The EU Navigating Multilateral Cooperation (NAVIGATOR)
How should the EU navigate the increasingly complex - and conflict-laden - institutional spaces of global governance to advance a rules-based international order? And what factors should be emphasized...
The subsea cable cut at Svalbard January 2022: What happened, what were the consequences, and how were they managed?
Svalbard is, like most other societies, largely dependent on an internet connection. The fiber connection on Svalbard consists of two separate subsea cables that connect Longyearbyen to the mainland. In some areas the cables were buried about two meters below the seabed, especially in areas where fishing is done, to “protect against destruction of the fishing fleet’s bottom trawling or anchoring of ships. (New version uploaded 18 January 2023)
More than just a petrol station: Norway's contribution to European Union's green strategic autonomy
The past five years have seen far-reaching changes in international politics and trade, all of which forced European policymakers to reconsider the role and place of the ‘Old World’ in global affairs. The continuous rise of China and its ambition to play a larger role, matching its economic weight, requires new approaches to international trade. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed Europe’s import dependencies and the fragility of long and complex global value chains on which it relies. These vulnerabilities are visible in many strategically important sectors, from semiconductors (chips) through medicine to the production of items on which European Union’s visions of future decarbonization rest: photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, nuclear fuel etc. This Policy Brief has also been published as a Policy Brief within the GreenDeal-NET project
Malin Øren Aldal
Malin works as a research assistant in the Research Group on Climate and Energy. Here she works on the Pullp-project, which analyses the role of t...
Climate Security Language in UN Peace Operation’s Mandates
Article 24 of the United Nations Charter confers the responsibility of maintaining international peace and security to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). This task requires a comprehensive engagement with the complex systems driving conflict in the world to understand and respond to threats to international peace and security. The UNSC has over the last 30 years gradually adopted a non-traditional security approach by incorporating economic, social, humanitarian and ecological instability as threats to international peace and security.
Space, nature and hierarchy: the ecosystemic politics of the Caspian Sea
The Anthropocene has given rise to growing efforts to govern the world’s ecosystems. There is a hitch, however, ecosystems do not respect sovereign borders; hundreds traverse more three states and thus require complex international cooperation. This article critically examines the political and social consequences of the growing but understudied trend towards transboundary ecosystem cooperation. Matchmaking the new hierarchy scholarship in International Relations (IR) and political geography, the article theorises how ecosystem discourse embodies a latent spatially exclusive logic that can bind together and bound from outside unusual bedfellows in otherwise politically awkward spaces. The authors contend that such ‘ecosystemic politics’ can generate spatialised ‘broad hierarchies’ that cut across both Westphalian renderings of space and the latent post-colonial and/or material inequalities that have hitherto been the focus of most of the new hierarchies scholarship. Rowe and Beaumont illustrate their argument by conducting a multilevel longitudinal analysis of how Caspian Sea environmental cooperation has produced a broad hierarchy demarking and sharpening the boundaries of the region, become symbolic of Caspian in-group competence and neighbourliness, and used as a rationale for future Caspian-shaped cooperation. They reason that if ecosystemic politics can generate new renderings of space amid an otherwise heavily contested space as the Caspian, further research is warranted to explore systemic hierarchical consequences elsewhere.
Loss of Tonga’s telecommunication – what happened, how was it managed and what were the consequences?
In January 2022 the subsea volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in Tonga had a major eruption which also cut the country’s communication lines nationally, between Tonga’s inhabited islands and the outside world. The damage led to a complete halt in international communication (a “digital darkness”) which meant that, in the period immediately after the outbreak, not much was known about the extent of the damage in Tonga. Due to very limited access to contact with both the authorities and the population of Tonga, it was only during overflights carried out by the Australian and New Zealand air forces that one could begin to map the extent of the damage and the need for assistance.
Stakeholder Networks in International Development Projects in the Amazon rainforest
The governance of environmental issues has become a central challenge in world politics. These issues are often complex, thus requiring flows of knowledge and resource from multiple actors across multiple levels. International development cooperation is a channel for these varied sets of actors to join their efforts in concrete projects and policies, allowing for global engagement with local envi- ronmental challenges. It thus can anchor policy networks capable of structuring polycentric modes governance. Yet, empirical research has shown that policy networks are sites of political disputes, (re)producing power rela- tions and affecting the capacity of different social groups to influence relevant outcomes. In this brief, we examine such dynamics in the network of stakeholders involved in development, execution or governance of internationally funded projects in the Amazon.
The pulling power of Paris: Unpacking the role of ‘pledge & review’ in climate governance (PullP)
Will the Paris Agreement deliver on its promise and will the international community be able to avoid dangerous climate change? This project analyses the role of the governance architecture of the Par...
The Case for Integrating Sustaining Peace into an Expanded Climate, Peace and Security Concept