The World Stage

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?

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).

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).