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Morten Skumsrud Andersen
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Morten S. Andersen er seniorforsker og leder for Forskningsgruppen for global orden og diplomati. I tillegg til teori og metodologi, handler forskningen hans om hvordan maktrelasjoner mellom stater har utviklet seg og blitt legitimert over tid. Her studerer Andersen særlig hierarkier og imperier, og internasjonal begrepshistorie.
Han er for tiden med i prosjektet A Conceptual History of International Relations (CHOIR). Disse forskningsområdene bruker Andersen også i en analyse av colombiansk utenrikspolitikk og global orden i prosjektene Undermining Hegemony og Evaluating Power Political Repertoires (EPOS), og i analyser av utenlandske oppkjøp og investeringer i prosjektet Consequences of Investments for National Security (COINS).
I 2016 forsvarte Andersen doktorgraden sin, “A Genealogy of the Balance of Power”, ved London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I den skrev han historien om hvordan begrepet “maktbalanse”, som i utgangspunktet ble benyttet til å forsvare ideen om en slags europeisk republikk, over tid undergravde tanken om et “internasjonalt samfunn” og heller ble brukt til å fremme en visjon av internasjonal politikk hvor egenrådige stater er i sentrum. Andersen viser her hvordan begrepets uklare oprinnelse og historien om hvordan det siden har blitt brukt definerer parametrene for dagens debatter om «maktbalanse» i internasjonale relasjoner.
Ekspertise
Utdanning
2016 PhD, London School of Economics. Doktorgradsavhandling: Genealogy of the Balance of Power – Its Uses and Effects
2008 MSc International Relations; London School of Economics
2006 Bachelor, internasjonale studier, Universitetet i Oslo
2003 Latinamerikastudier, Universidad de Costa Rica
Arbeidserfaring
2022- Gruppeleder, Forskningsgruppen for global orden og diplomati, NUPI
2008- Forsker/doktorgradsstipendiat/seniorforsker, NUPI
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Tøm alle filtrePractices as Models: A Methodology with an Illustration Concerning Wampum Diplomacy
The everyday meaning of ‘practice’ is something like concrete ‘doings’ or ‘what is being done’ in a social setting. Its everyday counter-concept is theory. Intuitively, this may lead us to think of practices as what is really going on in the world, as opposed to theories or models. This commonsensical meaning of practices reinforces the separation between theory and empirical reality. We argue that such an understanding has informed much of the ongoing ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. We also argue that this is not necessarily an efficient way of conceptualising ‘practices’, because practices might end up being too general a concept to be analytically useful. To counter this, we argue, one must be explicit about practices at the level of models, that is, in fictional representations of the world. This can help in studying them as endogenous phenomena, and not only as the practical counterpart of some other phenomena, or emanating from unspoken theoretical assumptions of, for example, conscious rule-following behaviour, interests, identities, structures and so on. As an illustration of what a model of practice might look like, we include a case study of Iroquois diplomacy as practice. Using a model, without relying on unstated assumptions exogenous to it, we represent this particular case through assuming that both the agents and their social environments emerge through practices.
Legitimacy in State-Building: A Review of the IR Literature
In this article, which focuses on different concepts of state-building and legitimacy as used in the mainstream International Relations (IR) literature, I suggest that recent debates may be categorized in a two-by-two matrix. The axes concern the choice between a normative or a sociological perspective on the one hand, and a focus on state institutions or on society on the other. The article identifies an empiricist-sociological approach. Still, the almost exclusive reliance on an ontology of entities and their attributes hampers foci on relations as constituting both “insides” and “outsides” in state-building, and on legitimacy as important in its own right as ongoing public contestations. In a concluding section, I explore the purchase of a relational sociology for future studies of legitimacy in state-building
The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations. Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics
Liberia og fredsbygging: en institusjonell forskningsagenda
Artikkelen analyserer arbeidet til FNs fredsbyggingskommisjon gjennom Fredsbyggingsfondet i Liberia og illustrerer hvordan institusjonelle strukturer kan bestemme mye av innholdet i og implementeringen av fredsbygging