The family of nations. Kinship as an international ordering principle in the nineteenth century.
This chapter suggests that the phrase ‘the family of nations’ for a long time was more commonly deployed amongst international actors themselves to describe ‘the international’ than more common concepts in contemporary IR scholarship such as ‘international system’, ‘society’, and ‘community’. The authors argue that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the concept of a family of nations was integral to legitimizing strategies for coercive measures and colonial rule.
The Russia Conference: Cold Peace in the Arctic?
On September 14, NUPI’s Russia Conference took place in Oslo. Couldn’t be there? Watch the entire event, including Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Søreide's key note speech, on YouTube.
Norge, USA og folkeretten
(Available in Norwegian only): Når det gjelder USA og folkeretten, er problemet ikke så mye Trump, som at USA konsekvent bryter de verdiene de selv forfekter, skriver Minda Holm i denne kronikken.
How has Trump pushed Europe and Asia together?
One of the unforeseen consequences of President Trump’s erratic foreign policy has been to push Europe and Asia closer together. This is what Fraser Cameron will argue when he visits NUPI on 19 September.
Global Disorder and Distrust – The breakdown of trust between Russia and the West
A downward spiral in Russia-Western relations has ensued after the crises in Ukraine in 2014. What are the consequences and what can be done to de-escalate the tension?
PODCAST: Friendships that move the world
What did two of the world’s most important state leaders – Barack Obama and David Cameron – signal by this image? Senior Research Fellow Kristin Haugevik has examined how relationships between states become ‘special’ in a new book.
Theory seminar: The Crisis of Liberal Memory
Vibeke Schou Tjalve presents the introduction chapter to a new book as part of the project “World of the Right”.
Codeword China
(From op-ed): When it comes to Arctic regional political governance and economic outlooks, the policy and academic communities have become good at asking ‘what about China’ and facilitating a conversation on several policy issues. All the main Arctic conferences have panels on China in the Arctic in some form or another and there is a small but strong and productive community of scholars analyzing how China approaches the Arctic.
Kith, kin and inter-state relations: International politics as family life
This chapter discusses what analytical value kinship may add to the academic study of inter-state dynamics. The chapter reviews how kinship has been contended with in key contributions to IR theory on inter-state cooperation and alliances, before it proceeds to discussing, firstly, how kinship might be of use as an analytical category and classification system in IR and, secondly, how kinship, as a practical category, is used in and impacts on everyday international political and diplomatic life.
The reconfiguration of clientelism and the failure of vote buying in Lebanon
One common demand in the 2011 uprisings in the MENA region was the call for ‘freedom, dignity, and social justice.’ Citizens rallied against corruption and clientelism, which for many protesters were deeply linked to political tyranny. This book takes the phenomenon of the 2011 uprisings as a point of departure for reassessing clientelism and patronage across the entire MENA region. Using case studies covering Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies, it looks at how the relationships within and between clientelist and patronage networks changed before 2011. The book assesses how these changes contributed to the destabilization of the established political and social order, and how they affected less visible political processes. It then turns to look at how the political transformations since 2011 have in turn reconfigured these networks in terms of strategies and dynamics, and concomitantly, what implications this has had for the inclusion or exclusion of new actors. Are specific networks expanding or shrinking in the post-2011 contexts? Do these networks reproduce established forms of patron-client relations or do they translate into new modes and mechanisms? As the first book to systematically discuss clientelism, patronage and corruption against the background of the 2011 uprisings, it will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Middle Eastern Studies. The book also addresses major debates in comparative politics and political sociology by offering ‘networks of dependency’ as an interdisciplinary conceptual approach that can ‘travel’ across place and time.