Forskningsprosjekt
Evaluating Power Political Repertoires
To utviklinger preger i dag verdenspolitikken i stor grad.
For det første blir økonomisk og militær makt mindre konsentrert rundt Nord-Atlanteren.
For det andre fører globaliseringsprosesser, inkludert endringer i kommunikasjonsteknologi, produksjonskjeder og transportvektorer, til at mange beslutningstakere og analytikere må finne nye paradigmer for å forstå politisk makt. Noen henviser til "soft power" eller nettverksmakt, og indikerer at maktens natur i seg selv er under forandring. Dette utfordrer forskningen, fordi det dominerende rammeverket for forståelse av det første settet med prosesser forutsetter historisk kontinuitet - at de samme grunndynamikkene opererer i alle maktoverganger over tid og rom.
Innsatsene som underbygger det andre settet, fokuserer på historisk diskontinuitet og antyder at skiftninger i dagens verdenspolitikk kan utspille seg veldig annerledes enn tidligere fordi maktens natur er i forandring.
Evaluating Power Political Repertoires (EPOS) har som mål å endre hvordan vi undersøker maktpolitikk: heller enn å fokusere på statens maktressurser og hvordan de systemiske funksjonene i verdenspolitikken betinger visse typer maktpolitisk atferd, fokuserer EPOS på repertoarer der stater engasjerer hverandre.
Prosjektteamet trekker fram fra den kontroversielle politikkens velutviklede analytiske rammeverk, men tilpasser det nødvendigvis for studien av internasjonale relasjoner. Dermed definerer prosjektet ‘repertoar av maktpolitikk’ som et spekter av taktikker som stater vender seg til når de konkurrerer om innflytelse. Å erkjenne at stater trakter etter innflytelse gjennom repertoarer åpner spennende muligheter for å forstå dynamikken i maktpolitisk konkurranse.
Prosjektleder
Deltakere
Aktuelt
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Nye publikasjoner
Afterword: International Organizations and Technologies of Statehood
The afterword discusses the contributions to the symposium by drawing links to cognate fields such as international relations, international law, and organisational studies. It reflects on the many insightful observations and arguments in the different contributions, and points to areas for future research, but also to areas where more extensive engagement with cognate fields may have been warranted.
Performing Statehood through Crises: Citizens, Strangers, Territory
Forskningen på krisehåndtering ser i liten grad på variasjonen i hvordan en og samme aktør bruker ulike verktøy og fremhever ulike sider ved sin identitet avhengig av hva slags krise det er snakk om. I denne artikkelen analyserer Iver Neumann og Ole Jacob Sending hvordan Utenriksdepartementet fremstår som en ulik aktør avhengig av om det er snakk om en sikkerhetskrise, en humanitær krise, eller en sivil krise. Forfatterne reflekterer over hva dette forteller oss om statens (ulike) fasetter og i hvor stor grad tilgjengelige handlingsalternativer avgjør hva slags type stat som trer frem gjennom ulike typer kriser.
The Relationship Between Narratives and Security Practices: Pushing the Boundaries of Military Instruments in Japan
Japanese security policy has undergone significant changes lately. Japanese policymakers have recently argued over advancing Japan’s Self-Defense Forces with new weapon systems. In particular, the Abe government has decided to pur- chase long-range cruise missiles for its new F-35A jetfighters, and to reconstruct a newly-built helicopter carrier into an aircraft carrier. While specific policy proposals continued di- viding policymakers and other stakeholders, the underlying story specifying Japan’s place in East Asia, the rise of China, the threat of North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs, the tight security relationship with the United States and the vulnerability of the Japanese archipelago has faced lit- tle core criticism. The lack of alternative national security narratives suggests the emergence of a Japanese security consensus in the mid-2010s. The strength of the narrative in deterring policymakers to refrain from critique, through the significant costs incurred by opposition, could also sug- gest a hegemonic narrative (but not necessarily a consensus). We find that the dominant narrative provided a necessary foundation for unorthodox policy proposals, which arguably enabled the Abe government to push through military in- strument expansions in the Self-Defense Forces, a move far from politically sustainable only a decade earlier.
corporaexplorer: An R package for dynamic exploration of text collections
This article presents the 'corporaexplorer' open source software. 'corporaexplorer' is an R package that uses the Shiny GUI (graphical user interface) framework for dynamic exploration of text collections. The package is designed for use with a wide range of text collections. The intended primary audience are qualitatively oriented researchers in the social sciences and humanities who rely on close reading of textual documents as part of their academic activity. However, the package should also be useful for those doing quantitative textual research and wishing to have convenient access to the texts under study. Main elements in the interactive apps: 1) Input: The ability to filter the corpus and/or highlight documents, based on search patterns (in main text or metadata, including date range). 2) Corpus visualisation: An interactive heat-map of the corpus, based on the search input (calendar heat-map or heat-map where each tile represents one document, optionally grouped by metadata properties). 3) Document visualisation and display: Easy navigation to and within full-text documents with pattern matches highlighted. 4) Document retrieval: Extraction of subsets of the corpus in a format suitable for close reading. While collecting and preparing the text collections to be explored requires some familiarity with R programming, using the Shiny apps for exploring and extracting documents from the corpus should be fairly intuitive also for those with no programming knowledge, once the apps have been set up by a collaborator.
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.
French status seeking in a changing world. Taking on the role as the guardian of the liberal order
France has a long history as a traditional European great power. But is this still the case today? The analysis in this article shows how French exceptionalism, often referred to as ‘grandeur’ is still the guiding principle of French foreign policy, but that it is being practised differently today. President Macron may be right in arguing that ‘France is back’, but it is important to note that modern French power projection or status seeking takes place through a set of very different mechanisms. The key argument put forward in this article is that French status is increasingly based on a type of symbolic power, and to understand the mechanisms through which this power is managed, insights from social psychology and Social Identification Theory (SIT) are helpful. SIT points to three different strategies for maintaining a position within a social hierarchy that may also be valid for international politics: social mobility, social competition and social creativity. While France has adopted different types of strategies in earlier periods (social mobility in the immediate post-war years and social competition during the Cold War), the analysis in this article shows that French foreign policy practices are now increasingly being legitimised through the creation of a new narrative. Interestingly, this narrative consists of the current French political leadership’s eagerness to take on the role as ‘the guardian of the liberal order’, which fits nicely with what SIT identify as a strategy of social creativity.
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.
New Dynamics in Japan-Russia Energy Relations 2011-2017
Since the triple disaster in Japan in 2011, the energy dimension of Japan-Russia relations in the Russian Far East (RFE) has developed at a more rapid pace. The integration of the energy markets of the world’s top liquefied natural gas (LNG) importer, Japan, and major energy exporter, Russia, has paralleled a warmer bilateral political climate and been accelerated by Russia’s turn to the East. In the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis, the globe’s energy landscape has been significantly altered and both Russia and Japan have faced constraints economically and in terms of bilateral cooperation. Questions remain about how bilateral energy relations will develop in the face of competition from Japan’s traditional energy suppliers and ongoing Japanese government efforts to diversify energy sources. Is energy prompting a stronger bilateral political bond or just fostering a limited partnership in this area? In considering the consequences of the Fukushima and Ukraine crises on Japan-Russia energy relations and the energy dimension of Russia’s pivot to Asia, the topic is placed in a wider context of new dynamics in Japan-Russia relations.
Identity Politics and the East China Sea: China as Japan's 'Other'
This article contributes to the relational IR literature on identity politics and Sino-Japanese relations. Theoretically, we develop Rumelili's 2004 framework for studying modes of differentiation by incorporating the sectoral characteristics of key discourse signs. Empirically, we apply this framework to the construction of Self and Other in the official Japanese security discourse regarding the Senkaku Islands dispute from 2010–2014, a period of dispute climax that is meaningful for studying the (re)production of Japan's understanding of China. The inclusiveness of the discourse signs that Japan uses to construct China possibly opens up for a positive evolution of Sino-Japanese relations, as there is space for progress if China's behavior—and Japan's interpretation of it—proves to be more peaceful, transparent, and law-abiding. The findings also suggest, however, that the strong sense of superiority in Japan (and China) vis-à-vis a subordinate Other may not bode well for Sino-Japanese relations.