Publikasjoner
Digital Supply Chain Dependency and Resilience
Mens en voksende mengde litteratur tar for seg hvordan stater i økende grad søker å sikre sine digitale områder og begrense avhengigheter, har det blitt viet mindre oppmerksomhet til hvordan digital infrastruktur påvirker deres evne til å gjøre dette. Denne artikkelen presenterer en ny tilnærming til å studere cybersikkerhet og digitale avhengigheter, med fokus på hvordan private selskaper påvirker staters evne til å sikre kritiske tjenester. I denne artikkelen analyserer vi digitale forsyningskjeder for å undersøke de tekniske tverrgående tjenestene, infrastrukturene og lokasjonene som populære mobilapplikasjoner er avhengige av. Vi argumenterer for at disse avhengighetene har ulike effekter på motstandskraften til digitale teknologier på nasjonalt nivå, men at det å håndtere disse avhengighetene krever ulike og til tider motstridende tiltak. For å studere dette fenomenet utvikler vi en metodikk for å utforske dette empirisk ved å spore og undersøke de spredte og ofte implisitte avhengighetene i populære mobilapplikasjoner. For å analysere disse avhengighetene registrerer vi rå datatrafikkstrømmer for så å geolokalisere de ulike avhengighetene til utvalgte applikasjoner sett fra Oslo, Barcelona, Paris, Zagreb, Mexico By og Dublin.
Generation three and a half peacekeeping: Understanding the evolutionary character of African-led Peace Support Operations
African-led Peace Support Operations (PSOs) were established to support the African peace and security architecture by developing integrated capacities for deployment in crises. However, since the deployment of the first African-led PSOs, there has also been the emergence of new types of African-led PSOs, such as the African Union Mission in Somalia; the Lake Chad Basin Commission Multinational Joint Task Force; the Joint Force for the Group of Five for the Sahel; the Southern African Development Community Mission in Mozambique; and the East African Community Force in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The paper examines why African-led PSOs have emerged, arguing that these operations have allowed for increased African agency and shaped the African peace and security space. The paper finds that African-led PSO reflects a more regional and local-specific response in a declining era of new United Nations peacekeeping operations but has also resulted in an overreliance on force to solve the continent’s peace and security issues. Consequently, the paper arrives at a novel conceptualisation of African-led PSOs, positing that they represent generation three and a half of peacekeeping which focus on the effectiveness of force and the morality of using force to deal with insecurity and multifaceted crisis.
Anarchy is a Bridge: Russia and China are Pushing NATO and Japan Together
After nearly 70 years of distant relations, security ties between NATO and Japan are flourishing. A number of important initiatives have recently been adopted, including high-level political dialogues, joint military training, and cooperation in science, technology, and cyber security. This article considers recent developments in NATO-Japan relations and in particular their origins, drivers and implications.
Major Powers in a Shifting Global Order
How to measure power in international affairs is an eternal matter of debate, especially among political scientists. Many generic approaches have been suggested, among them control over resources; control over actors; and control over events and outcomes,2 and numerous efforts have been made to develop concrete formulas. In China, academic institutions 3 and independent scholars have competed as to how best to measure “comprehensive national power”. All approaches and formulas have something to offer, and all have inherent limitations.
Considering ecological security from the perspective of Arctic ecosystemic politics
This brief essay is part of a book forum on Matt McDonald's book (2021) presenting the idea of ecological security. In the essay, I reflect on progress and prospects for Arctic cooperation and governance in order to consider the promise and limitations of McDonald’s ecological security framework. The Arctic is an instructive example for such an exploration. The longstanding post-Cold War cooperation in the Arctic is strongly rooted in an appreciation of the interconnected nature of the Arctic ecosystem, even as the governance mechanisms remain far from what would qualify as an ecological security approach in McDonald’s sense. Nonetheless, I suggest that especially two aspects are instructive from the Arctic example. The first relates to how ecological security would potentially interface with an already quite full landscape of governance practices rooted in ecosystems, and associated power political genealogies and effects. The second point is a reflection on unfolding events, seeking to explore how continued inputs from other forms of security governance could impact on emerging or partial attempts to govern with an ecological security perspective. Here, the status of Arctic cooperative governance after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an illustrative example to consider. Both points can be read as impediments limiting the applicability of the ecological security framework. However, as McDonald argued, impediments are not the same as absolute limits (2021, 192) and potential obstacles are explored here in the spirit of advancing possibilities for ecological security.
The dangers of Europe’s blindness to a long war in Ukraine
While Western leaders still talk of total victory against Russia, they risk ignoring a grim reality with no end in sight.
How Not to Do UN Peacekeeping: Avoid the Stabilization Dilemma with Principled and Adaptive Mandating and Leadership
Looking back over the past seventy-five years of UN peacekeeping, the most enduring question has been: Is peacekeeping effective? Historically, most peacekeeping operations have been. However, peacekeeping is currently suffering from a significant trust deficit. One important factor that differentiates contemporary peacekeeping operations with a stabilization mandate from the historic record is the absence of a viable political or peace process. When security is not directed to serve a peace process, it produces a stabilization dilemma: the more effectively a peace operation protects and achieves stability, the less incentive there is for ruling political elites to find long-term political solutions. This dilemma generates several perverse effects, including prolonging the conflict, trapping operations in place with no exit options, increasing the resilience of armed groups, and embedding peacekeeping in the local political economy. The article identifies five factors that help prevent the stabilization dilemma and influence the effectiveness of peace operations.
Riddervold: Avtaler med EU – lettere sagt enn gjort
EU utvikler nye mekanismer for beredskap og krisehåndtering på alt fra helse til sikker kommunikasjon, sikring av infrastruktur og tilgang til kritiske råvarer. Norge vil som vanlig være med. Men er det en selvfølge at Norge får avtaler på bestilling? Og hvorfor drøyer det på områder der både EU og Norge ønsker en avtale, spør forsker Marianne Riddervold i denne kronikken.
Ecosystems and Ordering: Exploring the Extent and Diversity of Ecosystem Governance
This article argues that, to grasp how global ordering will be impacted by planetary-level changes, we need to systematically attend to the question of the extent to which and how ecosystems are being governed. Our inquiry builds upon—but extends beyond—the environmental governance measures that have garnered the most scholarly attention so far. The dataset departs from the current literature on regional environmental governance by taking ecosystems themselves as the unit of analysis and then exploring whether and how they are governed, rather than taking a starting point in environmental institutions and treaties. The ecosystems researched—large-scale marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems—have been previously identified by a globe-spanning, natural science inquiry. Our findings highlight the uneven extent of ecosystem governance—both the general geographic extent and certain “types” of ecosystems seemingly lending themselves more easily to ecosystem-based cooperation. Furthermore, our data highlight that there is a wider range of governance practices anchored in ecosystems than the typical focus on environmental institutions reveals. Of particular significance is the tendency by political actors to establish multi-issue governance anchored in the ecosystems themselves and covering several different policy fields. We argue that, in light of scholarship on ecosystem-anchored cooperation and given the substantive set of cases of such cooperation identified in the dataset, these forms of ecosystem-anchored cooperation may have particularly significant ordering effects. They merit attention in the international relations scholarship that seeks to account for the diversity of global ordering practices.