Teoriseminar: Political Memory and State Power – Holocaust Remembrance after Communism
Jelena Subotic undersøkjer i det nye prosjektet sitt om, og på kva måte, staten kan regulere korleis ein minnest store politiske hendingar.
Har jihadismen fått fotfeste i Sverige?
Magnus Ranstorp og Magnus Sandelin skal sjå nærare på historia, utbreiinga og utviklingstrekken til jihadismen i Sverige når dei besøkjer NUPI 17. januar.
How the New Cold War travelled North (Part II) Interaction between Norway and Russia
This policy brief examines changing Russian and Norwegian approaches to each other in the period 2012–2016, and discusses how the “New Cold War” spread to the North. This is an intriguing question, since both parties had initially stated that, despite the overall worsening of Russia–West relations following the crises in Ukraine, the North should be protected as a space for peaceful interaction. To address this question, watching and tracking the changing patterns of Russian exercises and military modernization is not enough; understanding the rise in tensions requires studying the effects of the interactions underway between the parties in this region. Three interaction effects need to be taken into consideration in explaining why the tense relations following the conflict in Ukraine spread to the low-tension Northern theatre. In this, we stress the interactive dynamics that ensues when two parties start to view each other as threats, interpreting new moves by the other as expressions of hostile intent. Further, we explain the observed New Cold War “contamination” with reference to domestic policy agendas and practices of decision-making. On both the Norwegian and the Russian sides, the new military posturing in the North, now interpreted as part of a growing conflict, has emerged partly as a side-effect of implementing what actually were longstanding national goals.
How the New Cold War travelled North (Part I) Norwegian and Russian narratives
The standoff between Russia and the West over Ukraine has already obstructed cooperation across a range of issues. Could it also affect state interaction between Norway and Russia in the Arctic—an area and a relationship long characterized by a culture of compromise and cooperation? In two policy briefs we examine changes in how Russia and Norway have approached each other in the Arctic in the period 2012–2016. This first brief presents the development of official Norwegian and Russian narratives on the relations between the two countries in the Arctic. Such narratives stipulate logical paths for action. Showing how Norwegian and Russian policies have changed in line with these narratives, we conclude that what some refer to as “the New Cold War” is indeed spreading to the Arctic.
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.