Researcher
Benjamin de Carvalho
Contactinfo and files
Summary
Benjamin de Carvalho is a research professor at NUPI, working in the Research group on Global Order and Diplomacy (GOaD). His research interests have, broadly speaking, been between three areas: (i) historical international relations, (ii) UN peacekeeping, and (iii) status in international relations.
Within these fields, he has published on issues of broader historical change such as the formation of the nation-state in Europe, sovereignty, and the role played by confessionalization and religion. He has also been involved in a number of projects on UN peacekeeping, and has worked on the protection of civilians and sexual and gender-based violence in Liberia, Chad, and the Sudans. He is also involved in projects addressing status as a key driver of foreign policy, focusing on Norway and Brazil. Central issues here are the role played by small states in international politics, emerging powers and great power responsibility. Other research interests include hegemony, popular culture and international relations theory.
De Carvalho is currently involved in work of more historical character. He is currently the Principal Investigator of Empires, Privateering and the Sea (EMPRISE), a project funded by the Research Council of Norway addressing the importance of privateering for the formation of overseas empires in the Atlantic (1556-1856). He is also the main collaborator in Conceptual History of International Relations (CHOIR), led by Halvard Leira.
In addition, de Carvalho has played an important role in the institutionalization of Historical International Relations as a subfield of the discipline of International Relations. Together with Leira, he was instrumental in setting up the Historical International Relations Section of the ISA, of which he has served as section program chair (2015-2017) and section chair (2017-2019). Leira and de Carvalho are also co-editors of the four-volume set Historical International Relations.
He is formerly a co-editor of the leading Scandinavian-language International Relations-journal Internasjonal Politikk.
Benjamin is Editor in Chief of the journal Cooperation and Conflict, 2023-2027.
Expertise
Education
2009 PhD in International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
2001 MA, New School for Social Research, New York, USA
Work Experience
2006- PhD student/Senior Research Fellow/Research Professor, NUPI
Aktivitet
Filter
Clear all filtersPrivate Force and the Making of States, c. 1100-1500
This chapter shows how the distinction between the public and the private emerges with respect to the use of force in conjunction with the long rise of the state in Europe. In drawing a historical conceptual analysis of the changing organization of military power in the making of states, I show why we need to take an empirical rather than an ideological approach to the distinction between different types of force, as only then can we hope to understand why and for what purposed power was organized in specific ways, and the consequences of that organization. The chapter takes as its starting point the late eleventh century, a period when public authorities had been decimated throughout Christendom and where kings no longer held the aura of public authority, but were (private) contestants for public authority on equal footing with their competitors. Both public and private force was private, so to speak. I proceed in five sections. The first addresses the relationship between war-making and state-making, a relationship which is central to much of the literature on state formation and to our further discussion. The next three sections address the chronology of changes in the organization of force, and move from warfare as a knightly (largely) private enterprise to the wars of mercenaries, culminating in the early attempts at holding standing permanent armies around the late fifteenth century. The claim is not that this process was linear or inevitable, and, as demonstrated in the last section, the centralization of the legitimate means of warfare in the hands of public authorities did not mean the end of private enterprise in a world of states. Rather, private enterprise continued alongside public force, albeit in a different character.
Reforms, Customs and Resilience: Justice for Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Liberia
This book explores the burgeoning interest in alternative and innovative justice responses to sexual violence both within and outside the legal system. It explores the limits of criminal law for achieving 'rape justice' and highlights possibilities for expanding how we think about justice in the aftermath of sexual violence.
The Modern Roots of Feudal Empires: The Donatary Captaincies and the Legacies of the Portuguese Empire in Brazil
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.
En ny opprinnelse? Om 1800- tallet som startskuddet for dagens internasjonal politikk