Interviewing Jihadists: On the Importance of Drinking Tea and Other Methodological Considerations

The field of terrorism research has arguably long been characterized by a separation of the scholars from their subject of inquiry. Interviews can be used to bridge this chasm, but making contact with potential interviewees, conducting interviews, and analyzing the data pose unique challenges when conducting research into jihadists, especially active ones. This article focuses on the author's experience of interviewing both former and active jihadi foreign fighters. It is specifically intended to contribute to a better methodological understanding of conducting first-hand empirical research into jihadi foreign fighters and builds on fieldwork conducted in Sweden, Iraq, and Lebanon.     

Applying the security-development nexus on the ground: land restitution in Colombia

The general consensus on the security-development nexus is that both are key to achieving sustainable peace in war-torn societies. However, this debate has largely taken place among international actors, with little empirical evidence about how security and development relate to each other or are even considered by local actors. The current paper applies the security-development nexus to the case of land restitution in Colombia. Following decades of internal armed conflict, in 2012 the national government passed sweeping land restitution legislation amid ongoing violence. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups with multiple actors involved in this process, ranging from international organisations to national government units, from regional institutions to local communities, the paper analyses the objectives, impact, challenges and opportunities for land restitution related to security and development. Undermining peace-building, a lack of coherence in the integration of security and development priorities limits the extent to which either supports, or is promoted by, land restitution efforts in Colombia. The paper concludes with reflections on how the security-development nexus may promote peace-building amid ongoing conflict.     

Ecomodernist citizenship: rethinking political obligations in a climate-changed world

Green accounts of environmental citizenship typically seek to promote environmental sustainability and justice. However, some green theorists have argued that liberal freedoms are incompatible with preserving a planetary environment capable of meeting basic human needs and must be wound back. More recently, ‘ecomodernists’ have proposed that liberalism might be reconciled with environmental challenges through state-directed innovation focused on the provision of global public goods. Yet, they have not articulated an account of ecomodernist citizenship. This article seeks to advance the normative theory of ecomodernism by specifying an account of ecomodernist citizenship and subjecting the theory’s core claims to sympathetic critique. We argue that state-directed innovation has the potential to reconcile ambitious mitigation with liberal freedoms. However, full implementation of ecomodernist ideals would require widespread embrace of ecophilic values, high-trust societies and acceptance of thick political obligations within both national and global communities. Ecomodernism’s wider commitments to cosmopolitan egalitarianism and separation from nature thus amount to a non-liberal comprehensive public conception of the good. Furthermore, ecomodernism currently lacks an adequate account of how a society that successfully ‘separates’ from nature can nurture green values, or how vulnerable people’s substantive freedoms will be protected during an era of worsening climate harms.     

The Backbone Structure of Audience Networks: A New Approach to Comparing Online News Consumption Across Countries

Measures of audience overlap between news sources give us information on the diversity of people’s media diets and the similarity of news outlets in terms of the audiences they share. This provides a way of addressing key questions like whether audiences are increasingly fragmented. In this article, we use audience overlap estimates to build networks that we then analyze to extract the backbone—that is, the overlapping ties that are statistically significant. We argue that the analysis of this backbone structure offers metrics that can be used to compare news consumption patterns across countries, between groups, and over time. Our analytical approach offers a new way of understanding audience structures that can enable more comparative research and, thus, more empirically grounded theoretical understandings of audience behavior in an increasingly digital media environment.     

China and climate justice: moving beyond statism

China is the largest national source of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution causing climate change. However, despite some rhetorical progress at the 2011 Durban climate conference, it has consistently rejected calls to take on binding targets to reduce its GHG emissions. The Chinese Government has understandably argued that developed states are responsible for the predominant share of historical GHG emissions, have greater capacity to pay for the cost of mitigation, and indeed have an obligation to do so before China is required to take action. However, due to the explosive growth in its GHG emissions, China is now in a position to single-handedly dash any hope of climate stability if its position does not change. On the diplomatic level, other big polluters, particularly the United States, will not enter into new binding agreements to reduce substantially their own GHG emissions without a credible commitment from China. Challenging the “statist” framing of the climate justice, this article explores the possibility for China to take on a leadership role in climate change diplomacy in a way that allows it to maintain its long-standing principled resistance to binding national emissions targets while making meaningful progress toward combating the problem. Action by China’s rapidly growing affluent classes may hold the key to long-term climate stability.     

Local Political Decision-Making: A Case of Rationality or Appropriateness?

The party and trustee principles are two representational styles used to describe how politicians make decisions. Swedish politicians have historically relied more on the party principle than the trustee principle. This article studies the decision-making practices of local Swedish politicians by exploring to what extent they rely on these principles when making decisions on two issues that diverge in political dignity: tax level and organisational change in the municipal administration. The study draws on new institutional theory, in which theories from rational choice and sociological institutionalism were used for modelling and performing a large study. The results indicate that, although Swedish politicians still rely on the party principle when making decisions, there is a significant difference as to what extent they do so in regard to the two policy issues. The trustee principle is more frequently used when deciding on organisational change than on tax levels. This result is valid for all Swedish parties, except for a relatively new political party at the extreme right of the ideological spectrum. Future research of the two decision-making principles in relation to other policy issues, as well as research that delves deeper into the deviant results of the different political parties, is encouraged.     

Democracy and Security in the EU’s Eastern Neighborhood? Assessing the ENP in Georgia,Moldova, and Ukraine

This article explores the European Union’s (EU) democratic and security objectives in the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) toward three post-Soviet states: Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. By discussing the ENP’s objectives, this study concludes the following: first, despite long-term ENP democracy promotion, there have been very limited democratic developments in the partner states between 2005 and 2014; second, security challenges remain in partner states in the breakaway regions in Transnistria in Moldova, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk in Ukraine. Therefore, EU’s Kantian view of security through democracy has failed, and its ambition to create a ring of Eastern friends has not led to improved relations in the Eastern neighborhood. On the contrary, the EU’s push eastward has instead intensified insecurity in its partner states due to limited democratization.     

Civil society actors in peace negotiations in Central America

Civil society actors are assumed to play an important part in post-conflict peacebuilding; therefore, the international community pushes for civil society participation already during peace negotiations. However, the actual connection between civil society’s participation in those negotiations and its role in implementation processes remains unclear. Taking the Central American peace processes of the late 1980s and early 90s as a case study, this article compares civil society participation in peace negotiations and provisions for civil society involvement for the implementation phase, with the actual role that the civil society played in the implementation processes in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador. The article questions the importance of including civil society actors in the negotiation process since the level of civil society inclusion in, activism during and influence on the negotiation process in the three cases did not result in a stronger role for civil society organizations in the implementation process. The article concludes with an analysis of how these findings modify the current understanding of the role of civil society in peace processes and proposes a different focus for future research.