Publications
The World Bank in Ukraine – lessons and challenges after 2022
The World Bank holds a central role in the international civilian support structure and has mobilised over $90 billion for Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The pace and volume of the the fund mobilisation is unprecedented, requiring new mechanisms and structures, and raises technical and political challenges as the bank manages its apolitical mandate amid war between two of its shareholders. This brief explores the bank’s role in Ukraine and the trade-offs this entails, highlighting lessons and concerns identified by the actors themselves, including sustainability questions tied to scope of support, trust fund organisation, and ownership and legitimacy of the World Bank programmes. The analysis draws on grey literature and interviews with staff and Norwegian aid stakeholders, including the Nansen programme.
Beyond the blue line: Tackling climate, peace, and security challenges in Abyei
This report maps out the challenges of climate, peace and security (CPS) and its links to the United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei (UNISFA) work on protection of civilians (POC). It also looks at the work that the mission is doing to adapt to these issues with communities. This report is jointly produced by the Training for Peace project at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and the joint Climate, Peace and Security Risk project of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and NUPI.
Comrade, Customer, Client, or Critic? European States’ Engagements with China’s Belt and Road Initiative
Why do some European states embrace China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while others keep it at arm’s length or actively oppose it? States like Greece and Hungary have welcomed BRI investments as a political counterweight to Brussels, while Germany and others have remained skeptical, despite their economic ties to China. To capture the variation in how states respond to the BRI, we draw on theories of incomplete contracts and relational contracting, which foreground recipient states’ agency in negotiating with a more powerful counterpart. Here, what shapes the engagement is the character of the relations between the parties rather than the content of the contracts. We propose four ideal-typical relations of Comrade, Client, Customer, and Critic, each associated with distinct policy behaviors and underlying drivers, to assess how the BRI interacts with domestic politics and historical and existing relations. We argue that the BRI does not necessarily change existing alignments, but rather that it may reinforce or be adapted to them—and that such changes are contingent on domestic and institutional recalibrations. The proposed ideal-typical patterns help us understand the different, specific trajectories that emerge in the four studied cases—Greece, Poland, Hungary, and Germany—and how they are mediated by domestic politics. Further, the ideal-typical relations proposed here can help us assess the political and economic significance of the BRI while also contributing to broader debates about possible changes in China’s global position and the building blocks of an emerging international order.
The Political Effects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Context, Competition, and Infrastructure Politics
In this special issue, the authors identify three contextual dimensions that are particularly important for understanding the political effects of the Belt Road Initiative (BRI). First, bilateral relations and domestic politics: how a country’s history of interactions with China, and the particularities of its domestic politics, affects how the BRI is received, negotiated, and politicized. Second, the politics of international goods substitution: the BRI does not operate in a vacuum but in an ecology of competing providers of infrastructures and related international goods. The effects of any given investment will depend on what alternatives are available to recipient states. Third, symbolic and ideational contexts. Beyond its material dimensions, the BRI can function as an identity or status marker—for China, for recipient states, and for adversaries—in ways that may carry independent political consequences. Engaging with these three contextual dimensions, the authors argue, is key to moving beyond abstraction or insulation, and toward a fuller picture of the political effects of the BRI. The contributions to this special issue all investigate how these contextual dimensions of the BRI condition its political effects across regions and issue areas. Thereby, they seek to bridge the gap between macro-level accounts of China’s rise, and the more fine-grained studies of BRI projects. In this introduction, the authors first review the evolution of research on the BRI before addressing these three contextual dimensions in more detail and how they relate to the contributions comprising the special issue.
Bodø hovedflystasjon - strategiske og taktiske perspektiver
"Bodø Main Air Station – Strategic and Tactical Perspectives" tells the story of one of Norway’s most important military air bases over almost seven decades. From its establishment in 1953 until its closure in 2021, Bodø Main Air Station was a central element of Norwegian defence and security policy and an important NATO base in the High North. The book examines how the development of the air station was shaped by changing threat perceptions, defence strategies and technological developments – from the Cold War and the Soviet threat to Norway’s role in NATO today. At the same time, it provides insight into everyday life, the people who served there, and the operational activities at the air base. Through strategic and tactical perspectives, the book highlights the importance of Bodø Main Air Station to Norwegian and Allied security, and its role in the history of the Royal Norwegian Air Force, NATO and the defence of Northern Norway. Parts of the former main air station area are now being reused for military purposes. In 2024, the Norwegian Government decided to retain Bodø as a contingency base for Allied aircraft. The following year, the Prime Minister announced the establishment of a NATO Air Operations Centre at the former air station. The Norwegian Armed Forces’ Bodø Air Base and NATO’s CAOC Bodø have consequently been established and are currently under development.
Infrastructures in Cyber Conflict and Warfare
Infrastructure has played a foundational yet often underexplored role in cyber conflict and warfare. While typically treated as a backdrop to more prominent analytical concerns, infrastructure is in fact central to the very existence and functioning of the cyber domain, shaping both civilian and military operations. This chapter in De Gruyter Handbook of Cyber Conflict and Warfare surveys the diverse bodies of scholarship that engage with infrastructure in cyber warfare, revealing how different studies conceptualize what infrastructure is and what it does. Aanonsen and Gjesvik identify three overlapping approaches: infrastructure as a target and object of protection; infrastructure as a capability and source of power; and infrastructure as a force that shapes the practices and nature of warfare itself. Despite increasing attention, significant gaps remain in understanding how infrastructures influence cyber conflict. As scholarship moves from theoretical to empirical studies of cyber warfare, investigating the evolving role of infrastructures offers a promising path for future research.
The Battle for Russia’s Rebirth: Interpreting Pro-War Critical Patriotism and Imperial-Nationalism on Telegram
The Putin regime has developed an ambiguous relationship with Russian nationalism, which has been both a threat and a resource to the maintenance of its power. With the launch of the “Special Military Operation,” Russia’s national-patriot groups increased their profile as commentators on – and critics of – the war effort. This article analyses their content on Telegram – whose use has exploded inside Russia – and maps the discourses of this reinvigorated and politicized pro-war imperial-nationalist network. Our findings show that these channels share important commonalities in both their critiques of state policy — “critical patriotism” — and their propagation of an imperial-nationalist imaginary. Their hardline illiberal demands put pressure on the Kremlin to be less pragmatic and more ideologically consistent – at home and abroad. The key difference among the clusters within the network was between those still engaging in serious anti-regime dissent and those moderating their criticism to secure new niches in wartime conditions. We underscore the agency of these actors in their wartime stances toward the regime, interpret their radical pro-war positions, and consider their overall role in wartime Russia's information environment.
Sex workers, wives, soldiers, and spies: Representations of Russians in Norwegian media 1992–2023
This article analyses the changing ways in which Russians – and Russia – have been represented in a major Norwegian newspaper, VG , since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Theoretically, the article rests on the premises of social constructivism and the concepts of ‘othering’ through articulation of subject positions and symbolic boundaries. Applying a mixed-methods approach, the study explores both the changing thematic landscape and the evolving positioning of Russians in the newspaper’s reporting, zooming in on two dominant positions – Russians as pitiful and Russians as dangerous. Conceptualizing Russia as a ‘significant other’ to Norway, the article discusses how representations of Russians between 1992 and 2023 reflect shifting ideas about asymmetries between the two countries. It shows how, in VG ’s coverage, Russians have been transformed from occupying a position of economic inferiority to one of moral inferiority.
How Equitable and Inclusive? Comparing High-Speed Railway Projects in Indonesia and Thailand
While Southeast Asian governments sometimes wield bargaining power in securing infrastructure deals with external donors like China, many such projects still fail to deliver equitable and inclusive outcomes. This paper argues that autonomy alone, though necessary, is insufficient to ensure socially just infrastructure. We show that the enduring top-down Chinese developmental state model and the concomitant adherence to developmentalism by host states often override participatory and distributive concerns. Comparing Indonesia's Jakarta–Bandung high-speed railways (HSR) and Thailand's Bangkok–Nong Khai HSR, we find that the adherence to developmental state ideation of the Chinese investors on the one hand and developmentalist practices of the Indonesian and Thai project hosts on the other hand produced similarly adverse impacts on local communities, including evictions, environmental degradation, and limited public engagement. We call for a shift in focus from state autonomy alone to the ideational frameworks that underpin infrastructure outcomes, and urge that greater attention be paid to equity and inclusiveness in both scholarly and policy debates.
Unravelling the Ps in public–private partnerships for development
With the launch of UN Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) became formalised as both an objective of and a means of implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. An established policy-oriented research agenda has long sought to make sense of the ‘jungle’ of PPPs by identifying critical success factors and chronic shortcomings. Yet the instrumentalist inclination to evaluate PPPs restricts this agenda’s theoretical horizons. Building on a relatively smaller but significant body of critical PPP work, Agenda 2030 calls for research that embraces the messiness of PPPs and treats the plasticity of the term as a feature to understand rather than a bug to be overcome. To wit, Agenda 2030 advances an inductive approach to exploring the PPP buzzword in its specific enactments and makes the case for problematising the Ps in PPP from the bottom up and from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, Agenda 2030 highlights the theoretical value of escaping the evaluation meta-narrative that delimits the theoretical potential of a great deal of existing research on PPPs for development and PPPs more broadly. In addition to helping inform and enhance our understanding of the contemporary PPP agenda, this approach is useful for making sense of the political and capitalist forces that are shaping not only Ethiopia but the world at large today. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.