Blog post archive

Tuesday, 13 Feb 2024
Forgotten Victims: Gaza's Journalists & UN Workers

The war in Gaza is the most deadly in modern times for journalists and UN personnel. Despite the seriousness of the situation, these killings are under-reported. The war in Gaza is an exceptionally gruesome conflict, as shown by all the relevant statistics. Since Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) attacked ...

Monday, 27 Mar 2023
Soft Power and Disinformation: The Strategic Role of Media in Wagner’s Expansion in Africa

After its first steps on the African continent in Libya in 2017, the Wagner Group has been deployed in Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, and at the end of 2021 in Mali. This rapid expansion over the years contributes to the instability and insecurity in these regions. The ...

Sunday, 29 May 2022
Telenor’s Exit from Myanmar: An External Review Is Needed

Telenor’s sale of its Myanmar venture has been completed. Its new majority owner is Myanmar’s Shwe Byain Phyu group, which is mainly known for its petroleum trade. On 11 May, in their reports to Telenor’s Annual General Meeting, Chair of the Telenor Board Gunn Wærsted and CEO Sigve Brekke spoke at length about the extremely difficult situation Telenor ...

Friday, 18 Mar 2022
In Autocracies, a Little Media Freedom Can Go a Long Way

Mobilization in autocracies is inherently difficult. Potential dissidents face several hurdles, even when grievances are widespread and a regime is unpopular. Participating in dissent is dangerous and leaves individuals at risk of repression by state security forces. Safety in numbers is possible if others also mobilize, but in autocracies people ...

Wednesday, 16 Mar 2022
The Digital Battlefield

Photos, stories and videos featuring victims of the war in Ukraine are spreading all over the world on social media. This will change our perception of war. So far, cyber attacks and cyber operations have played a smaller role than expected in the warfare in Ukraine, social media on the ...

Wednesday, 1 Dec 2021
The New Pattern of Conflict in Myanmar

A new conflict pattern has appeared in Myanmar. Amidst a spiraling economic, social and health crisis, armed fighting is no longer confined to ethnic minority areas but has cropped up in cities and regions where the ethnic Bamar are in majority. They see themselves as pursuing a nation-wide resistance. Preventive ...

Friday, 5 Feb 2021
Facebook's Power in Myanmar

Facebook is Myanmar’s dominant media platform. Now the country is again a dictatorship. In 2018, Facebook banned commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing for his role in the expulsion of the Rohingya. Now, as the country’s new dictator, he temporarily shuts down Facebook. Myanmar’s many conflicts have given Facebook director Mark Zuckerberg ...

Monday, 26 Oct 2020
The individual, the national, and the global: New connections in times of China-US confrontation

As the ongoing confrontation between the US and China has entered the technological and digital realms, we are pushed to rethink the relationship between individuals, nations and the entire world as more fluid than it has ever been before. While we grapple with these changes, the EU is on the ...

Monday, 13 Jul 2020
The Pitfalls of Societal Impact in a Politicized Environment: An Example from the Corona Era

The British magazine The Spectator referred to research published in Norway to back up the magazine’s claim that societal lockdowns are not an effective means to reduce the spread of COVID-19 infections. This unlikely occurrence highlights some of the difficulties in ensuring that research has a societal impact. Funders and ...

Monday, 12 Nov 2018
The Other Side of Facebook in Myanmar

Facebook has been making headlines this year with what seems like scandal after scandal, from the Cambridge Analytica data breach to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of the United States Congress as a result. But perhaps one of the most serious scandals has been the social media platform’s ...

Thursday, 25 Oct 2018
The Sargentini Report and Hungary: How to Shape a Parallel Reality

Hungary is in the international spotlight again. On 12 September 2018, the European Parliament voted in favor of the Sargentini report – named after the author, the Dutch MEP Judith Sargentini– with a two-thirds majority. The report called for the activation of Article 7 (1) of the Treaty on European ...

Friday, 21 Jul 2017
Performing Grief

As we discuss the relationship between public and private mourning and grief, consider the emotional handling of the Newtown school shooting in 2012, where twenty children were killed at Sandy Hook elementary school. Such a traumatic event destabilizes people, creating a felt deficit in emotional support. When President Obama visited ...

Saturday, 6 May 2017
How comics can make the Arab world a better place

Most Arab countries today are governed by more or less authoritarian regimes that nourish a patriarchal social and political order. This order marginalizes young people, and particularly women. There are moments when it is openly challenged. We saw it across the Arab world in 2011 and afterwards. Several art forms ...

Tuesday, 21 Mar 2017
Trump and Threats to Truth, Democracy and Peace

Stein Tønnesson delivered this year’s The Fjord Memorial Lecture  at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer. The lecture discusses Trump’s team of advisors, calls for fighting the increasing use of lies in political campaigning, sees Trump’s election as having weakened democracy worldwide, and perceives a major risk to world ...

Monday, 23 Jan 2017
On Bullshit and Research

Researchers who write articles or give interviews must be given approval rights over how their material is presented. My year as an academic has been bookended by a couple of awkward encounters between my own research and a new media reality. The year has also provided a rich crop of ...

Friday, 2 Sep 2016
A Bug in the System

Palestine does not exist on the map and is also not easy to find in the jam-packed schedules of diplomats working with the Middle East. A Twitter storm was unleashed a couple of weeks ago when rumours spread among pro-Palestinian activists that Google had removed Palestine from its mapping service. ...

Thursday, 10 Mar 2016
From the House of Cards to House of Data?

The fourth season of the Netflix series House of Cards was released worldwide on the 4th March. Which is to say, the week-end when many International Relations (IR) researchers are still rushing to finalize their conference paper for the annual convention of the International Studies Association (ISA). And, if you ...

Friday, 26 Feb 2016
Is Apple the New Global Dictator?

Apple, CISCO and Microsoft rule the world, and intend to do so. Imagine if CISCO or Apple held a general election. Billboards with potential board members smiling at us with an apple in one hand and a ballot in the other. Anyone who owns a computer or an iPad or ...

Monday, 9 Nov 2015
Segregation Kills: How Social Media Fuels Violence in African States

Pundits and academics alike tell us that we are supremely fortunate to be living in a new “information age.” However, new findings which I present in an article in a Journal of Peace Research special issue paint a far more complicated picture of the consequences of increased human connectivity. Ours ...

Monday, 26 Oct 2015
When Internet Access Becomes a Weapon

Social Media has rightly been celebrated as an empowering tool for ordinary citizens to mobilize against repressive rulers, and make marginalized voices heard. But a crucial question remains unanswered: why should power-hungry states, with de facto control over access to the Internet, impassively concede to defeat? The simple answer is: they ...

Monday, 7 Sep 2015
Refugees are Also Migrants. And All Migrants Matter

The recent debate over word choice has taken turns that undermine humanitarian principles and cloud the view of how migration is unfolding. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, and others have examined the usage of ‘refugees’ versus ‘migrants’ over the past week. The general impression ...

Thursday, 23 Apr 2015
Social Media Responses to this Winter’s Terror Attacks

Social media have brought Kenya into focus recently, with people’s reactions to the attack at the University of Garissa spreading on Facebook and Twitter. Social media users have been sharing an image of a candle against a black background, accompanied by the single word “Kenya”. In this way they have ...

Tuesday, 3 Mar 2015
Paving the Road to Democracy or Unleashing Big Brother? The Internet under Dictatorships

Today almost half of China’s 1.3 billion inhabitants are online, along with 85 million Russians and 17 million Saudis. The proportion of people with Internet access in these countries will soon be comparable to that of the United States, Germany and Japan. But what are the political consequences of allowing ...

Thursday, 26 Feb 2015
Dial ICT for Conflict? Four Lessons on Conflict and Contention in the Info Age

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest among political scientists in the outbreak and dynamics of civil wars. Much of this research has been facilitated by the rise of electronic media, including newspapers but extending to social media (Twitter, Facebook) that permit the collection of fine-grained data on ...

Tuesday, 13 Jan 2015
Who is Charlie? And What Now?

On Sunday 11 January France witnessed the largest rally on records of people taking to the streets with close to 4 million people all over the country, of which almost 1,5 million in Paris. The world saw one of the largest gatherings of state leaders in one place outside of ...

Friday, 27 Jun 2014
The Limits of post-22 July Media Debates

In times of crisis, citizens and victims typically look to the government for leadership, protection, direction, and order – what is often characterized as a ‘master narrative’. Faced with terror and tragedy journalists seek to comfort and reassure the public, and willingly and instinctively move from their professional, neutral critical ...

Tuesday, 25 Jun 2013
Ethical Challenges of Internet Research on 22/7

For my research on post-22/7 resilience and social media, I am drawing on data sources from the internet. Even though this data is publicly available, there are several ethical issues to be considered. A core controversy of internet-based research is the definition of public and private space: speakers may assume ...