Consolidating African-led Peacebuilding Efforts
While the United Nations (UN) holds the primary responsibility for securing global peace, it increasingly emphasises the importance of partnerships with regional organisations. In practice, this means the UN often engages only once peace has been brokered. The wider international community looks to leading regional organisations, such as the African Union (AU) in the case of Africa, to take the lead in peacebuilding. As such, the AU has emerged as a key actor — mobilising international support for peacebuilding across the continent, while also driving the development of significant localised initiatives and anchoring these in state institutions towards advancing peace and stability. However, in persistent, violent conflicts, peacebuilding efforts often take a backseat. Stabilisation frequently takes centre stage, while policymakers focus on immediate humanitarian priorities and the prevention of further violence. As a result, peacebuilding in Africa is rarely uniform across states. It is often concentrated in capitals and urban areas, producing long-term effects that may exacerbate tensions and inadvertently reinforce the very disparities that initially sparked conflict. Peacebuilding is not a neutral process. It can maintain and entrench existing social structures, framing democracy as the sole driver of change while overlooking peacebuilding as a space of political contestation, negotiation and tension, and one that confers or denies legitimacy. This study examines African-led peacebuilding efforts that seek to address conflicts’ structural contradictions and root causes. It calls for a rethink of regional organisations’ approaches to peacebuilding in complex stabilisation environments, advocating for a more adaptive regional peacebuilding strategy that acknowledges its deep interlinkages with stabilisation.
Guns, Butter and Karl Polanyi: Securing Europe in the post-neoliberal world
Trump 2.0 has contested and sought to upturn the so-called liberal international order. Within Europe this entailed leveraging geoeconomic dependence to force NATO members to publicly commit to spending 5% of GDP on defence and the EU into an asymmetrical trade deal. Europe is thus undergoing a guns versus butter debate that threatens the social contract and the solvency of Europe. Taking stock of the scramble across Europe to keep NATO keeping on - and drawing upon research that explores the transnational and economic roots of the rise of the far right - this essay argues that to effectively respond to Trump 2.0 and stem tide of anti-democratic currents will require rethinking contemporary EU economic doxa – imperfectly captured by the term neoliberalism. Such a reckoning should involve a systematic reconsideration of how far and how deep markets and market logics should be institutionalised within European societies. In short, Europe should seek to proactively shape the emerging post-neoliberal trend to seek to ensure that what comes next retains the existing order’s stated commitments to democracy, tolerance, and human dignity. Conversely, failure to rethink Europe’s commitment to neoliberalism risks strengthening those that are convinced the status quo embodies little worth salvaging.
Governing nature and the making of world order
How have efforts to govern nature and address urgent global environmental challenges shaped, transformed or undermined processes of world ordering? Chapters in this book explore how efforts to govern nature have transformed – or are transforming – how we understand and practice world politics. Bringing together a team of contributors from around the world, the book traces this inquiry across diverse international policy fields, from security and peacebuilding through science cooperation and governing ecosystems to the politics of economic growth. Taken together, the book offers a conceptually ambitious and empirically grounded account of how the governance of nature and the making of world order intertwine and calls for a research agenda to attend to the growing impact of this interrelationship.
Governance by indicators and the re-politicisation of expertise
States are measured and ranked on an ever-expanding array of country performance indicators (CPIs). Such indicators are seductive because they provide actionable, accessible, and ostensibly objective information on complex phenomena to time-pressed officials and enable citizens to hold governments to account. At the same time, a sizeable body of research has explored how CPIs entail ‘black boxing’ and depoliticisation of political phenomena. This article advances our understanding of the consequences of governance by indicators by examining how CPIs generate specific forms of politicization that can undermine a given CPI’s authority over time. We contend that CPIs rely upon two different claims to authority that operate in tension with one another: i) the claim to provide expert, objective knowledge and ii) the claim to render the world more transparent and to secure democratic accountability. Analysing CPIs in the field of education, economic governance, and health and development, we theorize and empirically document how this tension leads to three distinct forms of politicisation: scrutiny from experts that politicises the value judgements embodied in a CPI; competition whereby rival CPIs contest the objectivity of knowledge of leading CPIs; and corruption, where gaming of CPIs challenges its claim to securing transparent access to social reality. While the analysis identifies multiple paths to the politicization and undermining of specific CPIs’ authority, the article elaborates why these processes tend to leave intact and even reproduce the legitimacy of CPIs as a governance technology.
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...
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.