The World Stage

2024 will be an important election year on both sides of the Atlantic. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are yet again battling each other in this years presidential race. Whatever outfall, we know it will have implications for Northern European security, in quite different ways. Biden has an understanding of the importance of NATO in Europe, however with a rising China, will US resources continue to shift towards the Indo-Pacific? Will a second Trump administration be as critical and skeptic towards its commitment to European countries and NATO? Either way, it looks like Europe needs to be ready to take further responsibility for their own security. UKs General Election will be taking place in July this year. Polls are showing that a political change may be on the steps, and that Labour is likely to become the new governing party. What will this mean for European security? How well would Labour’s Keir Starmer cooperate with Trump on matters of security and defence?In this episode of the NUPI podcast The World Stage, we take a closer look at which implications the UK and US elections will have on Northern European security.Here, you will hear from Max Bergmann, Director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program and the Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European Studies at CSIS, Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute and NUPI Research Professor Karsten Friis.  The conversation is hosted by NUPI Junior Research Fellow Gine R. Bolling. The conversation is based on the report US and UK Elections: Implications for NATO and Northern European Security written by Max Bergmann, Karsten Friis and Ed Arnold, who is a Senior Research Fellow for European Security within the International Security department at RUSI. This report is published as a part of the trilateral CSIS/RUSI/NUPI research cooperation on transatlantic security, funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 

As ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) proliferate, particularly on the African continent, two questions crystallize. First, what consequences do they bring about for the existing institutional security landscape? And second, how can the trend of AHCs operating alongside, instead of inside, international organizations be captured and explored conceptually?To answer these questions, Malte Brosig and John Karlsrud have in a new article in International Affairs examined the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) fighting Boko Haram and its changing relationship to the African Union. Through a case-study and a review of policy and academic literature, the article launches the concept of deinstitutionalization and how it can be characterized.The authors identify three features of deinstitutionalization, and in sum, the article unwraps processes of deinstitutionalization and identifies three forms of rationales for this process: lack of problem-solving capacity, limited adaptability and path dependency.In this episode of the NUPI podcast The World Stage, NUPI Research Professor Ole Jacob Sending sits down with the two authors to dig into the article and its findings.Malte Brosig is a Professor at University of the Witwatersrand. John Karlsrud is a Research Professor at NUPI.

Why should we connect the environment to issues of peace and conflict? And in a world of dramatically increased geopolitical tensions, is it possible for cooperation on climate change and environmental issues to contribute to positive change at the level of great power politics? In this episode, Ashok Swain (Uppsala University) and Cedric de Coning (NUPI) talk about these issues with Thor Olav Iversen (NUPI).

The Arctic continues to be transformed and impacted by global forces, from declining sea ice on the Arctic Ocean, through new summers of devastating wildland fires, to the wide-reaching political consequences of Russia's war against Ukraine.The Arctic is also a vibrant and varied region and homeland, and marked by three decades of post Cold War efforts at strengthening circumpolar governance.What options are there for moving Arctic governance forward, and what needs to be done first?In this episode of The World Stage NUPI Research Professor Elana Wilson-Rowe is joined in the studio by Edward Alexander, co-chair of the Gwich'in Council International, and Jennifer Spence, who is a Senior Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School.

2023 marked 75 years of peacekeeping missions in the UN. In this time, more than 70 peacekeeping operations have been deployed by the UN. Hundreds and thousands of military personnel, UN police, and other civilians from more than 120 countries have participated in UN peacekeeping operations.So, looking only at the numbers, surely peacekeeping operations must have been a success? Recently, however, several countries have asked the UN to leave, including Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So, what is this a symptom of? Where are we, 75 years after the first UN peacekeepers set their foot on foreign ground? Is this still functional? Has it worked so far? And if so, will it continue to do so in the future? What is the future for peacekeeping?In this episode of the NUPI podcast The World Stage, we take a closer look at what UN Peacekeeping mission are and whether they have been successful.In this episode you’ll hear from David Haeri, (Director, Policy, Evaluation and Training Division, UN Peacekeeping) Annika Hilding Norberg (Head of Peace Operations and Peacebuilding, Geneva Centre for Security Policy), Tor Henrik Andersen (Minister Counsellor, Peace and Security, Africa, Norwegian Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York) and NUPI Research Professor Cedric de Coning.

In this episode NUPI's Ole Jacob Sending sits down with Professor Dan Nexon of Georgetown University to talk about how international political leadership – or hegemony – is established and undone.  Nexon argues that hegemony is established through the supply of (public) goods – such as security – for other states. This is what the US has been doing for decades, but now China is trying to replace the US, providing alternative goods and also seeking to reduce the value of what the US has to offer.This episode of The World Stage is a part of the Geopolitics Center, led by NUPI.

In this episode of The World Stage, we meet Dr. Paolo Benanti. Benanti, who is known for coining the term algorethics, is a professor in ethics of technology and a Franciscan monk. He is a member of UN Secretary General's High-level Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence and also serves as an AI advisor to none other than Pope Francis. Joins us for an insightful conversation between Benanti and Dr. Niels Nagelhus Schia, head of NUPI’s Research Center on New Technology.Why do we need ethics in the development of AI-technology? Is AI a sort of God? And what did the pope feel about the AI generated image of him in a white puffer coat?

In this episode of The World Stage, join us for an insightful conversation with AI expert Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, recently recognized on The Times list of the world’s 100 most influential people in AI, and Dr. Niels Nagelhus Schia, head of NUPI’s Research Center on New Technology. Chowdhury brings a unique perspective on the intersection of technology and society, advocating for the critical need for global oversight to ensure we shape a responsible AI future. It's not just about the code; it's about the guardians ensuring its ethical and impactful deployment.

In this episode of the The World Stage, NUPI researchers Thor Olav Iversen and Cedric de Coning discuss how to sustain peace amidst the uncertainty and unpredictability of complex crises.Cedric introduced the concept of adaptive peacebuilding in a 2018 article in International Affairs, and he and his co-authors has further developed the concept and tested it in several case studies in a recently published book Adaptive Peacebuilding A New Approach to Sustaining Peace in the 21st Century. Together with Thor Olav, he discuss their findings and reflects on what constitutes the liberal model of peace and why it has come under heavy criticism, the local nature of peace processes, the agency of the people affected by conflict and how peacebuilding efforts need to continuously adapt to the complex and dynamic realities on the ground.