Strengthening Fragile States through Taxation (FRAGTAX)
How is the political authority to tax established, exercised and maintained over time? State-building requires predictable income. Without a domestic revenue base, even core activities...
Scandinavia as an arena for Chinese economic statecraft
China's utilisation of economic statecraft as a foreign policy tool challenges the accustomed distinction between Norwegian business policies, and Norwegian security policy. This ...
Reactions to state regulation of Islam in times of Daesh (STATEISLAM)
In recent years, in response to the rise of ISIS, governments in the Middle East have begun to control the religious spheres in their countries more tightly. One example is the standar...
Chinese Anger Diplomacy (ANGER)
Do liberal-democratic states yield to public criticism by China? ANGER approaches this question by focusing on China's use of "anger diplomacy" - public, vehement displa...
The Intercity Origins of Diplomacy: Consuls, Empires, and the Sea
City diplomacy is a fairly new topic in the study of diplomacy, and, many would argue, a fairly recent empirical phenomenon. A counterpoint to this could be to reference how the alleged origin of diplomacy in Greek antiquity was city-centered, as were the earliest forms of Renaissance diplomacy in Italy. In this article we want to probe the connections between cities and diplomacy through problematizing what has counted as diplomacy. Our starting point is that cities have always mattered to what we could analytically refer to as diplomatic practice. Being conscious of the conceptual ambiguities, we are thus not starting from a specific definition of “city diplomacy,” but from a conviction that cities have mattered and continue to matter to the practice of diplomacy.
Inter-governmentality: A framework for analysis
This chapter explores the analytical purchase of the governmentality-framework when applied to interactions between polities before the early modern period, what I refer to as inter-governmentality. Starting from the assumptions that: (1) governmentality (historically understood) was always entangled with globality and (2) that governmentality (heuristically understood) can be studied in polities other than the modern state, the chapter establishes a heuristic analytical apparatus for the study of the relation between non-state governmental apparatuses. By being explicitly analytical, the conceptual vocabulary of governmentality allows us to make sense of logics and practices of government across time and space, without assuming sameness. The conceptual apparatus of inter-governmentality (or the analytics of government) provides three clear and interrelated benefits. First, and most importantly, it provides an explicitly analytical framework to the academic subfield of Historical International Relations where the distinction between analytical and practical concepts is central, but often hard to get around. Second, it can direct attention at overlooked issues, such as gift-giving and marriage practices, and help bring meaning to practices which do not make sense to the modern eye. Third, it offers potential coherence to already ongoing research, by suggesting an overarching and integrative analytical framework.
Paul Beaumont
Paul Beaumont received a Ph.D. in International Relations/International Environmental Studies and Development from the Norwegian University of Lif...
Cristiana Maglia
Cristiana Maglia is a senior research fellow at NUPI. She is currently the post-doctoral researcher of the project Ad hoc crisis response and inte...
Arjun Chowdhury, The myth of international order: why weak states persist and alternatives to the state fade away
A book review of Arjun Chowdhury's 'The Myth of International Order'.
The Fight Over Freedom in 20th- and 21st-Century International Discourse Moments of ‘self-determination’
This book shows how international discourse citing ‘self-determination’ over the last hundred years has functioned as a battleground between two ideas of freedom: a ‘radical’ idea of freedom, and a ‘liberal-conservative’ idea of freedom. The book offers new insights into the historical times in which ‘self-determination’ was prominently cited internationally since the early 20th century; it also offers a recasting and renewal of international debates on freedom in international discourse.