Halvard Leira
Biographic Data
| ID | 4085496 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Halvard Leira |
| GIVEN NAMES | Halvard |
| FAMILY NAME | Leira |
| SIGNATURE | LEIRA H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Norwegian Institute of International Affairs |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7470-4460 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 83 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 206 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 81 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Status of Culture and the Culture of Status in International Relations
Culture has long inhabited a rather peculiar place in International Relations (IR), as witnessed by recent attempts to bring culture “back into” IR (Andrew Phillips and Christian Reus-Smit, eds., Culture and Order in World Politics , 2020). Even after the opening up of the discipline at the end of the Cold War, and with strategic culture being the obvious exception to the rule, culture has typically been seen as something that a discipline center…
Forum: On Jens/Becoming Bartelson
This forum discusses and celebrates the career and impact of Jens Bartelson in and on Nordic academic International Relations. Through engagement with his central works and concepts, the contributions highlight the intellectual impact and development of Bartelson’s work over three decades
Historicizing theory at the end of the world
Training folk internationalists: Foreign policy identity and children’s news
Stories we live by: The rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts
Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we ri…
The future is just another past
Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discard…
The importance of being civilized: Opera houses as status symbols in International Relations
(Ouverture) By making the case for opera houses as symbols of civilized status in International Relations (IR), this article addresses the discrepancy between the waning popularity of opera and the veritable boom in new opera houses we are witnessing across the globe. We foreground the multivocality of status symbols—they may be intended to communicate more than one meaning, by and to more than one audience. Whether intended as vehicles of urban,…
The Historicity of International Politics: Imperialism and the Presence of the Past
The past is constantly present, not least in the study of imperialism and imperial forms of power in international politics. This volume shows how historical trajectories have shaped international affairs covering a wide range of imperial and (post-) colonial settings in international politics, substantiating the claim that imperial and colonial legacies - and how they have transformed over time - are foundational to the historicity of internatio…
Privateering, Colonialism and Empires: On the Forgotten Origins of International Order
This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its…
To better understand ourselves, the Francesco Guicciardini prize forum
Birth of the state: The place of the body in crafting modern politics
Journal Article Birth of the state: the place of the body in crafting modern politics Get access Birth of the state: the place of the body in crafting modern politics. By Charlotte Epstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 352pp. £71.00. Isbn978 0 19091 762 3. Available as e-book. Halvard Leira Halvard Leira Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Internat…
The Intercity Origins of Diplomacy: Consuls, Empires, and the Sea
City diplomacy is a fairly new topic in the study of diplomacy, and, many would argue, a fairly recent empirical phenomenon. A counterpoint to this could be to reference how the alleged origin of diplomacy in Greek antiquity was city-centered, as were the earliest forms of Renaissance diplomacy in Italy. In this essay we want to probe the connections between cities and diplomacy through problematizing what has counted as diplomacy. Our starting p…
Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations
Studiet av internasjonal politikk etter 11. september 2001
Det er ingen tvil om at hendelsesforløp som ble igangsatt 11. september 2001 har vært med på å prege global politikk i de to tiårene som har gått. Men ble terrorangrepene mot USA 11. september 2001 definerende for hvordan vi forstår internasjonal politikk og hvordan vi studerer det? Basert på en gjennomgang av studiet av internasjonal politikk over de siste 20 årene argumenterer vi i denne artikkelen at svaret her er mer tvetydig. Tvetydig fordi …
Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations
The Duty of Care in International Relations: Protecting Citizens Beyond the Border
The Emergence of Foreign Policy
International relations scholarship typically treats foreign policy as a taken-for-granted analytical concept. It assumes either that all historical polities have foreign policies or that foreign policy originates in seventeenth-century Europe with the separation between the “inside” and “outside” of the state. It generally holds that foreign policy differs in essential ways from other kinds of policy, such as carrying with it a special need for …
Ethnic Diversity in the Recruitment of Diplomats: Why MFAs Take the Issue Seriously
Diversity and its management have become an issue in all organisations. Ministries of foreign affairs ( MFA s) do not escape the issue. In the 2000s, states decided to consider more ethnic diversity in the recruitment of their diplomats. In some countries, this new goal requires affirmative action programs. This article is based on three case studies. The first case study analyses two Western countries — France and Norway — where MFA s have to re…
Duty of Care in International Relations: Protecting Citizens Beyond the Border
The Function of Myths in International Relations: Discipline and Identity
Kinship diplomacy, or diplomats of akin
This chapter explores the sociological dimension of kinship diplomacy and the importance of blood kinship as a cohesive factor in diplomatic interaction. Specifically, the chapter focuses on diplomacy as a functional ‘third culture’ and on diplomats as part of a self-referential group of peers. It is argued that while metaphorical kinship and family metaphors are certainly central to diplomacy, blood kinship has been underestimated as a cohesive …
Utenrikspolitikk – en begrepshistorie
Artikkelen tar opp spørsmålet om når Norge fikk en egen utenrikspolitikk, og gir svar gjennom en begrepshistorisk analyse. Tidligere forslag har vært middelalderen, med etableringen av relasjoner mellom norske konger og andre konger, slutten av 1700-tallet, med etableringen av et eget departement i København for utenlandske anliggender, eller 1905, med full ytre suverenitet. Et fokus på utenrikspolitikk som praksisbegrep, et begrep som oppsto på …
Diplomatiminister Brende
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, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably quest…
Construction Time Again: History in Constructivist IR Scholarship
In this article we seek to understand how succeeding generations of constructivists have invoked history to exact narratives of change within IR. We make the case that there is a move from a first generation where history served primarily to undermine generalised and ahistorical mainstream arguments through a second generation where history was providing data to undercut specific mainstream stories, replacing them with their own largely progressi…
The Big Bangs of IR: The Myths That Your Teachers Still Tell You about 1648 and 1919
International relations as we know them emerged through the peace of Westphalia, and the discipline of International Relations emerged in 1919 and developed through a First Great Debate between idealists and realists. These are the established myths of 1648 and 1919. In this article we demonstrate how historical and historiographical scholarship has demolished these myths, but that the myths regardless are pervasive in the current textbooks that …
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, and competition can all be system-supporting under some conditions. We extract lessons for other thorny issues in status research, notably quest…
Norwegian Strategic Culture after World War II: From a Local to a Global Perspective
This article details the changes in Norwegian strategic culture, comprising grand strategy and practice, following the end of the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War, Norwegian security and defence policy was characterized by broad, non-politicized consensus. Basic elements of this grand strategic perspective were the smallness of Norway, the people defence and allegiance to the UN. Doctrines focused on survival, with the army as the lead service. …
Stories we live by: The rise of Historical IR and the move to concepts
Scholars of the humanities and social sciences are necessarily storytellers. Thus, crafting narratives is an inescapable feature of the practice of International Relations scholarship. We tell stories about the past to orient ourselves in the present and envision the future. Historical International Relations has greatly expanded the repertoire of available narrative elements. However, when we read the past through the prism of our present, we ri…
International Relations Pluralism and History-Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession
This article approaches the possibility of achieving pluralist International Relations research through engagements with history/History. There are serious sociological and disciplinary challenges to achieving pluralism, most importantly related to the need to make a mark and a career in one specific discipline and the constant diversification of disciplines. Even so, drawing on the literature of amateurism, understood as engaging in an activity …
The importance of being civilized: Opera houses as status symbols in International Relations
(Ouverture) By making the case for opera houses as symbols of civilized status in International Relations (IR), this article addresses the discrepancy between the waning popularity of opera and the veritable boom in new opera houses we are witnessing across the globe. We foreground the multivocality of status symbols—they may be intended to communicate more than one meaning, by and to more than one audience. Whether intended as vehicles of urban,…
Political change and historical analogies
In November 2016, Donald J. Trump surprised the world, himself included, by being elected to the US presidency. His completely unorthodox campaign seemingly overturned common wisdom about how to ge
Beastly Diplomacy
Even if beastly iconography has been pervasive in international politics, the study of diplomacy has traditionally focused solely on man as a political animal. Animals in diplomacy have been treated as a curiosity. This article stakes a claim for a more serious engagement with beastly diplomacy, arguing that animals matter through their ontic status; by representing states; as diplomatic subjects; and as objects of diplomacy. The article places p…
The future is just another past
Before International Studies can confront the future, it needs to get a better grip on its past and present. The discipline lacks agreement on both its own name and the name of its object of study. More importantly, key concepts used to describe phenomena have changed continuously: no concept emerging in the 19th century has remained untouched, no envisioned future of the past could have prepared us for the present. Old concepts have been discard…
Taking Foucault beyond Foucault: Inter-state Governmentality in Early Modern Europe
The analysis of governmentality has had a profound impact on the study of liberal, domestic societies over the last two decades, and the conceptual framework has been applied successfully to current global affairs. In this article one possible way of expanding the timeframe and the scope of governmentality studies is explored. Through an immanent critique of Foucault's own comments on the co-constitutive development of states and a state system i…
Caring and Carers: Diplomatic Personnel and the Duty of Care
This article deals with the duty of care that states hold in relation to their citizens abroad — more specifically, the double role of diplomatic personnel, as both providers and recipients of care. The focus of discussion is states’ duty of care for diplomatic personnel, raising questions of how this care can be balanced with the duty of care for citizens and how far this duty stretches. The article first emphasizes the threats, before focusing …
Our Entire People are Natural Born Friends of Peace: The Norwegian Foreign Policy of Peace
What makes a peace nation? In this article it is argued that the Norwegian foreign policy of peace is rooted in an historical self‐understanding of Norway and Norwegians as particularly peaceful, an identity which was first articulated around 1890. Norwegians hold a strong liberal/meliorist belief that the world can become a better place, and that Norway has an important role to play in this process. However, this general belief in peace and a No…
Folket og freden: Utviklingstrekk i norsk fredsdiskurs 1890–2005
To better understand ourselves, the Francesco Guicciardini prize forum
Birth of the state: The place of the body in crafting modern politics
Journal Article Birth of the state: the place of the body in crafting modern politics Get access Birth of the state: the place of the body in crafting modern politics. By Charlotte Epstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. 352pp. £71.00. Isbn978 0 19091 762 3. Available as e-book. Halvard Leira Halvard Leira Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Internat…
Ethnic Diversity in the Recruitment of Diplomats: Why MFAs Take the Issue Seriously
Diversity and its management have become an issue in all organisations. Ministries of foreign affairs ( MFA s) do not escape the issue. In the 2000s, states decided to consider more ethnic diversity in the recruitment of their diplomats. In some countries, this new goal requires affirmative action programs. This article is based on three case studies. The first case study analyses two Western countries — France and Norway — where MFA s have to re…
The Making of a Classic: On Diplomacy 30 Years On
Innledning
Justus Lipsius, political humanism and the disciplining of 17th century statecraft
Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) was among the most influential thinkers of the late 16th/early 17th centuries. His guides for action were highly influential in the establishment of moderate absolutism and what has been called the fiscal-military state across Europe. In this article I explore Lipsian thought in an International Relations context. Special attention is paid to his ideals of discipline, which were meant to order both the ruler and those t…
Anarchy in the IR
Studies of popular culture, including music, have begun to make inroads in the study of international relations (IR) over the last two decades or so, and as titles such as War (U2) and Combat Rock (The Clash) indicates; popular music has long taken a keen interest in our field of study. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the stunning parallels between popular music and IR theory. From Thucydides quoting the Delian “Hymn to Ap…
Bokspalte
Utenrikspolitikk som identitetspolitikk
Bokspalte
Bokspalte
Bokspalte
Norwegian Strategic Culture after World War II: From a Local to a Global Perspective
This article details the changes in Norwegian strategic culture, comprising grand strategy and practice, following the end of the Cold War. Throughout the Cold War, Norwegian security and defence policy was characterized by broad, non-politicized consensus. Basic elements of this grand strategic perspective were the smallness of Norway, the people defence and allegiance to the UN. Doctrines focused on survival, with the army as the lead service. …
Folket og freden: Utviklingstrekk i norsk fredsdiskurs 1890–2005
Bokspalte
Internasjonal Politikk i Norge – En disiplins fremvekst i første halvdel av 1900-tallet
Vår visjon for Internasjonal Politikk
Bokspalte
Aktivisme, politikk og forskning i det godes tjeneste
Kjære leser
Helhetsperspektiver på norsk utenrikspolitikk
Bokspalte
Anarchy in the IR
Studies of popular culture, including music, have begun to make inroads in the study of international relations (IR) over the last two decades or so, and as titles such as War (U2) and Combat Rock (The Clash) indicates; popular music has long taken a keen interest in our field of study. However, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the stunning parallels between popular music and IR theory. From Thucydides quoting the Delian “Hymn to Ap…
At the Crossroads: Justus Lipsius and the Early Modern Development of International Law
Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) was among the most famed intellectuals in his time, but was largely forgotten during the Enlightenment. Intellectually, he stood at an important crossroads, his thought incorporating both late Renaissance traits and precursors of the early modern age. In this article I give a brief intellectual background to Lipsius's thought before concentrating on his thought regarding the lawful interaction between polities, with a f…
Leder
Leder
Anmeldelser
Norske amerikabilder i opinion og media
Veien til 270 – Hvor vil valget vinnes
Leder
Amerikansk imperium
Consular Representation in an Emerging State: The Case of Norway
The consular institution has regularly been viewed by academics and practitioners alike as the poor sibling of diplomacy: as a career sidetrack or tour of duty for aspiring ambassadors; and as an example devoid of all the intrigue and politics by historians and theoreticians of diplomacy. Through a detailed case study of the emergence and development of consular representation in Norway, this article demonstrates that any comprehensive history of…
Political science (74 works) · Law (26 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (19 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (16 works) · European and International Law Studies (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · International relations (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works)