Iver B. Neumann

Before Belonging

Deep hanging out with Michel Foucualt

Undertaking Discourse Analysis for Social Research

Frozen Moments: Visualizing the Polity in Times of Overheating

We are living in a new epoch: the Anthropocene, where the world is overheated by human activity, driven too fast and filled too full, uneven and unequal. This collection explores the question of identity in this new world, looking at the consequences of rapidly accelerating change on social and personal identities and providing a concrete set of perspectives on how people conceive their selves and belonging in the twenty-first century. Featuring examinations of the Phiippines, Israel, Australia, the Cape Verde Islands, and Afghanistan, the book studies changes generated by rapid industrialization, forced return of migrants, sudden population growth, and the touristification of local cultures.

Norsk utenrikspolitisk idehistorie, 1890-1940

Norges utenrikspolitiske ideverden er særegen. Denne boka tar for seg idetradisjonene som slo inn i norsk politikk rundt forrige århundreskifte, og som i tiden etter bidro til å forme Norges forestillinger om verden omkring oss og om Norges plass og rolle i den. Liberale argumenter har formet den norske fredstanken, betoningen vår av folkerettens sentrale plass og av internasjonalt samarbeid i ordnede, universelle former. Men hvor kommer disse ideene fra, og hvorfor slo de så dype røtter i Norge? Forfatterne viser hvilke forestillinger og ideer som har vært og er tonengivende i norsk utenrikspolitikk, og setter disse inn i et større, politisk og idehistorisk perspektiv. De viser blant annet hvordan den liberale fredstanken har vært en vedvarende kraft i det utenrikspolitiske ordskiftet og diskuterer hvorfor Norge har manglet en konservativ idetradisjon. Norges naboland har hatt et markant innslag av maktpolitiske resonnementer som har manglet i den norske idetradisjonen.

Sited Diplomacy

“Roving Elites and Sedentary Subjects: The Hybridized Origins of the State”

In the introduction to this volume, Hurt and Lipschutz ask about historical precedents for the present-day hybridization of state power and capitalist accumulation strategies and practices. As is well known, the emergence of capitalism was marked by a number of earlier and relevant shifts of governmental rationality, leading back to the break with mercantilism, which was decisive in singling out economics as a separate sphere in western societies. This process was a key drama in western state building during the mercantilist seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was indigenous to those states. Similar processes emerged in other states only as a result of contact (trade, conquest, colonization etc.) with western states. Characteristically, at present non-western states have a less clear division of political and economic spheres than do western states, and in some states, it makes little sense to talk about separate spheres at all. One of the defining features of what are often called “fragile states” is precisely that the public and the private is not separate, thus contradicting the ideal-typical model of a Weberian state on which the category rests (Eriksen 2011).