The Russian political system in transition: Scenarios for power transfer
In the aftermath of the March 2018 presidential elections, the Russian political system is preparing for – indeed, already entering – the next phase of its development: the transition of power. This inevitable, but still unmentionable, transition is the topic of topics in the minds of Russia’s political elites, and is made all the more pertinent by the fact that the acting members of the decision-making class cannot discuss it openly. What is the constitutional framework around this political situation? Is there indeed a problem of succession, or, more broadly, of stability in the transition of power? What lessons could be drawn from other political regimes that resemble the Russian system? What are the possible scenarios for the transition of power? What are the positive and negative sides, feasibility and possible consequences of these scenarios? These are the questions this working paper seeks to address.
Military-Civilian Relations in Interventions
It is frequently claimed that success in interventions hinges largely on military–civilian coherence. Nevertheless, despite high ambitions, coherence among intervening actors has proven challenging to achieve in practice. Why is this so? The thesis asks: How can we theorize and analyse the challenges facing intervening actors to achieve military–civilian coherence in post-Cold War interventions? The thesis firstly develops a holistic understanding of the various actors present in an intervention and their inter-relationships – and offers a taxonomy of various forms of relationships between them. It then focusses on the military actors and discusses how they differ significantly from conventional peacekeeping to robust counter-insurgencies. The thesis then discusses the relations between military and humanitarian actors. Based on the first chapters it is thereafter argued that there is a need for a comprehensive analytical framework to make deductive analyses of interventions possible. It argues that by studying the identification processes of the intervening actors, insights into how they regard their role and how they regard the other actors, international as well as local, can be generated. This analytical framework is then applied to the case of Afghanistan to analyse the identities of three sets of actors – the military, the humanitarians and the state-builders, finding that the three entities appeared largely ignorant of each other, operating in parallel but not in conjunction. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the applicability of the analytical framework on other cases and with other research questions.
Review of the Global Focal Point for Police, Justice and Security 2018
In December 2017, an independent Review of the Global Focal Point (GFP) arrangement was commissioned to inform GFP partners, Member States and other stakeholders on how the arrangement has evolved over time and can be further strengthened to deliver rule of law assistance in peacekeeping operation settings, special political mission settings, including in transition contexts, and non-mission settings. The Review examines progress, achievements and challenges of GFP joint support to rule of law activities with a view to strengthening the GFP arrangement, enhancing the delivery of rule of law assistance and adapting it to the United Nations reforms, the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, and the Secretary-General’s prevention platform initiative. The research, with more than 209 interviews undertaken, was concluded in June and the report was finalized in August 2018.
States before relations: On misrecognition and the bifurcated regime of sovereignty
The symbolic structure of the international system, organised around sovereignty, is sustained by an institutional infrastructure that shapes how states seek sovereign agency. We investigate how the modern legal category of the state is an institutional expression of the idea of the state as a liberal person, dependent on a one-off recognition in establishing the sovereign state. We then discuss how this institutional rule co-exists with the on-going frustrated search for recognition in terms of socio-political registers. While the first set of rules establishes a protective shield against others, regardless of behaviour, the second set of rules specify rules for behaviour of statehood, which produces a distinct form of misrecognition. States are, at one level, already recognised as sovereign and are granted rights akin to individuals in liberal thought, and yet they are continually misrecognised in their quest to actualise the sovereign agency they associate with statehood. We draw on examples from two contemporary phenomena - fragile states, and assertions of non-interference and sovereignty from the populist right and non-Western great powers, to discuss the misrecognition processes embedded in the bifurcated symbolic structure of sovereignty, and its implications for debates about hierarchy and sovereignty in world affairs.
Frustrated Sovereigns: The agency that makes the world go around
In this special issue we build on the growing interest in recognition to suggest that a shift from recognition to misrecognition open up new theoretical perspectives. Our point of departure is that failure – not obtaining the recognition one seeks – is built into the very desire for recognition. Thus understood, the desire for recognition is not simply a desire for social goods, for status or for statehood, but for agency. This, we suggest, is Hegel’s fundamental lesson. On this basis, we argue that the international system is defined by a symbolic structure organised around an always unrealisable ideal of sovereign agency. We discuss the implications of such a focus on the workings of misrecognition and the ideal of sovereign agency, and introduce the key themes – focused on failure and the negative, the striving for unity and actorhood, and sovereignty and the international system – that the contributors address in their respective articles.
The Emergence of Sovereignty in the Wake of the Reformations
The elusiveness of the emergence of sovereignty represents a challenge to IR, as it leaves us with many possible beginnings. And as any new beginning marks an end, settling the question of sovereignty begs the question of how the world was without it. Did sovereignty mark the end of an era that would make little sense to IR and its sovereignty prism? In the present contribution I will take issue with such clear delimitations and make the case for a broad understanding of change grounded in the practical challenges of international politics rather than canonical statements about them. My argument is rooted in a dissatisfaction with extant accounts seeking to redraw the temporal limits of international politics in the wake of the fall of the foundational myth of 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia
Introduction: The Emergence of Sovereignty: More Than a Question of Time
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the concept sovereignty for international relations (IR). And yet, understanding the historical emergence of sovereignty in international relations has long been curtailed by the all-encompassing myth of the Peace of Westphalia. While criticism of this myth has opened space for further historical inquiry in recent years, it has also raised important questions of historical interpretation and methodology relevant to IR, as applying our current conceptual framework to distant historical cases is far from unproblematic. Central among these questions is the when, what, and how of sovereignty: from when can we use “sovereignty” to analyze international politics and for which polities? Can sovereignty be used when the actors themselves did not have recourse to the terminology? And what about polities that do not have recourse to the term at all? What are the theoretical implications of applying the concept of sovereignty to early polities? From different theoretical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this forum shed light on these questions of sovereignty and how to treat the concept analytically when applied to a period or place when/where the term did not exist as such. In doing so, this forum makes the case for a sensitivity to the historical dimension of our arguments about sovereignty—and, by extension, international relations past and present—as this holds the key to the types of claims we can make about the polities of the world and their relations.
Hatet mot George Soros
(Available in Norwegian only): Ingen enkeltperson er hatet så mye av både det nasjonalistiske og ekstreme høyre som ungarsk-amerikanske George Soros.