How the New Cold War travelled North (Part I) Norwegian and Russian narratives
The standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine has already obstructed cooperation across a range of issues. Could it also affect state interaction between Norway and Russia in the Arctic—an area and a relationship long characterized by a culture of compromise and cooperation? In two policy briefs we examine changes in how Russia and Norway have approached each other in the Arctic in the period 2012–2016. This first brief presents the development of official Norwegian and Russian narratives on the relations between the two countries in the Arctic. Such narratives stipulate logical paths for action. Showing how Norwegian and Russian policies have changed in line with these narratives, we conclude that what some refer to as “the New Cold War” is indeed spreading to the Arctic.
Military-Civilian Relations in Interventions
It is frequently claimed that success in interventions hinges largely on military–civilian coherence. Nevertheless, despite high ambitions, coherence among intervening actors has proven challenging to achieve in practice. Why is this so? The thesis asks: How can we theorize and analyse the challenges facing intervening actors to achieve military–civilian coherence in post-Cold War interventions? The thesis firstly develops a holistic understanding of the various actors present in an intervention and their inter-relationships – and offers a taxonomy of various forms of relationships between them. It then focusses on the military actors and discusses how they differ significantly from conventional peacekeeping to robust counter-insurgencies. The thesis then discusses the relations between military and humanitarian actors. Based on the first chapters it is thereafter argued that there is a need for a comprehensive analytical framework to make deductive analyses of interventions possible. It argues that by studying the identification processes of the intervening actors, insights into how they regard their role and how they regard the other actors, international as well as local, can be generated. This analytical framework is then applied to the case of Afghanistan to analyse the identities of three sets of actors – the military, the humanitarians and the state-builders, finding that the three entities appeared largely ignorant of each other, operating in parallel but not in conjunction. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the applicability of the analytical framework on other cases and with other research questions.
The geopolitics of renewable energy: Debunking four emerging myths
This article seeks to nip in the bud four emerging myths about the geopolitics of the rise of renewable energy and the concomitant increase in electricity usage. The article presents alternative perspectives, arguing that (1) the risk of geopolitical competition over critical materials for renewable energy is limited; (2) the resource curse as we know it from the petroleum sector will not necessarily reappear in many countries in connection with renewable energy; (3) transboundary electricity cut-offs will mostly be unsuitable as a geopolitical weapon; and (4) it is not clear that growing use of renewable energy will exacerbate cyber-security risks. In all four areas, the evolving literature could place more emphasis on uncertainty and risks and less on one-sided scenarios and maximization of threats.