Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

To make progress on decarbonisation, a large number and variety of stakeholders need to be engaged. In this Policy Forum, we assess the participation of different types of ASEAN actors in major international initiatives for climate action. We build a database of 335 international climate initiatives and find that ASEAN is underrepresented. Especially ASEAN municipalities are absent, whereas ASEAN national governments and companies are well represented. We also find that ASEAN actors participate more frequently in initiatives that facilitate political dialogue and less in those that fulfil concrete purposes. Only three out of 335 climate initiatives are headquartered in ASEAN countries, suggesting a paucity of international climate leadership by ASEAN actors. Finally, we find that actors from the different ASEAN countries often do not participate in the same initiatives, reducing the possibility of acting as a unified bloc.

The relationship between Norway and the U.S. has deep historical roots. This strong transatlantic bond has resulted in economic cooperation, investments and strategic collaboration. However, today’s geopolitical landscape is shifting. The U.S. is reorienting itself towards the Pacific region, creating uncertainty around future security guarantees for Europe and Norway. At the same time, Norway is closely linked to the EU through the EEA agreement and there is an increasing need to balance transatlantic relations with closer cooperation within Europe.

While the UN secretary-general maintains in the 2023 New Agenda for Peace that the impartiality of the United Nations is its strongest asset, the UN is increasingly becoming partial on the ground. The trend that started with the inclusion of the Force Intervention Brigade in the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2013 is accelerating and taking on new forms. The UN has been supporting the African Union Mission in Somalia and providing logistical support to the Group of Five for the Sahel Joint Force in Mali. In December 2023, the UN Security Council agreed on a resolution that should enable the predictability and sustainability of assessed contributions to African-led counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations, on certain conditions. The normative consequences of increased support to African-led interventions are significant and little explored. The UN system, including humanitarian and human rights components, will no longer be able to claim impartiality in countries where the UN is financing African-led interventions that are propping up fledgling regimes against opposition and terrorist groups. This essay will unpack and examine these developments and their consequences for UN peacekeeping and the larger UN system.

Dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in peace processes have in recent years received increasing attention in research and among policymakers and practitioners. Much of this attention has focused on inclusion in peace negotiations, whereas inclusion in post-agreement commissions or committee-type institutions has received limited attention despite the key role they play in peacebuilding. This article offers an in-depth exploration and process tracing of the introduction of a gender quota in the Agreement Monitoring Committee in Mali. It argues that changes in women’s representation in post-agreement committees in peace processes become possible when critical actors perform their work in the context of international gender equality norms and women’s mobilization. Based on analysis of documents and interviews with key actors involved in the peace process, it finds that critical actors use political accumulation, collaboration with women’s activists, and altering of the institutional environment to effect gender-based policy changes in peace processes.

This article documents the historical development of the calory and its application in international measurement of undernutrition. It provides an empirical account of the origins of caloric measurement as a scientific instrument, its uptake into international statistics on undernutrition produced by the League of Nations and the United Nations, and eventual use in monitoring global development goals. The historical analysis explores and discusses how a dialectic of care and control is embedded in macrosocial measurement of hunger: Caloric statistics have served as a condition of possibility for states and international agencies to render food systems governable through constituting a novel form of legibility that pushed the frontiers for modern schemes of top-down intervention and control. Such measurements have furthermore served as a vital resource to legitimize and justify the ambitions of the UN and modern development agenda, serving to establish and shape grand narratives of humanity’s progress under different food regimes. Based on this historical analysis, the article provides a normative and epistemic argument for centring the perspectives and knowledges of those affected by hunger in the enumeration of nutrition and food security. Such democratic agency should however not just be an object of measurement but be leveraged through participatory methodologies that draw upon the voices of the food insecure to better capture the multidimensional nature of food security through numbers.

Concern has risen that current global warming and more frequent extreme events such as droughts and floods will increase conflict around the world. This concern has spurred both social science research on contemporary climate, peace, and conflict as well as research in the historical sciences on past climate, weather, warfare, and violence. This perspectives article compares these two fields of scholarship and examines how each may benefit the other. It finds significant convergences in methods and insights across contemporary and historical research as well as persistent patterns in causal pathways between climate and conflict. Contemporary climate, peace, and conflict (CPC) research may sharpen methods and causal models for historical researchers. Historical studies, particularly those informed by contemporary research, may elucidate deep origins and long-term effects of climate-related conflicts. For policymakers and the public, history offers comprehensible ways to make sense of complex and contingent linkages and to construct cogent narratives of the past as well as storylines for the future.

Against the background of a crisis of United Nations (UN) peace operations, military ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) have increasingly gained a foothold as conflict management tools. This article provides the first comprehensive empirical mapping of military AHCs, focusing on the following questions: how have military AHCs evolved over time, where have they been deployed, who are the most active contributors, and how do AHCs interact and compare with other military conflict management initiatives? We do so by introducing and analysing an original dataset encompassing 58 different military AHCs since 1945. We map attributes of temporality, membership, organizational structure, geographical orientation and mandate, and show that military AHCs are not a new phenomenon, but that their composition and use have changed considerably over time. The ADHOCISM dataset makes comparative analysis possible among military AHCs, but also between them and other types of arrangements, such as UN peace operations or operations implemented by regional organizations. It offers much-needed data for scholars who wish to understand how the field of international conflict management is changing amidst a crisis of multilateralism and what role AHCs can perform in parallel with, or in replacement of UN peace operations.

This article makes a twofold contribution on the relationship between self/other securitisation, ambiguous threat constructions, and anxiety at the intersection of Securitisation Theory (ST) and Ontological Security Studies (OSS). First, we develop the concept topos of threat (TT) as a potent linguistic anchor in securitisation processes. TTs depict an entire self/other threat situation that warrants escape, serving identity needs while staying flexible and ambiguous. However, their frequent rhetorical deployment can blur the threat construction and increase anxiety: this challenges the classical scholarly assumption that antagonism necessarily alleviates anxiety. Second, we theorise metapolitics as an anxiety mediation strategy. Metapolitics is a mode of interpretation – a relentless analysis of surface clues to expose a deceptive, powerful adversary – which in the final event fails to alleviate anxiety. The dual practice of nurturing topoi of threat and metapolitics drives conflict because it sets in motion a vicious securitisation spiral that entrenches rigid patterns of self/other representation and fosters a bias of anticipating hostility. We employ abductive theorising: working with established theory alongside empirical discovery through a discourse analysis of Russia’s official rhetoric on NATO and the use of the TT ‘colour revolution’ since the conflict in Ukraine began in 2014.

This chapter studies the US’s and UK’s approaches to foreign direct investment screening in the light of increased global geopolitical rivalry. The chapter analyses the development of screening mechanisms in these countries by using the concepts of securitization and weaponized interdependence. Both these countries claim to be champions of the free market, but at the same time they are currently increasingly considering and limiting the open global economy with a view towards protecting national security. They are furthermore viewed as the key actors of the Anglo-Saxon axis and as the strongest advocates and defenders of the liberal international order which is threatened by the actions of revisionist states that seek to undermine it, China and Russia being the key antagonists. Based on this, the analysis argues that in the US and the UK the ‘liberal dilemma’ is especially pertinent as the balance between promoting an open global economy and defending the national interest may undermine the liberal international order if it tips to much in one direction. Furthermore, it shows how the US sets the standard for the UK, which has gradually followed suit as the US has tightened its regime and demanded the same of the UK.

This chapter examines how Western approaches to screening of foreign investments and preventing these investments from having a negative impact on national security as defined by the current regime are mirrored in Russia. This chapter follows the overall structure for chapters presenting national approaches. It pays attention to Russian official understanding of security challenges and the role of foreign investments in this context. It also outlines what formal solutions have been devised in Russia over the past 20 years to address issues related to foreign investments in Russia. Finally, it also assesses the impact of the war in Ukraine on Russia’s economic, political and security relations with the West, and more specifically on the Russian approach to foreign investments viewed through a national security lens.

Foreign investment has played pivotal roles in China’s overall economic growth over the last several decades, but for different reasons and with varying intensity. In this chapter, we focus mainly on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) and perform three tasks. First, we provide an overview of the foreign investments that have entered China since economic and market liberalization and internationalization reforms started in the late 1970s. Second, we consider inward FDI with regard to sectoral distribution, where most investments come from, and which sectors are more popular among foreign investors. Third, we discuss Chinese FDI policies and regulations with focus on motivations and seek to explain that although China has changed its regulatory measures considerably over the years, it has remained relatively restrictive and selective in terms of which sectors and types of investments have been, and are still, open for foreign investment.

This chapter explores the security implications of foreign investments in critical infrastructure and vital societal functions. The authors present their operational understandings of four concepts—national security, critical infrastructure, fundamental needs and functions, as well as foreign investments. They also explore how investments used as a policy tool can be viewed as posing a risk or even a threat to the national security. The chapter also describes the development of foreign investment screening policies in response to the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine, and the growing tension between the West and China over the global order. It also provides a detailed overview of the role nine actors whose policies are examined in detail in this volume—the EU, Germany, Norway, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, USA, Russia and China—play in the global investment context. Finally, it also provides an overview of Chinese and Russian investments in Europe and discusses two controversial cases: Nord Stream 2 and Huawei.

Over two decades, the African Union ( au ), complemented by Regional Economic Communities and Regional Mechanisms ( rec s/ rm s) have carried out and managed activities which can conceptually be viewed as distinctive African-led stabilisation effort(s) designed to stabilise states, environments, and regions. These African-led stabilisation efforts have led to the deployment of the au peace enforcement efforts in Somalia, the au Regional Stabilisation Strategy for the Lake Chad Basin Region with support from the Multinational Joint Task Force; the au ’s mission to the Gambia; the G5 Sahel Force; the Southern African Development Community mission to Mozambique and others. Despite this increase African institutions do not have a coherent conceptualisation and framework to understand and clarify these emerging African-led stabilisation efforts. The analysis examines the rise of African-led stabilisation efforts and explains how African-led stabilisation efforts can adopt an adaptive stabilisation approach to improve these interventions.

Of the four work strands of UK counter-terrorism (CT), Prevent and Pursue are directed towards stopping individuals from becoming involved in terrorism, and investigating and prosecuting those suspected of terrorist crimes. Over the past few years, both these two work strands of UK CT seem to have captured more individuals with Multiple and Complex Needs (MCN), especially people of young age and with mental health issues. This article describes key UK CT discourse on the terrorist threat landscape and its proposed countermeasures, with particular regard to the role of MCN. It considers the extent to which discourse on the threat and set-up of UK CT seems to correspond to academic research, media reporting and other open sources—and is interested in whether the apparent increase of MCN in UK CT (only) reflect real-life developments in the threat landscape, or whether the current structure of UK CT may disproportionately draw in individuals with MCN. It finds that while accurately capturing some recent trends, UK CT discourse overall reifies largely outdated ideas of the role of ideational radicalisation and of there being a sharp distinction between the categories of vulnerability and risk. It also suggests that the emphasis of UK CT seems to increasingly be on the category of risk and on the logic of Pursue—also when MCN are involved—rather than proposing a multifaceted approach to the ever-changing complexity of the threat of terrorism.

Transnational surveillance is a powerful tool in the arsenal of autocrats the world over. Despite its pervasive use in extraterritorial coercion, the systematic study of surveillance of regime opponents beyond national borders remains underdeveloped in political science, primarily due to limited data availability. To help fill this gap, we constructed the Latin American Transnational Surveillance dataset, a micro-level dataset based on declassified foreign surveillance reports produced between 1966 and 1986 by autocratic Brazil. Latin American Transnational Surveillance records the identity, locations, social ties and political activism of 17,000 individual targets of transnational surveillance, the vast majority of whom were tracked in neighbouring countries across Latin America. Drawing on these abundant data, we empirically explore existing theoretical insights about the motivations, methods and consequences of transnational surveillance, a task that would be difficult to do using other sources. We also leverage social network analysis to showcase potential applications of Latin American Transnational Surveillance in the testing of collective-action theories of transnational political violence.