Blog post archive

Tuesday, 14 May 2024
Pandemic Aftermath: Reflecting on the Value and Compensation of Essential Workers

After the first confirmation of a COVID case in Norway in late February 2020, the Norwegian government found itself in a difficult situation where the prevention of the virus was urgent, while the functioning of public institutions was necessary. Therefore, the Norwegian government categorized certain workers as especially important or ...

Friday, 9 Jul 2021
What a Year with No Travel Taught Us about the Future of Fieldwork

For many researchers working on projects that spanned international borders, the imposition of travel restrictions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a rapid change in ways of working. Drawing on their own experience and those of colleagues of carrying out fieldwork during the pandemic, Talitha Dubow and Marta ...

Tuesday, 20 Apr 2021
Does Infection Trump Everything?

On 7 April, prime minister Erna Solberg presented the government’s plan for reopening society. The plan provides predictability and clarity about prioritization, including the prioritization of children and young people. This is welcome, but the plan also reveals the problematic aspects of Norway’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. The government’s ...

Wednesday, 31 Mar 2021
Norwegian Quarantine Hotels: Infection Control or Penal Measure?

Quarantine hotels and Easter trips According to the Norwegian government, quarantine hotels are an infection-control measure. In this blog post we contest this view, and argue that the rules are penal in character. “We” are all Norwegian: four medical doctors, one psychologist, and three jurists. The rules distinguish between “necessary” ...

Friday, 26 Mar 2021
Why Digital Vaccine Passports are a Bad Idea: the Norwegian Perspective

Expanding the use of Covid-19 digital vaccine passports to domestic purposes would in practice represent a return to the checkpoint permit (in Norwegian ‘passerseddel’, in German “Passierschein”), a form of internal passport. This type of document is associated with authoritarian regimes and with war and conflict, last used in Norway ...

Tuesday, 9 Mar 2021
The Pomp of Popular Constitutional Outrage

The democratic struggle over the Norwegian Covid-19 curfew proposal. Up until a year ago, no one could have anticipated the scope, intensity, and character of the current Norwegian debate on some of the most central civil rights in a democratic society. With the advent of the COVID-19 lockdown and the ...

Tuesday, 23 Feb 2021
Tech-Based States of Emergency: some key takeaways

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the acceleration of pre-existing technological trends. As states introduce new rules and technological solutions to fight the pandemic, it can be tempting to view these technological applications as neutral scientific decisions. However, we must critically examine these decisions because times of crisis set standards which ...

Friday, 29 Jan 2021
National Risk Assessments: a political vaccine against the next disaster?

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the political potential of National Risk Assessments (NRAs). The consistent focus of European NRAs on the risk of pandemics while public attention was glued to terrorism demonstrates their relevance to the question of how to prevent and prepare for future disasters – be they natural or ...

Monday, 14 Dec 2020
Revisiting Emergency eLearning

On April 30, 2020, my article “COVID-19 and Emergency eLearning: Consequences of the Securitization of Higher Education for Post-Pandemic Pedagogy” was published in Contemporary Security Policy. In that piece, I argued that securitization theory could help understand the experience of teaching and learning online as an emergency measure, but also ...

Wednesday, 18 Nov 2020
COVID-19: A call for people-centered national security strategy in Africa

Humanity has been extraordinarily challenged by the coronavirus with serious and unprecedented impacts on all aspects of human life and the ways states have been functioning and managing public affairs. COVID-19 may either consolidate global solidarity or it may take humanity on a path toward the demise of globalization and ...

Wednesday, 11 Nov 2020
Tensions in Nordic Cooperation

The Covid-19 crisis has (re)introduced challenges within and between the Nordic countries, endangering the image of a unitary, happy and cooperative region.   The pandemic has highlighted serious challenges with the provision of welfare services –perhaps the welfare state as a whole in the Nordic region, above all in Sweden. ...

Wednesday, 4 Nov 2020
Book review: Data Justice and COVID-19. Global Perspectives

Edited by Linnet Taylor, Gargi Sharma, Aaron Martin & Shazade Jameson. Meatspace press. 306p Data Justice and COVID-19questions how the widespread deployment of digital technologies to fight COVID-19 has affected data governance and data justice. Written in ‘real-time’ during the first wave of the pandemic, the volume brings together 38 ...

Friday, 30 Oct 2020
Public-Private Partnerships during COVID-19: time to ask some questions

To say that the world was not prepared for a pandemic is an understatement. The point was made early on that in order to overcome COVID-19 and make it to the other side, it was “all hands-on deck”. This included individuals, health experts, governments, the private sector and – the ...

Thursday, 2 Apr 2020
COVID-19 in Conflict-Torn Mali

Coronavirus has killed thousands of people, traumatised the global economy, and has huge impacts on people’s everyday life due to government restrictions in an attempt to flatten the curve. But what impact can COVID-19 have when reaching states with weak governing capacity, limited health care services, and with high levels ...

Friday, 27 Mar 2020
How Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Reshape Refugee and Migration Governance?

This blog post identifies marginalization, legal distancing and the ambiguity of care as the key characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic response currently reshaping refugee and migration governance. This piece is part of our blog series Beyond the COVID Curve. COVID-19 has quickly changed everything from our daily routines, to the ...

Monday, 2 Mar 2020
Governing Global Health Emergencies: the Role of Criminalization

The point of departure for this blog is the apparent frequency of criminalization strategies in early government responses to the Corona virus. While much attention has been given to the securitization of global health responses – also in the case of Corona – less systematic focus has been given to ...