Norms and Practices in UN Peacekeeping: Evolution and Contestation
The four articles in this special section focus on norms in UN peacekeeping (gender, impartiality, human rights, and environmentalism) and how they are implemented in practice. They look at the evolution of these norms over time; take an explicit theoretical perspective (feminist institutionalism, norm contestation, and securitization); and report the results of original field research in Rwanda, South Sudan, and New York UN headquarters. The articles present a coherent narrative because they all look at practices either explicitly or implicitly, often at the mundane everyday level among troops or UN staff. But the focus on everyday experiences should not betray their theoretical importance: each of the articles uses this empirical material to better understand and theorize international relations. Georgina Holmes provides us with micro-study of norm implementation on the individual level with her bottom-up study of training of female military peacekeepers. Marion Laurence reveals how legitimating practices are changing in tandem with the changing understanding of the impartiality norm. Emily Paddon Rhoads analyzes impartiality as a composite norm and unpacks its procedural and substantive dimensions to reveal how human rights and protection are being privileged to the detriment of a more political understanding of impartiality. Lucile Maertens is forcing us to examine the causal chain of securitization theory by showing how security is shaped by environmentalization.
Tre trender som utfordrer norsk utenrikspolitikk
Denne policy briefen tar utgangspunkt i tre globale trender, og gir en analyse og vurderinger av hva trendene innebærer av utfordringer og muligheter for norsk utenrikspolitikk i tiden fremover: 1. Nye stormakter vokser frem. 2. Migrasjon brer om seg. 3. Utenrikspolitikk blir innenrikspolitikk.
AVLYST - Korleis kan EU bli betre på kriserespons?
Det NUPI-leidde og Horizon 2020-finansierte forskingsprosjektet EUNPACK blei nyleg avslutta. Kva følgjer har funna frå tre år med omfattande forsking og feltarbeid for EUs engasjement i ekstern kriserespons?
Kor godt har FNs fredsoperasjonar i Mali og Sør-Sudan fungert?
I samband med den internasjonale dagen for fredsbevaring har NUPI gleda av å invitere til eit seminar om effektiviteten av FNs fredsoperasjonar i Mali og Sør-Sudan.
Drømmen om Europa
Bannons forsøk på å samle europeiske høyrepopulister har mislykkes. Nå prøver ltalias innenriksminister på det samme, skriver Minda Holm i Dagsavisen-kronikk
Local Ownership as Global Governance
The ownership discourse has profoundly altered the management of development aid. Nominally, it seeks to instil greater freedom as well as responsibilities among aid recipients. Revisiting two ethnographic studies (the World Bank–Uganda partnership and NGO relations in Ethiopia), this article shows how ‘ownership’ practices also involve new forms of tacit governance mechanisms that enable the donor to retain control. By using ‘freedom’ as a formula underpinning governance at a distance, developmentality is made contingent on the donor’s ability to frame the partnership and the conditions under which the recipient exercises the freedom that has been granted.
Forebygging av krig og konflikt i cyberdomenet
Cyberdomenet representerer kanskje en av vår tids største trusler mot internasjonal fred og sikkerhet men er viet lite oppmerksomhet hva gjelder forebygging av krig og konflikt. Det er behov for internasjonale forpliktende kjøreregler som hever blikket over IKT-forvaltning, digitalisering og cybersikkerhetstiltak og fokuserer på fredelige relasjoner mellom stater i cyberdomenet. Skal en slik diskusjon ha effekt må den tas i FNs Sikkerhetsråd.
Mørke skyer over Mali
Massakren i Mali i mars representerer bare det foreløpige bunnpunktet i en pågående voldsspiral mellom ulike etniske grupper, skriver NUPI-forskerne Natasja Rupesinghe og Morten Bøås i denne kronikken fra Klassekampen.
15 NUPI-forskere på firedagers maraton i internasjonal politikk
NUPI-forskere spilte en viktig rolle da verdens største konferanse for forskere innen internasjonale studier – ISA 2019 - gikk av stabelen i Canada.
EUNPACK Executive Summary of the Final Report & Selected Policy Recommendations. A conflict-sensitive unpacking of the eu comprehensive approach to...
Since adopting a ‘comprehensive approach’ to crisis management in 2013, the EU has spent considerable time and energy on streamlining its approach and improving internal coordina¬tion. New and protracted crises, from the conflict in Ukraine to the rise of Daesh in Syria and Iraq, and the refugee situation in North Africa and the Sahel, have made the improvement of external crisis-response capacities a top priority. But the implementation of the EU’s policies on the ground has received less scholarly and policy attention than the EU’s actorness and institutional capacity-building, and studies of implementation have often been guided primarily by a theoretical or normative agenda. The main objective of the EUNPACK project has been to unpack EU crisis response mecha¬nisms and provide new insights how they are being received and perceived on the ground by both local beneficiaries and other external stakeholders. By introducing a bottom–up perspective combined with an institutional approach, the project has tried to break with the dominant line of scholarship on EU crisis response that has tended to view only one side of the equation, namely the EU itself. Thus, the project has been attentive to the local level in target countries as well as to the EU level and the connections between them. The research has been conducted through an inductive and systematic empirical research combining competencies from two research traditions that so far has had little interaction, namely peace and conflict studies and EU studies. A key finding in our research is that while the EU has been increasingly concerned with horizontal lessons learnt, it needs to improve vertical lessons learnt to better understand the local dynamics and thus provide more appropriate responses.