Reduced influence in the Arctic?
What is at Stake in Norway's Post-election Climate Negotiations
KRONIKK: Når blir akademisk samarbeid sikkerhetspolitisk risiko?
Why do firms import via merchants in entrepôt countries rather than directly from the source?
An increasing share of world trade happens indirectly via merchants in third countries, so-called entrepôts. This article uses an exhaustive and highly disaggregated dataset for Norwegian firms’ import transactions to study the motives for importing through such merchants rather than directly from the source country. I first show that transactions via entrepôts are much smaller than transactions from the source. I then study which factors are associated with the probability of importing indirectly. Source country characteristics – especially high trade barriers and unfavourable geographical locations – are important when time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity is not controlled for. When controlling for this, however, firm- and product-level characteristics stand out as the main drivers. Smaller and less productive firms more often import via entrepôts, especially when importing product-source combinations that are relatively unimportant in their total imports and when importing products with low price dispersion and high value-to-weight ratios. The results are in line with theories suggesting that merchants facilitate trade by offering reduced fixed trade costs for firms that trade through them. As such, they may help smaller and less productive firms to import.
How states manage international censure: Norway's response to criticism of its Child Welfare Services
When states are criticised, they normally recognise, reject or counter the critique. Yet they could listen to and contain criticism without directly rejecting or recognising it. Using criticism of Norway’s Child Welfare Services as an example, Kristin Haugevik and Cecilie Basberg Neumann show that diplomatic containment can prevent conflict accelerating and then damaging bilateral relations
Reputation crisis management and the state: Theorising containment as diplomatic mode
This article theorises containment as a diplomatic response mode for states when faced with potentially harmful attacks on their international identity and reputation. Despite widespread agreement in International Relations (IR) scholarship that identities matter in the context of state security, studies of crisis management have paid little attention to ontological security crises. Scholarly literature on public diplomacy has concerned itself mainly with proactive nation branding and reputation building; work on stigma management has privileged the study of how ‘transgressive’ states respond to identity attacks by recognising, rejecting or countering criticism. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we make the case that states do not perform as uniform entities when faced with ontological security crises – government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats have varying roles and action repertoires available to them. Second, we argue that containment is a key but undertheorised part of the diplomatic toolkit in crisis management. Unpacking containment as a crisis management response mode, we combine insights from IR scholarship on emotions and diplomacy with insights on therapeutic practices from social psychology. We substantiate our argument with a case study of how Norwegian government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats responded to escalating international criticism against Norway’s Child Welfare Services following a wave of transnational protests in 2016. A key finding is that whereas the dominant response mode of government ministers and bureaucratic officials was to reject the criticism, diplomats mainly worked to contain the situation, trying to prevent it from escalating further and resulting in long-term damage to bilateral relations.
Norway as an in-between for Russia: Ambivalent space, hybrid measures
This three-year project addresses the acutely relevant question of whether Norway is acquiring the precarious status of an ‘in-between’ state in the Kremlin’s eye after the watershed events of 2014 (A...
What affects Nordic defence cooperation?
We have lacked good tools for analysing security cooperation in medium-sized regions such as the Nordic areas, according to Karsten Friis (NUPI). His most recent article offers a solution.
Analyzing Security Subregions: Forces of Push, Pull, and Resistance in Nordic Defense Cooperation
How can we best analyze security subregions? The most commonly used theory of regional security in the discipline of international relations, the regional security complex theory, focuses on large regions, such as Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. It pays less attention to smaller regions within these. This is unfortunate, because the security dynamics of these subregions often are a result of more than their place in the larger region. At the same time, the security of subregions cannot be reduced to a function of the policies of the states comprising them either. In short, security subregions are a level of analysis in their own right, with their own material, ideational, economic, and political dynamics. To capture and understand this, we need an analytical framework that can be applied to security regions irrespective of where and when in time they occur. The aim of this article is to offer such an analytical framework that helps us theorize the forces forging regional security cooperation, by combining external push and pull forces with internal forces of pull and resistance. The utility of the framework is illustrated through the case of Nordic security cooperation. It allows for a systematic mapping of the driving forces behind it and the negative forces resisting it. The Nordic region thus becomes a meeting point between global and national forces, pushing and pulling in different directions, with Nordic Defense Cooperation being formed in the squeeze between them.
Frankrikes Europa-politikk gir muligheter for Norge
If one wants an EU that is able to protect the values on which European cooperation is based, then the EU must be strengthened. This is the main message of the new French European policy. And Norway should support that, even if it is not an EU member.