US and UK Elections: Implications for NATO and Northern European Security
How will the outcome of the US election impact security policy in the UK and Northern Europe? The report discusses potential consequences of a victory for Harris and Trump respectively, as well as the new British government's security policy orientation. What does this mean for Norway and Northern Europe?
NUPI’s Russia conference 2024: Wartime Russia – weak or strong?
Join us on 22 October for the annual Russia conference.
CANCELLED: The state of peace in Africa
Due to unforeseen events, this seminar is unfortunately cancelled.
Dorthea Gradek
Dorthea Gradek is a Research Fellow in the Research group on security and defence.She is primarily researching space governance and the EU's space...
The Grammar of Status Competition: International Hierarchies and Domestic Politics
States do not only strive for wealth and security, but international status too. A burgeoning body of research has documented that states of all sizes spend considerable time, energy, and even blood and treasure when seeking status on the world stage. Yet, for all scholars' success in identifying instances of status seeking, they lack agreement on the nature of the international hierarchies that states are said to compete within. Making sense of this status ambiguity remains the key methodological and theoretical challenge facing status research in international relations scholarship. In The Grammar of Status Competition, Paul David Beaumont tackles this puzzle head on by making a strength out of status' widely acknowledged slipperiness. Given that states, statesmen, and citizens care about and pursue status despite its difficulty to assess, Beaumont argues that we can study international status hierarchies through these actors' attempts to grapple with this same status ambiguity. The book thus redirects inquiry toward the theories of international status (TIS) that governments and citizens themselves produce and use to make sense of their state's position in the world. Advancing a new framework for studying such TIS, the book illuminates how specific theories of international status emerge, solidify, and become contested, and how these processes influence domestic and foreign policy. Showcasing the value of a TIS approach via multiple historical case studies—from nuclear arms control to Norwegian education policy—Beaumont thereby addresses three major puzzles in IR status research: why states compete for status when the international rewards seem ephemeral; how states can escape the zero-sum game associated with quests for positional status; and how status scholars can overcome the methodological problem of disentangling status from other motivations
Norske interesser og multilateralt samarbeid. Multimeldingen – fem år etter
The White Paper 'Norway’s role and interests in multilateral cooperation' (Report to the Storting No. 27 – 2018-2019) – hereafter called 'the Multilateral Report' – contains a thorough analysis of multilateral cooperation and Norwegian interests. It describes the various functions of multilateral cooperation, how disagreements between major powers affect such cooperation, and how this impacts Norwegian interests. The White Paper was submitted to the Storting in June 2019. By that time, Russia had already annexed Crimea, the U.S., under President Trump, had shown a more negative attitude towards multilateral cooperation, and China’s desire to influence multilateral cooperation was evident. At the same time, the report preceded the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent criticism from low- and middle-income countries of how Western nations handled the pandemic, as these countries did not have the same access to vaccines. And, not least: the report came before Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine, Hamas’ attack on Israel, and the ensuing war in Gaza. Although the rivalry between the U.S. and China was already increasing in 2019, five years later, it has a more defining character for international politics. The developments in recent years show even more clearly than before that the norm that international problems are best solved through multilateral cooperation has weakened. The Multilateral Report pointed to several causes for this, primarily increased rivalry and the preference of major powers for bilateral solutions, and how, for example, China has succeeded in influencing the interpretation of human rights in multilateral forums. In this report, we discuss how the analysis and conclusions of the White Paper hold up five years later. The short version is that they hold up well: the analysis of increased rivalry and the growing 'bilateralization' of international cooperation has proven to align more with the reality than one might wish. At the same time, we paint a somewhat more complex picture than what was described in the Multilateral Report, focusing on fragmentation and the emergence of a significant ecosystem of informal governance initiatives that supplement but also alter the nature of the multilateral system. We also discuss in some detail the importance of analyzing how the various functions of the multilateral system are affected by rivalry, bilateralization, and fragmentation. Such a discussion is relevant in order to assess which multilateral functions are most important for safeguarding Norwegian interests. For example, it is not a given that support for a multilateral organization is an effective measure to promote a 'rules-based' order. We conclude with a discussion on how Norway should relate to the fact that our interest in a rules-based order will not be the same if the content of the rules reflects less of the values they do today. The report focuses on changes in the multilateral system and does not analyze specific multilateral organizations. Rather, we use examples from various multilateral organizations to try to illustrate more general trends. For example, we do not have a specific analysis of NATO or the EU as multilateral organizations. Both can be characterized as multilateral since both have three or more members, but the distinctive nature of the EU and NATO reflects less the developments in multilateral organizations more generally.