Iver B. Neumann

Performing Statehood through Crises: Citizens, Strangers, Territory

This article applies the growing International Relations literature on state performance and performativity to the question of how practitioners categorize different kinds of crises. The aim is to add value to the crisis literature by paying more attention to how performances are staged for multiple...

Preface

Foreign and security policy have long been removed from the political pressures that influence other areas of policymaking. This has led to a tendency to separate the analytical levels of the individual and the collective. Using Lacanian theory, which views the subject as ontologically incomplete and...

Kinship in International Relations: Introduction and framework

This chapter identifies and discusses some of the ways in which kinship may be of use to IR scholars. The chapter offers examples of how kinship relations have manifested themselves historically in international relations, seeking to demonstrate how blood kinship from the beginning has been accompanied,...

Kinship in International Relations

While kinship is among the basic organizing principles of all human life, its role in and implications for international politics and relations have been subject to surprisingly little exploration in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This volume is the first volume aimed at thinking systematically...

Diplomacy as Global Governance

The chapter details how diplomacy - the case study being Norwegian diplomacy - is no longer solely about representing the state vis a vis other states. It has evolved to also include governing specific issues. This governance aspect of diplomacy becomes even more interesting as an expression of the transformation...

Expertise and Practice: The Evolving Relationship between Study and Practice of Security

The chapter details the evolving relationship between the study and the practice of international security. This relationship is seen as one of differentiation: international security has proliferated into several sub-fields - cyber security, conflict management etc - with increased specialisation of...

Diplomacy, the arts, and popular culture

Diplomacy usually takes place in settings that are constructed not only with a view to functionality, but also to beauty. Beauty lends status and ambiance to diplomatic sites. The first part of this entry discusses the use of art by diplomats. The second part discusses how diplomacy is represented in...

Moral authority and status in International Relations: Good states and the social dimension of status seeking

We develop scholarship on status in international politics by focusing on the social dimension of small and middle power status politics. This vantage opens a new window on the widely-discussed strategies social actors may use to maintain and enhance their status, showing how social creativity, mobility,...

Governmentality

Governmentality is a concept that Michel Foucault developed in response to critics that found no subjects in his analyses of power. It refers to how subjects such as states may govern from afar by conducting the conduct of other subjects such as NGOs, individuals etc. This chapter traces the emergence...

Security, ethnicity, nationalism

In this article, Neumann asks which aspects of ethnicity and nationalism that may be brought into sharper focus if we read these two phenomena with a view to how they have been shaped by security concerns. The first part of the article clears up some problems inherent in such exercises in diachronic...

Power, Culture and situated research methodology. Autobiography,Field, Text

This book explores the extent to which our lives become an important underlying context for data production. Drawing on insights from Gestalt psychology, feminism and post-structuralism, it discusses how to situate yourself in the different phases of research.

Poststructuralists Also Have a Duty of Methodological Care

On Diplomacy (Der Derian, 1987) wasthe first attempt at bringing theory to the study of diplomacy, and it was a solid piece of empirical research. However, I will leave the celebration of these qualities to others, and concentrate on the question of methodology, where the book also has importance for...

Russiske nasjonalister vs vestvendte siden Den kalde krigens slutt

Hegemonic-Order Theory: A Field-Theoretic Account

This article outlines a field-theoretic variation of hegemonic-order theory — one inspired primarily by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. We argue that hegemony derives from the possession of a plurality of meta-capital in world politics; hegemons exercise “a power over other species of power, and particularly...

Russia’s Return as True Europe, 1991–2017

Since the reign of Peter the Great, Russia has identified itself in opposition to Europe. In the late 1980s, Michael Gorbachev and associates forged a liberal representation of Europe and initiated a Western-oriented foreign policy. Against this westernizing or liberal representation of Europe stood...