Researcher
Paul Beaumont
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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 leads the ERC Starting Grant funded project “Navigating the Era of Indicators”, which explores the politics of quantification across education, climate, and health policy fields, as well as in global governance in general. More broadly, Paul's research interests include IR theory, the (dis)functioning of international institutions, 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). The latter won the APSA Ideas, Knowledge, and Politics section book prize in 2025. His research has featured in numerous leading journals, including European Journal of International Relations, Review of International Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, New Political Economy, Third World Quarterly and International Studies Review, among others. He has also co-edited two volumes, Governing Nature and the Making of World Order and The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development, and a special issue on "Status Symbols in World Politics".
A keen contributor to policy and public debate, Paul has published multiple op-eds in Klassekampen, Aftenposten, among other Norwegian national newspapers. Committed to fostering pluralistic, rigorous and theoretically informed research within the discipline of IR and adjacent fields, Paul is currently an editor of the Nordics’ leading IR journal Cooperation and Conflict and a co-chair of the Knowledge in IR (KnowIR) section for the European International Studies Association.
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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Constructivist theorizing in tumultuous times (ft Nicholas Onuf and Stefano Guzzini)
With the growing sense of perpetual and compounding global crises and war, it is not only policy makers that are scrambling to respond. The discip...
Briefing: Developing Global Indicators for Climate Change Adaptation
Measuring climate adaptation progress presents several complex technical and political challenges. Ahead of the UNFCCC June Climate Meetings in Bonn (SB62), this briefing explores key considerations and challenges for developing indicators for the Global Goal on Adaptation that could contribute to effective and scaled-up climate adaptation action. To understand the power of global governance indicators and how to use them judiciously, it is necessary to understand what indicators are and how they are produced. Different kinds of indicators--such as counts, ratios, or composites--can influence policy making and governance processes through a variety of mechanisms. Outcomes on the GGA indicators at COP30 present a unique opportunity for climate adaptation and other related matters to build on work conducted by both negotiators and experts as well as multiple stakeholders and presents the potential to identify measurable approaches for adaptation action. It is important to ensure that the finalised indicators are applicable across different contexts, are not detrimental to developing countries where climate action is most needed and are applied for ensuring the goals of the Paris Agreement are met, and means of implementation are scaled up and accessed for adaptation action. Therefore, the selection of the final indicators needs to take into consideration general approaches to indicator development, especially their applicability in country-specific contexts and their relevance to adaptation.
Trump 2.0 og internasjonal politikk
I denne spesialrapporten har Senter for geopolitikk samlet en rekke bidrag fra forskere tilknyttet senteret, fra Fridtjof Nansen Institutt, Institutt for Forsvarsstudier, Universitetet i Oslo, UiT – Norges Arktiske Universitet og Norsk Utenrikspolitisk Institutt. Bidragene setter søkelys på noen konkrete temaer som inntak til å forstå et USA i endring og hva det vil kunne bety for andre stater, og for utviklingen på konkrete politikkfelt. Rapporten har særlig fokus på hva disse endringene, hver for seg og samlet, betyr for Europa og Norge. En oppdatert versjon ble publisert 12.06.25, klokken 12.40.
Navigating the Era of Indicators (Navigator)
The European Research Council funded Navigator project (2025-2030) explores how public and private bodies, civil society and the state, navigate the era of indicators in global governa...
Rational Illusions: Everyday Theories of International Status and the Domestic Politics of Boer War
Existing research has documented that status-seeking abounds in world politics. Yet the status hierarchies to which states respond and compete within are notoriously ambiguous and difficult to empirically ascertain. This ambiguity has begotten considerable disagreement among scholars over the nature of international hierarchies. Making a strength out of this slipperiness, this article posits that international status can be studied via the everyday theories of status that governments and their opponents themselves produce and use to interpret their state’s status. Treating these everyday theories as productive of the world they purport to describe, such an approach foregrounds the interpretative agency of domestic groups to develop and maintain "hierarchies of their own making," which need not be recognized internationally to become crucial for policy legitimation domestically. In order to study such everyday theories’ systematically, the article develops a new meta-linguistic framework for identifying and mapping their use within domestic politics. Via a case study on the Boer War (1899-1902), the article shows how domestic battles over what international status is can shape domestic politics and policy outcomes.
Status symbols in world politics
A large body of scholarship in International Relations (IRs) has shown that numerous actors in world politics are avid observers, and sometimes obsessive seekers of social status. However, the literature has remained oddly quiet about the status symbols acquired and used to further that goal. To redress this lacuna, this special issue brings together several of IR’s leading status scholars to investigate the emergence, decline, ambiguity, functionality, and utility of status symbols in world politics. This introduction lays out the analytical and ethical warrant for studying status symbols. We formulate an interpretive framework for historicizing status symbols and exploring their temporal and spatial trajectories within international society. Specifically, this introduction develops four analytical lenses for illuminating status symbols. In short, how status symbols temporally rise to prominence and eventually whiter, how and whether they function and thus how they are received, whether their inherent multivocality enable them to cut across multiple groups of world politics, and how and to what extent status symbols can be consciously manipulated into a force for good.
Conclusion: Writing for Reflexivity and Breaking Writing Rules
Joining an inter-disciplinary body of work that seeks to politicise the craft of academic writing, the premise of this forum is that the norms of “good academic writing”structure the kind of knowledge that can be produced and thus the kind of goals academic writing can achieve. While taking aim at the hegemony of Anglo-American norms in particular, the forum’s argument pertains to any context whereby one set of norms monopolises what “good writing” entails.. It is a call for writing pluralism then, but it is also much more than that. Rather than calling for letting 1000 writing styles bloom, the forum endeavours to systematically develop strategies to help readers’ on their reflexive journey: what the forum terms “writing for reflexivity”. Indeed, for all the guides on fostering reflexivity in the researcher, there are far fewer interrogating how our writing practices may encourage or discourage reflexivity in our readers. Taking stock of the forum’s efforts, this conclusion discusses how the contributors bend and break prevailing norms and with what consequences for generating reflexivity in the reader. Second, it identifies a strategy of writing for reflexivity that is latent in the forum: cultivating humility in the authorial voice. Finally, the conclusion warns against seeing Anglo-American norms as a coherent whole that stands in opposition to writing for reflexivity, but heterogenous set of techniques, each of which can work in combination with radical departures from those same norms in the aid of writing for reflexivity.
The Construction of Status in Security Politics: Rules, Comparisons and Second-Guessing Collective Beliefs
Tapping into international relations status’ research’s extended lineage, this chapter makes the case for a thick constructivist account of international status dynamics that makes the construction of rules and comparisons central to analysis. Drawing upon the work of Robert Gilpin and Nicholas Onuf, the chapter’s approach enables the exploration of how the rules governing status competitions emerge, why some rules become agreed upon and others contested, and the consequences of these processes of rule formation. While this framework requires a gestalt switch for conventional status research, this chapter argues that it is possible to do so while remaining consistent with status research’s core definition of status. The value of the framework is illustrated via a case study of how the rules of the nuclear status competition emerged and solidified over the course of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the Soviet Union and United States (1969–79).
Review of Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions for Human Rights
A strong contribution to international studies’ scientific ontology of human rights processes, Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions in Human Rights illuminates and dissects a hitherto underappreciated but influential process through which non-state actors influence the interpretation and thus implementation of human rights law. Indeed, getting down among the weeds of human rights treaty bodies’ lawmaking processes, Reiners emerges with a compelling account of how an informal, important if transient, actor, she calls Transnational Lawmaking Coalitions (TLCs), clarifies human rights law and thereby structure states’ human rights obligations through drafting general comments. Operating across the boundaries of inter-governmental organizations, Reiners documents how TLCs emerge out of the “opportunity structure” generated by the recurring need to clarify human rights law and the chronic underfunding of human rights treaty expert bodies (p. 55). Composing of at least one of the treaty body’s appointed expert members, we have a case of TLC when members of the expert body then reach outside to utilize expertise within their professional networks for drafting a general comment. According to Reiners, working outside formal processes, these expert networks conduct their work on a shoestring budget lubricated primarily with the social capital, professional recognition, and moral conviction (p. 57). While lacking formalized processes for engaging with stakeholders, TLCs nonetheless render what can become authoritative new human rights interpretations, largely beyond the purvey or at least the direct influence of the state parties (pp. 22–4). As Reiners put it, TLCs “emerge from” and “operate through” the formal bodies but are not formal institutional entities themselves nor directly employed by state parties (p. 46). In this way, TLCs can be understood as exploiting a loophole in the human rights architecture through which non-state actors can bypass deadlocked formal treaty-making processes (p. 142–3).