Managing Climate, Peace and Security Risks in the Borderlands of the Lake Chad Region (CPS-Lake Chad)
This is a Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA) report for the research project on managing climate, peace and security risks in the borderlands of the Lake Chad Basin Region. An updated version was published 8 May 2026.
Benedicte Egjar Engesland
Benedicte is a Master’s student in Political Science at the University of Oslo and a research assistant at NUPI in the Research Group for Global O...
Julie Askeland Caspersen
Julie is a master’s student and research assistant at NUPI in the Research Group for Peace, Conflict and Development. She is currently enrolled in...
Backlash Against the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
In recent years, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has faced mounting resistance from regressive political forces seeking to undermine its hard-won normative gains. This Open Access book offers a timely and rigorous examination of this global backlash, providing both theoretical innovation and empirical depth. Bringing together leading scholars and practitioners, the volume introduces a novel analytical framework that weaves together the concepts of backlash, counter-practices, and counter-discourses. It pioneers a deeper conceptual understanding of backlash—an often under-theorized phenomenon in feminist scholarship—and explores how resistance to gender norms is mobilized, manifested, and sustained across diverse contexts. Through richly detailed case studies from around the world, the book reveals how backlash operates at multiple levels, from subtle discursive shifts to overt political maneuvers. It interrogates how these dynamics stall, reshape, or reverse the WPS agenda, exposing the fragility of normative progress in international peace and security governance. Essential reading for scholars, peacebuilders, and advocates committed to advancing gender justice in global security, this volume not only diagnoses the threats facing the WPS agenda but also underscores the urgent need for sustained scholarly and policy engagement to protect and advance feminist achievements in global security.
Introduction: Backlash Against the Women, Peace and Security Agenda
This edited volume sets out to examine how the backlash against gender equality and women’s rights affects the aims and ambitions of the WPS agenda. Since the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has grown to form a comprehensive normative framework and body of knowledge. However, backsliding of women’s rights in the UN and beyond signals a potential reversal of an agenda that has steadily progressed and diffused globally for the past 25 years. Today, we see a backlash against liberal progressive norms, and support for women’s rights cannot be taken for granted as conservative and patriarchal norms gain ground within existing international and domestic normative structures. In this introductory chapter, we theorize and illustrate the interplay between norm development and regressive politics that aim to undo normative progress. The chapter presents an overview of research on the implementation and contestation of the WPS agenda, followed by a theoretical exploration of the concept of backlash. The chapter also asks what backlash against WPS norms might look like, and how resilient WPS norms might be. Finally, we outline the volume, summarize the contributions of each chapter to the study of the WPS agenda and conclude by emphasizing the volume’s overall theoretical and empirical contributions to the field.
Altynai Klimova
Altynai Klimova is a Visiting Research Fellow from the OSCE Academy and will work with the Research Group on Climate and Energy. She holds a Maste...
Nore Ims
Nore is a research assistant at NUPI affiliated with the research group on Climate and Energy. He is currently in his final semester at the master...
Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options
This report assesses how changes in US foreign policy under a right-wing populist president affect the EU–US relationship and offers concrete policy recommendations on pressing issues. Focusing on the links between foreign-policy shifts, domestic polarization and antiliberal democratic trends, the report examines how domestic dynamics may constitute the most severe long-term challenge to transatlantic cooperation. It also evaluates specific policy challenges and opportunities for strengthening that cooperation in the years ahead. By exploring developments in US foreign policies and how these are linked to domestic polarization and antiliberal democratic ideas, chapters in this report shed light on how this domestic factor poses a severe challenge to the transatlantic relationship. Authors focus on how the rise of right-wing populism – with an increasing portion of the population resisting globalization, international institutions, free trade and even democratic values on both sides of the Atlantic affects the transatlantic relationship. Within each section of the report, a background chapter introduces the overarching debate, followed by three case studies focusing on observed changes, policy implications and recommendations for EU responses. The conclusion sums up key findings and provides recommendations for how the EU should respond to changing transatlantic relations.
Andreas Hirblinger
Andreas Hirblinger is a senior research fellow in the Global Order and Diplomacy research group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affair...
Search costs in global governance
To navigate global governance, policymakers need to adjudicate how they should allocate their scarce resources to organizations and networks that can best fulfill specific governance tasks. Given growing regime complexity, and the rise of private transnational regulatory organizations in multiple issue areas, policymakers are faced with a task that is insufficiently captured in existing research on global governance. It concerns the need to identify and assess which governance options, offered by what actors, are best suited to advance a particular set of interests. These interests are not limited to considerations of what is the most effective governance solution, but also include “political” interests in maintaining alliances and status hierarchies in terms of deciding on who to govern with. On this basis, we suggest that in addition to the conventional focus on sunk-, transaction-, and opportunity costs, what we call “search costs” are growing in importance for policymakers: Policymakers can rely less on publicly mandated intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) with control over an issue-area and must identify and assess different governance options provided by IGOs, NGOs, private regulatory actors. In so doing, both considerations of legitimacy (e.g. multilateral v minilateral models) and effectiveness (e.g. hard v soft governance models) as well as alliances and partners must be considered. We outline our search costs framework and provide examples of the hidden (search) costs of global governance and identify why it matters. For scholars, it is important to understand what increased complexity entails for states. For policy-makers it is important to strengthen awareness and develop frameworks that can aide in assessing and choosing best-fit governance arrangements that match both concerns with effectiveness and legitimacy, as well as status-concerns and alliances.