject which has matured and developed significantly over the past decade. With the rise of India, China and Brazil as well as of the global south, diplomacy's history looks different. Significant shifts have prompted scholars in the field to reconsider the historical sequences that are relevant to an understanding of what diplomacy is today, and where it may be heading. Increased mediazation of global politics and diplomacy has prompted an exponential growth in literature on public diplomacy. This collection has been carefully structured so that each volume gives the reader an overview of the literature on a new area of development in the study of diplomacy: Volume One: Diplomatic institutions Volume Two: Diplomacy in a Multicultural World Volume Three: The Pluralisation of Diplomacy - Changing Actors, Developing Arenas and New Issues Volume Four: Public Diplomacy
Being Part of the Parade - "Going Native" in the United Nations Security Council
A sylvan superpower? Russian forests in international climate negotiations
Battlestar Galactica and International Relations
Looking at a television franchise like Battlestar Galactica (BSG) is no longer news within the discipline of International Relations. A growing number of scholars in and out of IR are studying the importance of cultural artifacts – popular or otherwise – for the phenomena that make up the core of our discipline. The genre of science fiction offers the analyst an opportunity that cannot be matched by more mimetic genres, namely the chance to look at how sets of widely-circulating expectations of the social serve to constrain authors as they work to introduce as yet unexplored problematiques, the fantasy aspect in much of science fiction storytelling is premised simply on a material difference. As such, while the physical setting of a science fiction tale might appear novel, its imaginative life world will likely retain many elements of the world we already live in and which we can readily recognize as similar to our own. For Critical IR scholarship then, BSG presents an opportunity to examine how these purported homologies or elements of redundancy between the fantastic and the real have been drawn and perhaps to consider, too, whether the show can teach us things about world politics, its various logics and structures, which we might not otherwise be sensitive to. Tackling some of the key contemporary issues in IR, the writers of BSG have taken on a range of important political themes and issues, including the legitimacy of military government, the tactical utility of genocide, and even the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence technologies for the very category of what it means to be 'human'. The contributors in this book explore in depth the argument that one of the most important aspects of popular culture is to naturalize or normalise a certain social order by further entrenching the expectations of social behaviour upon which our mentalities of rule are founded. This work will be of interest to student and scholars of international relations, popular culture and security studies.