Researcher
Paul Beaumont
Contactinfo and files
Summary
Paul Beaumont received a Ph.D. in International Relations/International Environmental Studies and Development from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 2020. He is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), working in the Global Order and Diplomacy research group. Paul is currently researching public private partnerships in development as part of the DEVINT project, and transnational ecosystem politics with the LORAX project. From April 2025, he will lead the ERC Starting Grant funded project “Navigating the Era of Indicators”
More broadly, Paul's research interests include IR theory, the (dis)functioning of international institutions, dubious quantified performance indicators, global environmental politics, nuclear weapons, hierarchies in world politics, and pluralist research methods.
Paul has published two monographs: "Performing Nuclear Weapons: How Britain Made its Bomb Make Sense" (Palgrave 2021) and “The Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics” (Oxford University Press, 2024). His research has also featured in numerous leading journals, including European Journal of International Relations, Contemporary Security Policy, International Relations, Third World Quarterly and International Studies Review, among others. A keen contributor to policy and public debate, Paul has published multiple op-eds in Klassekampen, Aftenposten, among other Norwegian national newspapers.
He is currently an Editor of the journal Cooperation and Conflict (2023-2027).
Expertise
Education
2020 Doctorate, International Relations/International Development and Environment Studies. The Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
2014 Master of Science, International Relations. (NMBU)
2006 Bachelor, Economic History. The London School of Economics (LSE)
Work Experience
2020- Senior Researcher, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)
2019 Visiting Scholar. The Department of Politics and International Studies. Cambridge University
2015-2020 PhD Candidate, The Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU)
2015 Junior Research Fellow. NUPI
2013-2015 Academic Writing Advisor, NMBU
2006-2012 English Teacher - Prague, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, London, Gliwice
Aktivitet
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Clear all filtersThe Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics
States do not only strive for wealth and security, but international status too. A burgeoning body of research has documented that states of all sizes spend considerable time, energy, and even blood and treasure when seeking status on the world stage. Yet, for all scholars' success in identifying instances of status seeking, they lack agreement on the nature of the international hierarchies that states are said to compete within. Making sense of this status ambiguity remains the key methodological and theoretical challenge facing status research in international relations scholarship. In The Grammar of Status Competition, Paul David Beaumont tackles this puzzle head on by making a strength out of status' widely acknowledged slipperiness. Given that states, statesmen, and citizens care about and pursue status despite its difficulty to assess, Beaumont argues that we can study international status hierarchies through these actors' attempts to grapple with this same status ambiguity. The book thus redirects inquiry toward the theories of international status (TIS) that governments and citizens themselves produce and use to make sense of their state's position in the world. Advancing a new framework for studying such TIS, the book illuminates how specific theories of international status emerge, solidify, and become contested, and how these processes influence domestic and foreign policy. Showcasing the value of a TIS approach via multiple historical case studies—from nuclear arms control to Norwegian education policy—Beaumont thereby addresses three major puzzles in IR status research: why states compete for status when the international rewards seem ephemeral; how states can escape the zero-sum game associated with quests for positional status; and how status scholars can overcome the methodological problem of disentangling status from other motivations
Reimagining NATO after Crimea: Defender of the rule-based order and truth?
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war on Ukraine has led to upheaval in NATO’s discourse and practice. Taking a step back from the security debate, this article contends that the very process of responding to Russian aggression has led to the reimagining of NATO’s identity. While NATO tends to present change as continuity, this article’s mixed methods analysis illuminates how a trio of new and ambitious self-representations have risen to prominence within NATO’s post-Crimea discourse. NATO has anointed itself defender of the international rules-based order and purveyor of truth and facts amidst a world of disinformation, while pushing a resilience policy agenda that expands its authority into new domestic domains. Problematizing these shifts, the article warns that NATO’s new narrative ignores its own role in the problems it seeks to solve and thus risks undermining NATO efforts to rally global support for Ukraine.
NUPI project to receive prestigious European Research Council funding
From the incoming editors: A leading International Relations journal with a Nordic touch
The new editors of Cooperation and Conflict introduce themselves and their aims for the journal going forward.
Dizzying Developments in International Relations
Everyday migration hierarchies: negotiating the EU’s visa regime
Critical security studies have shed invaluable light on the diffuse governmental technologies and pernicious effects of the EU’s bordering practices. While scholars have focused upon the experience of precarious migrant groups, this article suggests that extending our critical gaze to include seemingly privileged migrants can further understanding of just how far the insecurity produced by the EU’s migration regime reaches. Focusing on the migration process of international students in Norway, this article inquires into how these migrants experience, theorize and negotiate the EU’s visa regime and its governmental technologies. We show how their subjective understandings of ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ hierarchies of the visa regime play out in their bureaucratic encounters, influencing their everyday lives. Ultimately, the article shows how the regime’s disciplinary effects extend further than prior critical research has appreciated.
Reflex to turn: the rise of turn-talk in International Relations
The field of International Relations (IR) is being spun around by a seemingly endless number of ‘turns’. Existing analyses of turning are few in number and predominantly concerned with the most prominent recent turns. By excavating the forgotten history of IR’s earliest turns from the 1980s and tracing the evolution of turn-talk over time, this article reveals a crucial yet overlooked internalist driver behind the phenomenon: the rise of reflexivity. Rather than emerging in the 21st century, turn-talk began at the end of the 1980s as a series of turns away from positivism and towards reflexivity. Cumulatively, this first wave of turns would denaturalise IR’s state-centric ontology while enshrining reflexivity as a canonical good among critical scholars. By the mid-1990s, however, these metatheoretical critiques of positivism had produced a substantial backlash. Charged with fostering an esoteric deconstructivism, a new generation of reflexivists set out to demonstrate the feasibility of post-positivist empirical research. As a result, IR’s turning also took on a different form from the 2000s: whereas the first wave of turns had mounted an epistemological and methodological attack against the positivist mainstream, the second wave set about bringing new ontological objects under the scrutiny of reflexivist scholars. This shift from anti-positivist to mostly intra-reflexivist turning was facilitated by the institutionalisation of critical IR as a major subfield of the discipline. It is the privileged position of reflexivity among critical IR scholars that is the condition of possibility for endless turning, accentuated by mounting pressures to demonstrate novelty in an increasingly competitive environment.
Introduction: Is the time nigh for ecological security?
Climate change and the ongoing destruction of the earth's ecosystems have increasingly been depicted as a security issue with the noble but not unproblematic goal engendering an urgent response. These climate and environmental security discourses have been extensively critiqued on both empirical and normative grounds. But is there an ethically defensible and even emancipatory alternative to envisioning the relationship between the environment and security? Matt McDonald in his new book - Ecological Security: Climate Change and the Construction of Security - argues that there is and lays out comprehensive normative framework for doing so. To interrogate McDonald's case for what he calls “Ecological Security”, this forum brings together four leading researchers from Anthropology, Geography, International Relations, and Peace and Sustainability Studies. While all contributors are broadly positive regarding goals of the book, each identifies weaknesses in the approach that move from suggestions on how refine the framework on the one hand to questioning whether the framework risks proving counter-productive on the other.
Whose Revisionism, Which International Order? Social Structure and Its Discontents
While the distinction between status quo and revisionist states is well established in International Relations, only more recently have scholars begun to refine the concept of revisionism itself, emphasizing that revisionism comes in different forms. A number of typologies have been introduced to capture this diversity. In this article, we offer a critique of these typologies, highlighting how many of these works elide the rule-governed and contextual nature of what counts as revisionism. Building on an understanding of international orders as social structures, we argue that the revisionist character of state conduct can only be determined with reference to the conception of the legitimate ends and means current in a particular international order. This leads us to distinguish between three types of revisionism: competitive revisionism that is transgressive of the legitimate means; creative revisionism that is transgressive of the legitimate ends; and revolutionary revisionism that is transgressive of legitimate ends and means. We further emphasize that determining the revisionist character of state conduct always involves interpretation and judgment. The concern for analytical precision conveyed by the development of different typologies of revisionism must therefore be followed by an equally deliberate concern for the politics of revisionism—in both theory and practice.
NUPI team to take over as editors of the prestigious journal Cooperation and Conflict