The World Stage

Was there ever a deal to be had with Putin before the war? Is Russia mainly motivated by domestic or foreign policy considerations? And is there anything Western leaders can do to win hearts and minds in Russia?

In this episode of The World Stage, Kadri Liik, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, and Julie Wilhelmsen, research professor at NUPI, discuss Russia-West relations before, in and after the war in Ukraine. The episode was produced as part of the RUSSNETT project.

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In this episode of The World stage, Rana Mitter, Professor at the University of Oxford, and Bjørnar Sverdrup-Thygeson, Senior Research Fellow at NUPI, will first give an overview of China’s key domestic issues, before analysing Beijing’s foreign policy goals.

Norway has a lot of experience dealing with The Soviet Union, and later, Russia, but China is a very different kind of actor. How should we politically position ourselves with a state that combines authoritarian governance with a historically unique economic success?

Rana Mitter has co-written a report on resetting UK-China relations. What are his key points for reconceptualising Norway’s relationship with the authoritarian superpower?

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In this episode of the World Stage podcast, NUPI’s Cedric de Coning is in conversation with Amitav Acharya and Stein Tønnesson on the emergence of non-Western and Global International Relations.

The discipline came into being as an academic field during the past half-century when the US and its Western allies were the driving force behind globalization and the establishment of the global governance architecture. As a result, IR scholarship was mostly pre-occupied with international relations from a western perspective, and western – especially American – scholars, universities and research institutes dominated the field. Global IR is a movement to open up the field to non-western or Global IR theorizing and research.

Amitav Acharya is a distinguished Professor of international relations at American University in Washington D.C. and one of the leading proponents of a movement in International Relations scholarship to globalize the theory and focus of IR research.

Stein Tønnesson is a former Director of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo. His research has focused on the dynamics of peace and conflict in Asia.

Cedric de Coning is a Research Professor with NUPI’s Center for United Nations and Global Governance, and the coordinator of the Effectiveness of Peace Operations Network (EPON).

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The UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has set a process in motion to re-think the UN’s role in peace and security in the current global context. A team in the UN Secretariat is currently drafting a policy think piece called the New Agenda for Peace, which will be one of several thematic areas that will be considered at the 2024 Summit of the Future.

The ‘old’ Agenda for Peace was a major policy document that was produced under UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1992. It framed the way the UN understood and approached preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding for the following two decades.

The New Agenda for Peace is perhaps less ambitious, but the process provides us with an opportunity to reflect on how the UN’s concepts and capabilities need to be adapted to remain relevant in today’s rapidly changing global landscape.

We have invited Ian Martin to help us talk through these questions. Ian has led the UN’s human rights work in Rwanda and the process to organise a popular consultation in Timor-Leste. He was the deputy head of the UN peacekeeping operation in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Nepal. Following the 2011 international intervention, he was the UN’s Special Representative in Libya.

From 2014 to 2015, Ian was a member of the Independent High-Level Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, which is why we are looking in this episode at what the findings of this Panel has to offer for the New Agenda of Peace.

In this episode Ian is in conversation with Cedric de Coning, a research professor with NUPI’s Center for United Nations and Global Governance, and the coordinator of the Effectiveness of Peace Operations Network (EPON).

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Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has had immediate and ongoing effects for Arctic security and cooperative governance at both a regional and international level. The region is impacted by the increased sanctions, the withdrawal of Western companies from Russia, the Western disconnect from energy dependencies, and has also witnessed an increase in hybrid security incidents. In addition, climate change continues at to change the environment at a staggering pace in the north.

In a new report from NUPI and the Wilson Center, researchers argue that leaders must continue to address Arctic governance challenges and take concrete steps to mitigate and manage risks, regardless of the cessation of cooperation with Russia and the radical uncertainty shaping the broader political environment.

This episode is with Mike Sfraga and Elana Wilson Rowe.

The report can be downloaded for free here: http://ow.ly/4s5n50MV2uf

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The Russian online magazine DOXA is this year's winner of the Norwegian Student Peace Prize. The committee highlights their work exposing corruption and sexual harassment at universities, documenting state persecution, and fighting government disinformation, as well as their uncompromising reporting on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Because of the development in the political situation in Russia over the last years, the magazine now works through a network of editors who live in exile, local informants, and anonymous journalists.

In this episode of The World Stage, DOXA editors Ekaterina Martynova, Nikita Kuchinskii and Aleksandra Guliaeva speaks to Tora Berge Naterstad about their work, their generation of young Russians, and how this generation is reacting to Russia’s war on Ukraine. How do these three make sense of the turbulent journey that has taken them from joining a student newspaper at their university, to being part of a network of Russian independent journalist in exile across Europe? 

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What does resilience against radicalisation and violent extremism look like in Mali and the Sahel? And which drivers are present for the spread of extremism?

In this episode of the NUPI podcast The World Stage, Abdoul Wakhab Cissé (ARGA) and Morten Bøås (NUPI) are sitting at the bed of the river Niger. This mighty waterway floats from the high plains of Guinea through Mali and Niger before it makes its way to the Atlantic Ocean through Nigeria. They are discussing the manifestation of violent extremism in Mali and neighbouring Sahel countries like Niger and Burkina Faso.

This podcast episode is part of the EU-funded PREVEX project that aims to understand drivers of violent extremism and how local communities respond and resist through various ways of expressing resilience. PREVEX is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement No 870724. Read more about the project here: https://www.prevex-balkan-mena.eu/

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After Vladimir Putin’s announcement of the partial mobilization of the war in Ukraine in September, people, and in particular women, took to the streets in several of the republics in the North Caucasus. They protested this mobilization, saying that this war was one they couldn’t agree sending their sons into.

Even if these demonstrations on an international scale were quite small, and that they ended almost as quickly as they emerged, the protests can be seen as a sign of an increasing discontent with the center of power in Moscow.

In this episode of the NUPI Podcast The World Stage, Badri Belkania explains why the protests in Chechnya and Dagestan are important, what they are a sign of and what they could turn into. Host for this episode is Marie Furhovden.

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De facto states - states that have failed to win international recognition - have long been understudied 'blank spots,' overlooked in academic literature and on maps. However, they play critical and contentious roles in international politics: Since the end of the Cold War, de facto states have been involved in a disproportionately large number of violent conflicts, resulting in their establishment, change of status, or elimination.

In this episode of the NUPI podcast 'The World Stage', we turn our attention to Abkhazia, a de facto state in Southern Caucasus at the eastern coast of the Black Sea, and focus on its efforts to secure diplomatic ties in the post-Soviet space and beyond, as well as its relationship with its patron state, Russia. 

Episode host is Tamta Gelashvili (NUPI and University of Oslo). Guests are Donnacha Ó Beacháin (Professor at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University) and Pål Kolstø (Professor at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo).

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In this podcast episode we take a closer look on how the EU will handle a new migration crisis.

A new wave of mass migration to Europe might be building up according to several indicators. Is the EU better prepared now than during the refugee crisis in 2015? Or could this looming crisis be a new threat to the EU that will come on top of the war in Europe? How will that affect the European unity that we have been witnessing faced with the war in Ukraine?

Listen in as Research Professor Pernille Rieker from NUPI interviews Professor Christian Kaunert from Dublin City University and University of South Wales.

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