Blog Posts
Posted by Tore Wig on Monday, 6 February 2017
What we know about how great power wars start should make us terrified of President Trump. I don’t sleep at night, because of Donald Trump. This is unusual. I wasn’t kept awake at night by George W. Bush or Bill Clinton. Nor do I lose sleep over hot-blooded authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un or Turkey’s Erdogan. Why? The reason I’m being kept awake – for the first time in my life – by, and am terrified of, a democratically elected politician is simple: given that wars between superpowers are often caused by unpredictability and miscalculation, the danger ...
The past month has seen historic events in India. On Tuesday 8 November 2016, the Modi government announced without prior warning that all 500 and 1000 Indian rupee notes would be rendered valueless more or less overnight. In effect, this meant immediate withdrawal of the largest bank notes in circulation, and issuance of new notes within a few days, renewing 86 percent of India’s cash economy. Is this another step towards a cashless economy? What has the cash withdrawal done to the black economy, and networks based on corruption? And what are the implications for the use of cash, especially ...
Donald Trump has made statements sceptical of military interventions in the Middle East. This is perhaps a rare piece of good news. Military intervention as a means of building democracy has once again become a hot topic. The Norwegian government has been criticized due to the consequences of the intervention in Libya. Hillary Clinton has been branded a hawk because she is seen as more willing to use military force than Obama. Some supporters of Bernie Sanders seemed to prefer Trump to Clinton, in the hope that Trump would be less interventionist. Democracies rarely if ever go to war with ...
Posted by Rajiv Nayan & Åshild Kolås on Thursday, 18 August 2016
India became the 35th member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) on 27 June 2016. The MTCR is an informal and voluntary association of suppliers of ballistic and cruise missiles capable of delivering Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and other unmanned aerial vehicles. It was established in 1987 with merely seven countries. Though the MTCR does not force any of its members to take ‘legally binding obligations’, in reality, members normally incorporate decisions taken in the informal body. During the Cold War, as more countries joined the MTCR, there were frequent struggles among its members over harmonization. In 1992, ...
Tony Blair took the decision to take part in the military intervention in Iraq in 2003 more or less on his own, and based it on very scant knowledge. Are there reasons to fear the same happening again? The British Chilcot Commission has released a crushing verdict over former PM Tony Blair’s decision to stand side by side with the US in Iraq in 2003. How was it possible for such an important decision to be taken without serious consideration of its long-term consequences? Prior to the presentation of the Commission’s report, John Chilcot expressed that its aim was to ...
Posted by Åshild Kolås on Tuesday, 28 June 2016
Five years ago, the Basque militant group ETA (Basque Homeland and Freedom) announced a unilateral and permanent cessation of operations. Since then, the disappearance of political violence has given rise to a new debate on Basque nationhood: more inclusive, more open, more civic, and at the same time stronger in its affirmation of the legitimacy of popular sovereignty and the democratic demand to exercise ‘the right to decide’, as against the earlier radicalism of immediate independence. A new book edited by Pedro Ibarra Güell and Åshild Kolås, Basque Nationhood Towards a Democratic Scenario, takes stock of the contemporary re-imagining of ...
Posted by Åshild Kolås & Katrine Fangen on Wednesday, 22 June 2016
Foreign fighters returning from Syria have emerged as a looming security threat in many European countries, so also in Norway. As well as preventive measures against radicalization and mobilization by the Islamic State, there have been calls for the withdrawal of citizenship and deportation of returned foreign fighters. This raises a number of questions. Are Norwegians more secure if we send potential terrorists out of the country? Is this even feasible, if Norway wants to stay within the ‘border-free’ Europe? What are the trade-offs between security and civil rights to citizenship, and how can they best be balanced? Is citizenship essentially something that needs to be earned, or is ...
Posted by Åshild Kolås on Monday, 30 May 2016
On Friday 27 May 2016, PRIO celebrated Ola Tunander’s 30-year academic career with a seminar on ‘Sovereignty, Subs and PSYOPS’, and a reception. The celebration was, of course, focused on Ola and his work, spanning topics from the geopolitics and organic state theory of Rudolf Kjellén to the 27 October 1981 ‘Whiskey on the Rocks’ submarine crash in the Swedish Archipelago. Obviously, sovereignty was a key topic of the seminar, and is arguably also the critical theme of Ola’s work. As a digital footnote to the seminar, and a distillation of the ‘sovereign’ according to Ola Tunander, here are some ...
Why do dictators hold elections that merely play to the gallery? On 11 October, Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected as president of Belarus with an impressive 84 per cent share of the vote. The election was anything but free and fair. According to the OSCE, Belarusian law makes it impossible for the will of the people to be realized and, as if that were not enough, the election itself was characterized by fraud. Lukashenko’s regime had invested significant resources in preventing the election from being meaningful. So what was the point of holding it? Why do dictators hold elections that merely ...
Posted by Kristian Skrede Gleditsch on Thursday, 29 October 2015
Research lends support to the Nobel Committee’s rationale for its award of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2015; the revolution in Tunisia shows how non-violent protest can assist in democratization. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet came as a surprise to most observers. But the committee’s rationale – which cites the so-called Jasmine Revolution and the role of civil society in the democratization of Tunisia, together with the potential for inspiring processes of democratization in other countries – is closely linked to the findings of research conducted in recent years into non-violent protests, democratization ...
Posted by Kathleen Klaus & Matthew I. Mitchell on Thursday, 22 October 2015
On Oct. 25, Ivorians head to the polls for their first presidential election since the disputed 2010 election that left more than 3,000 dead and more than 500,000 displaced. Despite the previous electoral violence and a decade of civil war and political turmoil from 2000-2010, most discussion before this election has been about the country’s remarkable economic resurgence. Once known as the “Paris of West Africa,” the commercial capital Abidjan and the country more generally are again benefiting from high cocoa prices and investor-friendly policies. The World Bank estimates a growth rate of approximately 8.7 percent over the last two ...
Posted by Marta Bivand Erdal & Zain Ul Abdin on Thursday, 1 October 2015
Deadly heat exposes Pakistan’s power problems. This summer CNBC run a report titled Deadly heat exposes Pakistan’s power problems after more than a thousand people died during heatwaves during the first days of Ramadan. Insufficient preparedness for the heatwave is largely seen as the cause of deaths, yet the context of the protracted electricity crisis in Pakistan is also widely connected with the scale of deaths and hospitalization during this summer’s heatwave. Pakistan’s energy crisis has worsened over the past few years, with increasing gaps between electricity supply and demand in the country. The crisis has been reported on in ...
Posted by Håvard Mokleiv Nygård & Carl Henrik Knutsen on Monday, 10 August 2015
In Zaïre (currently DR Congo) in 1991, the country’s personalist ruler Mobutu Sese Seko faced popular unrest, army mutinies, and shrinking resources for patronage. Mobutu was seemingly starting to lose his grip on power, which he had held since the mid-1960s. In response, Mobutu ended the decades-long ban on political parties other than his own Popular Movement of the Revolution, promised free and fair elections, and entered into a coalition government. Yet, a couple of years later ‒ after the situation had “calmed down”, and after having shored up army support ‒ Mobutu reversed the liberalization measures. Almost 150 years ...
Posted by Erica Chenoweth on Monday, 20 July 2015
Two weeks ago, the Monkey Cage ran a piece by Matthew Baum and Phil Potter suggesting that the policy of “democracy-promotion” has gone out of style.[1] I think they’re right that in many circles democracy-promotion is politically passé and that, more broadly, democracy advocates are really having a tough couple of years. In the midst of pushback against democracy agendas within democracies themselves, they are also dealing with the “comeback” of authoritarianism. [2] Setting aside the debate as to whether the recent resurgence is overstated, it does appear to be the case that while democratic countries are questioning the wisdom ...
Posted by Ragnhild Belbo on Tuesday, 20 January 2015
East Africa has become the latest hotspot for oil-and-gas discoveries, but the reserves are located in countries characterized by weak state institutions and social unrest. A number of African countries – several of them with significant Norwegian assistance – are on the threshold of becoming major producers of oil and gas. Does this mean that Norwegian companies are contributing to increase the risk of civil war in these countries? Weak state institutions and social unrest Two years ago, on 16 January 2013, an armed Islamist group attacked the Statoil- and BP-run gas plant at In Amenas in Algeria. For almost ...
Posted by Erica Chenoweth on Wednesday, 30 July 2014
Is there any measurable way to tell whether police become more or less focused on crime prevention and public safety in nations that are not fully democratic? Interesting question. I guess answering it would have to start with a good theory as to why police would change their priorities and behaviors in less democratic countries. Most existing work seems to refer to the fact that democracy provides a level of transparency, public oversight, and accountability over police practice, which make police more professional and responsive to the rule of law than they might be in non-democracies. However, I’m not aware ...
Posted by Håvard Hegre on Friday, 16 May 2014
The process of democratization is often violent in the short run, and democratic governments are more constrained in their use of force against insurgents than non-democratic authorities. But are democracies really more prone to political violence than other political systems? This is the theme of a short article published at the International Relations and Security Network (ISN) at ETH Zürich. This summary article is based on recent quantitative studies of the relationship between democracy, democratization, and political violence. A longer review of this literature was recently published as an open-access article in Journal of Peace Research. In a newly published ...
In April, 800 hundred million people began casting their ballots all across India in the largest election the world has ever seen. When we think of voting in India, we often picture a poor elderly villager showing a big ink-stained thumb and boasting a wide smile as proof of democracy in action. But elections in today’s India mean big money, big ideas and a growing focus on big urban centers as the drivers of development that will continue to catapult it from a 20th century agrarian laggard to a 21st century global power. India’s electorate is bigger than all of ...
Democracy is to a large extent about parties being willing to accept electoral defeat. In Nepal the Maoist Party, previously engaged in guerrilla warfare, has done precisely this. A wave of election boycotts is sweeping across Asia. In Thailand’s election on 2 February the “Democrats” succeeded in preventing voting in enough constituencies to delay the result. Bangladesh’s New Year election descended into pure farce following a boycott by most of the opposition. Last year’s election in Malaysia triggered massive protests, while in Cambodia the opposition is refusing to accept the results of the 2013 election. While this unrest has attracted ...
Posted by Håvard Hegre on Sunday, 12 January 2014
The ‘Arab Spring’ demonstrated that political transitions tend to occur together in space and time. Samuel Huntington coined the term ‘Waves of democratization’ in his book The Third Wave. The figure above shows that changes to the proportion of the world’s countries that are democracies occurs in spurts. Confirming Huntington’s three waves of democratization, spurts occurred from the 1890s up to 1920, from 1935 to 1945, and from 1975 up to today. There are also reverse waves — from 1920 to 1935 and from 1945 to about 1970. Huntington demonstrated the waves empirically, and provided a number of explanations for why they occur. He did not ...