The Politics of Expertise. Competing for Authority in Global Governance

Experts dominate all facets of global governance, from accounting practices and antitrust regulations to human rights law and environmental conservation. In this study, Ole Jacob Sending encourages a critical interrogation of the role and power of experts by unveiling the politics of the ongoing competition for authority in global governance.

Luftbåren maritim overvåking og anti-ubåt kapabilitet: status og utvikling - konsekvenser for Norge

Luftbåren maritim overvåking og ASW: status og utvikling - konsekvenser for Norge

Doing Historical International Relations

The relationship between International Relations and History has varied greatly over the last century, following largely from the historiographical changes in International Relations theorising. This volume details the changing relationship over the last 60 years, through a number of both seminal and newer texts. The volume starts with classics of the 1950’s and 60’s, continues with the ebb of historical scholarship in the 1970’s and 80’s and the forceful calls for a regeneration, and concludes with the opening of new perspectives over the last two decades. Although the newer generations have indeed rehashed some of the older ideas, there has also been an obvious increase in the sophistication of (meta) theoretical reflection and methodological awareness. There have never been more or more varied ways of justifying historical scholarship in International Relations.

The History of International Thought

Being a distinct discipline entails being able to recount the disciplinary history and pre-history, and in IR this has led to a sustained engagement, first with the history of international thought in the classical sense, then with historiography. Over the last decades, scholars have increasingly come to see International Relations Theory neither as the recurrence of ancient patterns of thought nor as a miraculous conception of the early 20th century. Rather, continuous stories have been written, where IR has become tied to a wide variety of previous thought. In this volume we explore this scholarship in breadth, explicitly opposing the notion of “great traditions” and “great debates”, and focusing primarily on the challenges, and on works undermining, redirecting or expanding the canon.

Historical International Relations

As a quarry for data, testing-ground for theory and site of investigation, history has been one of the unacknowledged partners of International Relations. The last two decades has witnessed both a substantial increase in the scope of historical IR scholarship and in the sophistication of methodological approaches to history, accompanied by a rapidly increasing (and multidisciplinary) interest in the history of international thought, as well as an ever more sophisticated historiography of the discipline itself. This Major Work is structured in a way to engage with the key recent developments in the field of international relations, providing the reader with an overview of approaches to history in IR; the history of international thought/historiography; and the emergence of the state and the state system.

Peacebuilding, Ownership, and Sovereignty from New York to Monrovia: A multi-sited Ethnographic Approach

How does peacebuilding organize people within systems of power and authority? In this dissertation I address the ways in which current global peacebuilding processes challenge established notions of the state and different conceptions of sovereignty. Adopting a studying-through approach further enabled me to trace aspects and activities across several organizational levels and geographical sites during fieldwork; (i) the UN Security Council, (ii) peacebuilding bureaucracy and policy making in DPKO in New York, (iii) the implementation level and peacebuilding process in Liberia. Peacebuilding activities turned Liberia into an object of governing. This produced certain paradoxical processes, whereby the UN, in seeking to build the state, also became the state.