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Researcher

Halvard Leira

Research Director, Research Professor
Halvard_Leira_11.jpg

Contactinfo and files

hl@nupi.no
(+47) 928 03 854
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Summary

Halvard Leira is Research Professor and Research Director at NUPI.

Halvard Leira’s main areas of research is foreign policy and diplomacy, with a special emphasis on the Norwegian varieties. He also has a long-standing research interest in historical international relations, and international thought. Leira completed his PhD thesis in May 2011, titled «The Emergence of Foreign Policy: Knowledge, Discourse, History».

Expertise

  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • Europe
  • The Nordic countries
  • Nationalism
  • Oceans
  • Historical IR

Education

2011 PhD, Political Science, University of Oslo  

2002 Cand. Polit., Political Science, Department of political Science, University of Oslo

Work Experience

2024 - Research Director, NUPI

2003- Research Fellow/Phd-candidate/Senior Research Fellow/Research Professor, NUPI

Aktivitet

Articles
News
Articles
News

New Research Directors

The duo has high ambitions for NUPI's research quality and research portfolio.
  • Foreign policy
  • Theory and method
  • Historical IR
  • Comparative methods
Publications
Publications
Scientific article

Stories we live by: the rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts

Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we risk closing down opportunities for different ways of imagining both the present and the future. In this article, we acknowledge the advances made in HIR over the last decades but suggest that a closer engagement with conceptual history would enhance its potential even further, making it possible to explore how a wider space of experience can also widen our horizon of expectations.

  • Historical IR
CRIA.jpeg
  • Historical IR
Publications
Publications
Scientific article

The future is just another past

Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discarded, new ones adopted, and existing ones modified. This implies that any exercise in ‘futurology’ must necessarily come with an openness towards conceptual change, and that a key challenge for International Studies going forward will consist in matching our conceptual toolbox to an ever-changing world. The importance of conceptual change has until recently been neglected in the study of global politics. Thus, in this paper we start by presenting the empirical case for incorporating conceptual change by laying out key past and present conceptual changes in the international realm. We then move on to a presentation of conceptual history and the tools it provides us for grasping conceptual change, before discussing how to tackle conceptual developments when thinking about the future of global politics.

  • Historical IR
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  • Historical IR
Articles
New research
Articles
New research

How do our concepts of the world shape how we understand the world?

Two new articles from the project "A Conceptual History of International Relations" explore basic concepts of international relations and how conceptual history can help us understand the world around us better.
  • Historical IR
Bildet viser Game of Thrones-karakteren Tyrion Lannister stående til høyre for en treplanke med et bekymret blikk
NUPIpodden #12: Kan du forvente hjelp fra Norge hvis du kommer i trøbbel i utlandet?
Podcast

NUPIpodden #12: Kan du forvente hjelp fra Norge hvis du kommer i trøbbel i utlandet?

Skal vi hente hjem fremmedkrigere som har reist til Syria for å slutte seg til IS? Brukte norske myndigheter for mye penger på å få hjem to drapsd...

  • Security policy
  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • The Nordic countries
  • Humanitarian issues
  • Governance
  • Security policy
  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • The Nordic countries
  • Humanitarian issues
  • Governance
NUPIpodden #21: Hva er egentlig utenrikspolitikk?
Podcast

NUPIpodden #21: Hva er egentlig utenrikspolitikk?

Når begynte vi å snakke om utenrikspolitikk? Og hvorfor? Og spiller det noen rolle at makthaverne begynte å kalle noe for «utenrikspolitikk»? I de...

  • Foreign policy
  • Foreign policy
The ugly duckling of the foreign services
Podcast

The ugly duckling of the foreign services

Visiting prisoners, assisting lost travellers and distressed expats. Consular work is often considered the ugly duckling of the foreign services,...

  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
  • Diplomacy
  • Foreign policy
Event
13:15 - 15:00
NUPI
Engelsk
The Counterinsurgent Imagination - cover_CREOPPED.jpg
Event
13:15 - 15:00
NUPI
Engelsk
26. May 2023
Event
13:15 - 15:00
NUPI
Engelsk

Book presentation: The Counterinsurgent Imagination

How and why counterinsurgent ideas persist, despite recurring failures?

Event
14:30 - 16:00
NUPI
Engelsk
011222-book-launch.png
Event
14:30 - 16:00
NUPI
Engelsk
1. Dec 2022
Event
14:30 - 16:00
NUPI
Engelsk

Book Launch: Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders

We invite you to this book launch with Ayse Zarakol and her new book on the rise and fall of world orders.

Event
11:00 - 13:00
NUPI
Engelsk
080922-CHIP-Annual_Lecture-20-21.png
Event
11:00 - 13:00
NUPI
Engelsk
8. Sep 2022
Event
11:00 - 13:00
NUPI
Engelsk

CHIP Annual Lecture 2020-2021: On Becoming International

NUPI's Center for Historical International Politics (CHIP) invites you to this seminar with Jens Bartelson.

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