Keeping the UK’s climate promise: restoring leadership through delivery
The UK holds a strong position on climate policy globally. However, it currently faces a significant implementation gap between its ambition and the domestic policies in place to achieve it. This gap puts its credibility as an international climate leader at risk. To resolve this, the UK should: - Take further action to bring down the cost of electricity. - Ensure the effective roll-out of existing schemes outlined to meet the 2030, 2035, and 2050 targets. - Strengthen the commitment to ending all new fossil fuel development. - Expand its international climate fi nance commitments. - Consider going beyond minimum targets for 1.5 degrees
From laggard to leader? Australia’s path to climate credibility
Climate policy has a somewhat chequered history in Australia. Progress has been inconsistent and ambition has historically fallen far short of the country’s fair share. Ambition has grown substantially in recent years, although recent targets remain insufficient to align with a 1.5 °C pathway. To build on its current trajectory and ensure the extent of its obligations are met, Australia should: - Reduce reliance on LULUCF sequestration in developing climate targets - Rapidly reduce reliance on and subsidisation of fossil fuels - Tighten and review the Safeguard Mechanism for industrial emissions reductions - Substantially scale up international climate finance
UN reform, budget cuts and gender backlash: What is at stake for Women, Peace and Security in peace operations?
This research paper explores possible risks and consequences of UN80 reform efforts and current financial contingency planning for the WPS agenda in peace operations. Based on interviews with member state representatives and UN staff working in headquarters and field missions, it finds that contingency planning to mitigate the liquidity crisis, and gender backlash within the UN system are having a detrimental impact on WPS programming in peace operations. Further, WPS programming is moving from being underfunded to defunded and deprioritised, leading to a loss of gender expertise in peacekeeping, and contributing to the shrinking of women’s civic spaces in post-conflict states. Finally, WPS expertise and resources must be protected during UN80 reforms and budget cuts.
Time and Compromise in UNCITRAL’s Working Group III
In multilateral negotiations, time has a tangible effect on the flow and conduct of deliberations. As negotiating deadlines approach, time becomes a tool of pressure, one used to induce compromise or force closure. In this blogpost, published with the European Journal of International Law, we explore how this time-compromise dynamic plays out in the ongoing negotiations to reform investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in the UN’s trade law body.
Norwegian Russia policy in times of war: Hidden but unavoidable dilemmas
This chapter is a part of the book 'Dilemmaer i norsk utenrikspolitikk'. The book is in Norwegian only.
Proxy Games and Freezing Conflict: Trilateral Identifications, Fear, and Agency in Russia-Georgia Relations Post-Crimea
This article argues that conflicts can be frozen through engagement in mutual trilateral identification games that marginalize lower-level political entities while elevating their danger through identification with threatening third-party Others. Drawing on and broadening the literature on national identity discourse, securitization, and foreign policy, the article theorizes and investigates trilateral identifications and combines two sets of such Self/Other/Other representations as they emerge in official language between two political entities over time. It analyzes relations between Russia and Georgia in the period following the onset of the conflict in Ukraine in 2014, after which Moscow intensified its activities in the post-Soviet space with reference to Western encroachment in its so-called “near abroad.” While Russia re-emphasized Georgia as a Proxy of the threatening “West,” Georgia reduced the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Proxies of Putin’s “expansionist Russia.” These evolving mutual identifications of Self and Other(s) not only rendered policy practices of diplomacy and negotiation less reasonable, but they also contributed to freezing conflict by removing the agency to act and compromise at the imagined negotiating table from the Proxy to the alleged “real” third-party Other.
Towards a Postliberal Global Order? The Crises of the Liberal West
This article is in Norwegian. The article discusses the weakened position of the liberal West in global governance, and the significance of Trump’s USA in this landscape. The first part of the article outlines three central ideological and geopolitical developments related to global order that run counter to the dominant dichotomies between the West and the non-West, democracies and autocracies. Although the world is changing, and the post-1989 form of liberal hegemony is in significant reverse, global politics will not become post-liberal any time soon. The second part discusses how the Western self-image as a unified liberal «us» has unraveled throughout the 2000s. First, Western states have systematically undermined some of the values and institutions they have claimed to represent. The gap between self-image and reality, in parallel with extensive outward moralization, has created a significant legitimacy crisis for the West. Second, the far right has become a central part of the Western political landscape. The new transatlantic community of values under Trump is not liberal, but radical right-wing. The tensions within the community of shared values will be there regardless of who’s in power in the USA. The conclusion is that it is no longer possible to talk about a unified Western liberal «us». Continuing to insist on it will only further strengthen the West’s internal and external tensions.
How Lebanon’s security sector works amidst state collapse
This paper examines how hybrid security orders in Lebanon were renegotiated during shocks, specifically the state collapse from 2019 to 2023 and the regional war in 2023–2024. It employs the framework of Areas of Limited Statehood to analyse the coexistence of formal and informal governance amid the Lebanese state’s challenges. The study contributes to the understanding of governance by focusing on ‘state effects’ – the tangible practices that emerge in such contexts. The analysis reveals that Lebanon’s hybrid security system employed flexible, bottom-up strategies to cope with the economic collapse, such as relying on international security assistance, circumventing regulations, downsizing activities and rent seeking. However, increased corruption risks undermining the stability these solutions initially provided. Additionally, the paper discusses the Lebanese army’s expanded role in the aftermath of the recent conflict with Israel, highlighting its challenges in enforcing UN Security Council Resolution 1701 while maintaining internal cohesion amid rising discontent among Hizbullah supporters.