Regions

Trailblazers in a Warming World? The Agency of African Actors in Climate, Peace, and Security

A growing body of evidence indicates how climate change can, combined with other factors, increase the risk of violent conflict. Such claims have particularly been made in African contexts. This article studies the agency exerted by African actors in shaping international agendas on climate, peace, and security in the cases of (1) the UN Security Council, (2) The African Union and (3) COP27. The analysis shows how this engagement has included diplomacy, discursive innovation, epistemic engagement, and policy coordination. We argue that the continent’s growing geopolitical centrality is enabling African actors to exert a nonaligned foreign policy on their own terms.

Differentiating Hybrid Threats against the High North and Baltic Sea regions

Russia’s grey-zone threats and actions are a major concern for bordering countries who are on the receiving end of such actions, both physical and cyber. This policy brief examines how such hybrid threats affect countries in the High North and Baltic Sea regions and evaluates the challenges related to response and countermeasures. NATO's policy is that the member nations are responsible for building resilience and responding to hybrid threats or attacks. To avoid invalid interpretations or paralysis in assessment and response to such complex and diverse threats, they should be differentiated and dealt with separately rather than boxed into a wide cognitive basket. This Policy Brief is part of the project ‘Norway as an in-between for Russia: Ambivalent space, hybrid measures’ financed by the Norwegian MoD.

How are these two supposed to cooperate?

They don’t have much in common, Donald Trump and Keir Starmer. But does that mean we are about to see a British showdown with the United States? In this op-ed in Dagsavisen, NUPI researchers Øyvind Svendsen and Paul Beaumont raise this question. At first glance, the two leaders appear to be diametrical opposites. On one side, the somewhat rigid social democrat and human rights lawyer Starmer; on the other, the ruthless rule-breaker Trump. Can they cooperate at all? Must the British now break away from their special relationship with their American guiding star?

Tourists as a Means of Power

For many in Norway, Chinese tourists represent an important source of income. For China, tourism is hardline politics. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide (Arbeiderpartiet) recently told Aftenposten that we must exercise caution regarding Chinese investments in critical infrastructure, but that this does not preclude a future free trade agreement. Minister of Culture Lubna Jaffery (Arbeiderpartiet) also seeks to strengthen cooperation with China. It is reasonable to question whether the government fully understands Chinese power politics. As China expert Torbjørn Færøvik emphasizes, it is one thing to work towards cooperation and dialogue with China, “but weaving the Norwegian economy into the Chinese one is something quite different.”

Expelled from the Fairytale: The Impact of the Dissident Legacy on Post-1989 Central European Politics

To understand the political dimension of dissident legacies, we need first to understand the components that “made” the dissidents and follow their reconfiguration after 1989, leading to initial empowerment followed by gradual demise of the liberal post-dissident elite. Dissidence in the form that first appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s in central and eastern Europe constituted a particular mode of political practice, combining open, non-violent dissent with universalist moral claims. The phenomenon of dissidentism was transnational, as political empowerment of oppositionists was achieved through a particular network of relationships between domestic audiences, repressive regimes, and Western media, social movements, trade unions, political parties, and policymakers. The specificities of the dissidents’ empowerment can partly explain key features of post-dissident politics and the visible backlash against former prominent dissidents, which has contributed to the rise of illiberalism and to democratic backsliding. This article traces the post-1989 trajectories of a few who belonged among central Europe’s most prominent representatives in this symbolic category, to try to explain the causes and character of the swift backlash against them—or as Václav Havel put it, their “expulsion from the fairytale.” Three pillars of dissident political power turned into the roots of their demise. First, critics question the dissidents’ uniqueness and rewrite their master narrative. Further, we see a clash of representations that results from the dissidents’ transnational empowerment, and third, the broader anti-elite and anti-intellectual tendencies that always accompanied dissidence as its shadow became amplified by more recent populist rhetoric.

The urgent need for social science and humanities knowledge for climate action in Europe

The morphology of Putinism: the arrangement of political concepts into a coherent ideology

Scholarly analysis has been divided as to whether Putinism is a coherent ideology. With the decision to invade Ukraine, this question requires reexamination. This article interprets the evolution of Putinism in morphological terms, tracing how political concepts developed into a distinctive ‘thin’ ideology. After interpreting the original formation of Putinism (2000–2012), I unpack how interlinked processes of securitization and culturization reshaped the arrangement of core, adjacent and peripheral concepts. This was preceded by discursive closure between the Kremlin and its ideological antagonists over critical junctures in 2012 and 2014. An emphasis on the reactive, events-driven dynamic of Putinism reveals how it functions as an immanent morale that reinforces preexisting power networks and strives to win the loyalty of the population. Preserving culture and security has become synonymous with maintaining the very existence of the Russian Federation. With the launch of the ‘Special Military Operation’ in February 2022, this ideology was not immediately transformed but rather deployed on a new and more dramatic level. The ideological reconfiguration examined in this article must be understood as a crucial precursor to the decision to escalate the war in Ukraine, which ris reshaping Russia’s political trajectory in dramatic and unpredictable ways.

Pragmatism and protest: Russia’s communist party through Covid-19 and beyond

The Covid-19 epidemic came at a sensitive time for Russia’s leadership, which was attempting a political reset and structural reforms, including the removal of President Putin’s presidential term limits. This article examines how issues related to the pandemic provided new opportunities for the systemic opposition, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who emerged as the main beneficiaries after capitalising on opportunities created by the epidemic. The underappreciated role of systemic opposition parties in electoral authoritarian systems, which balance “voice” and “loyalty” to benefit both themselves and the regime, is examined in the context of the Covid-19 crisis.