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Benjamin de Carvalho
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Benjamin de Carvalho er forsker 1 ved NUPI. Hans forskningsinteresse ligger mellom tre hovedområder: Han jobber med problemstillinger knyttet til historisk endring, slik som dannelsen av nasjonalstaten i Europa, suverenitet og betydningen av religion og konfesjonalisme.
Han er involvert i flere prosjekter om FNs fredsbevaring, og har arbeidet med beskyttelse av sivile, samt seksuell og kjønnsbasert vold i Liberia, Tsjad og Sudan. Han er også involvert i prosjekter som undersøker betydningen av statusbegrepet i staters utenrikspolitikk, med fokus på Norge og Brasil. Sentrale tema her er rollen små stater spiller i internasjonal politikk, fremvoksende makter og stormakters ansvar. Andre forskningsinsteresser er hegemoni, populærkultur og teorier om internasjonal politikk.
De Carvalho ble tildelt sin doktorgrad 16. mai 2009 ved Universitetet i Cambridge, hvor han leverte avhandlingen Sovereignty, Religion and the Nation-State.
De Carvalho er sjefsredaktør i tidsskriftet Cooperation and Conflict, 2023-2027.
Ekspertise
Utdanning
2009 PhD, University of Cambridge, UK: Sovereignty, Religion and the Nation-State
2001 Mastergrad ved New School for Social Research, New York, USA
Arbeidserfaring
2003- Doktorgradsstipendiat/seniorforsker/forsker 1 ved NUPI
Aktivitet
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Tøm alle filtreIntroduction: The Emergence of Sovereignty: More Than a Question of Time
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the concept sovereignty for international relations (IR). And yet, understanding the historical emergence of sovereignty in international relations has long been curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia. While criticism of this myth has opened space for further historical inquiry in recent years, it has also raised important questions of historical interpretation and methodology relevant to IR, as applying our current conceptual framework to distant historical cases is far from unproblematic. Central among these questions is the when, what, and how of sovereignty: from when can we use “sovereignty” to analyze international politics and for which polities? Can sovereignty be used when the actors themselves did not have recourse to the terminology? And what about polities that do not have recourse to the term at all? What are the theoretical implications of applying the concept of sovereignty to early polities? From different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this forum shed light on these questions of sovereignty and how to treat the concept analytically when applied to a period or place when/where the term did not exist as such. In doing so, this forum makes the case for a sensitivity to the historical dimension of our arguments about sovereignty—and, by extension, international relations past and present—as this holds the key to the types of claims we can make about the polities of the world and their relations.
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 Function of Myths in International Relations: Discipline and Identity
Myths, understood as forms of narrative, providing meaning and significance, are an inescapable part of the life of human collectives. Thus, myths are central to any academic discipline. They tell us who we are and what we should be concerned with, and provide blueprints for arguments about policy choices. However, they also constrain our thinking and limit our choices. Although mythic thinking might be inescapable, it is nevertheless necessary to critically engage the central myths of any discipline, to denaturalise what is taken for granted. In this chapter, we tackle three central sets of myths in IR. The first two form the backbone of the discipline; the ontological myth of 1648 and the epistemological myth of 1919. Together they tell the story of a discipline which is concerned with states in an anarchical system, which grew out of the desire to end war and which is steadily progressing towards a more realistic representation of the object of study. Our final set of myths are the praxeological ones, the myths where academic commonplaces shade into policy-prescriptions. We end by cautioning against reading all historical misrepresentation as myth-making, and against the belief that we can create a myth-free discipline.
Everyday sovereignty: International experts, brokers and local ownership in peacebuilding Liberia
The present article investigates how sovereignty is performed, enacted and constructed in an everyday setting. Based on fieldwork and interviews with international embedded experts about the elusive meaning of ‘local ownership’, we argue that while sovereignty may, indeed, be a model according to which the international community ‘constructs’ rogue or failed polities in ‘faraway’ places, this view overlooks that these places are still spaces in which contestations over spheres of authority take place every day, and thus also spaces in which sovereignty is constructed and reconstructed on a daily basis. Local ownership, then, becomes our starting point for tracing the processes of the everyday enactment of sovereignty. We make the case that sovereignty should not be reified, but instead be studied in its quotidian and dynamic production, involving the multiplicity of actors reflecting the active production of the state beyond its presumptive existence as a homogeneously organized, institutionalized and largely centralized bureaucracy.
Teoriseminar: «War in International Thought»
Professor Jens Bartelson skal snakke om den nye boka si som handlar om korleis vi har sett på krig gjennom fleire hundreår.
Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking
We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably questions concerning when, if ever, status is a good in itself; whether it must be a positional good; and how states measure it.
Networks of Practice at the Margins of Empire
Dr Jeppe Mulich besøkjer NUPI for å presentere den pågåande forskinga si på imperium og kaperfart i Karibien
Pasifisering i brasiliansk utanrikspolitikk
Maíra Siman gjester NUPI for å presentere delar av den nye forskinga si på “pasifisering” som utanrikspolitisk praksis for vidareføringa av sjølvforståinga til staten.
80-årsjubilant i ny drakt
Tidsskriftet Internasjonal Politikk (IP) er 80 år. I sentrum for det nye nummeret står USA, akkurat slik det gjorde for det første tidsskriftet i 1937.
Teoriseminar: Radikal feminisme og menneskehandel
“If you'reie looking at a frightened woman in a brothel…”. Jennifer Lobasz besøkjer NUPI 17 mars for å snakke om det pågåande bokprosjektet sitt “Strange Bedfellows: Evangelicals, Feminists, and the Fight against Human Trafficking”