Forging a maritime alliance: Norway and the evolution of american maritime strategy 1945-1960

The study examines the development of American maritime interests in the High North in the period from 1945 to 1960 with particular emphasis on the Eisenhower period and Admiral Arleigh Burke's tenure as Chief of Naval Operations. Specifically, it traces the reorientation of US concern about Soviet naval developments from the Baltic area to the Northern Fleet area after 1955. It explores how, in the latter half of the 1950s, Norway acquired a central role in US defence strategy as the US Navy - partly in response to the weakening of British naval power - moved into the Northeast Atlantic. By 1960 Norway was providing navgational support for the first generation of US nuclear-fuelled ballistic missile submarines and was playing a key part in the nuclear-oriented anti-submarine strategy of the US Navy. In 1960 the process which had begun in the late 1940s when the US increasingly came to assume Britain's traditional role as Norway's principal source of external support had been largely completed

Introduction: Tracing History, Politics and Law as a Vindication of Palestinian Liberation

Today, the Zionist occupation of Palestine and the continued dislocation of Palestinians for nearly a hundred years through brute force – combined with the former’s discursive hegemony over its victims – remain as major obstacles to the construction of a peaceful and stable international political order in the Middle East. The so-called Palestinian problem remains the key to understand the failure of the Middle Eastern sub-system to produce sustainable peace in the region. This brief introduction to the special issue seeks to explain the general perspective and summarise main arguments of the contributors who have approached the issue of Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lenses of various fields of study such as international law, foreign policy analysis and discourse analysis. As will be seen, all the authors offer notable critical reflections that challenge established understandings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within the mainstream Western media and scholarly literature.       

United Nations peacekeeping at at crossroads : The challenge of management and institutional reform

After much positivism in regards to UN efficiency in peacekeeping missions up to 1992, an increased pessimism came during 1993. Many operations that seemed promising started to go sour. What went wrong? Mats Berdal argues that besides the fact that the international system is dominated by states interests, the UN have an inability to adapt to changing circumstances, and has an urgent need for reform

Peacekeeping in South Sudan is a race against time for the UN

In the context of fraught geopolitical relations following Russia’s war in Ukraine, the UN Security Council’s decision to renew the mandate of the Mission in South Sudan is a major achievement. But the potential for escalating violence in the country make the Mission’s future uncertain

A Critical View of the Scholarly Discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian Problem

The scholarly discourse about Israel has at least two defects. First, although it is a colonial-settler state that has occupied the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine, it is still by and large treated as a “normal” state in the literature; and secondly, even the progressive scholars – who are very critical of Israel for is subjugation of Palestinian rights and massive breaches of human rights – have mostly confined their critique to the Palestinian territories occupied during the 1967 War. Therefore, the progressive scholarship ought to adopt a wider view of Israel’s irregular practices by extending its focus to the entirety of territories corresponding to the former Mandate of Palestine and the entirety of the history of the state of Israel in the context of its occupations, colonial policies, ethnic cleansing, population transfers, systematic racism and massive human rights violations against the Palestinian people. This “new” approach also requires, at least in the context of critical academics, an advocacy for multiple sanctions by international institutions, first and foremost, by the United Nations (UN), to be imposed against Israel as was the case with the Apartheid state of South Africa during the Cold War. 

Politiets arbeid mot vold i utelivet : en teoretisk oppgave

Bachelor i politiutdannin

Nationalism and secession in the Horn of Africa: a critique of the ethnic interpretation

This thesis seeks to assess the relevance of existing theories about the origins of nationalism and investigate more specifically the claim that nationalism is rooted in ethnicity. It does so by examining the cases of Eritrea and Somaliland, which proclaimed their independence in May 1991 after seceding from the states to which they were formerly united. Having explained in the introduction why International Relations needs to take a closer look at the causes of nationalism, the second chapter proceeds to review some of the main theories about the origins of nationalism. It retraces the history of the primordialist-modernist debate, discusses the main contentions of the ethnonationalist approach and presents some of the factors singled-out by recent scholarship as propitious for the emergence of nationalism. Given that most of the theories about the origins of nationalism presented in chapter two centre on Europe, chapter three surveys the literature on the rise of nationalism in Africa i_n order to determine whether any additional factors need to be considered before analysing Eritrea and Somaliland. Chapter three also includes a discussion of the anthropological literature on ethnicity in Africa and questions the ethnonationalist claim that ethnic groups are pre-modern. Using as a framework the factors identified previously, chapter four offers a historical account of the emergence of nationalism in Eritrea. Chapter five does the same for the case of Somaliland. As the analysis provided in chapters four and five illustrate, the claim that nationalism and secession have ethnic roots is not empirically substantiated by the cases of Eritrea and Somaliland. The thesis concludes by discussing the practical implications of these fmdings with regard to the right of secession and proposals for boundary adjustment in Africa. It also highlights the ways International Relations may contribute to our understanding of the causes of nationalism