International politics

In this project, we examine how much influence transnational actors - such as environmental organizations, trade unions, and human rights groups - actually exert in contemporary international politics. The project analyzes how their proposals are incorporated into international decision-making documents using text analysis, and complements this with survey experiments with decision-makers to identify the factors that shape their influence.

Principal investigator: Magnus Lundgren, Associate Professor.

Financier: The Swedish Research Council, 2025.

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Several political scientists argue that the world has entered a period of democratic decline. A less democratic world has critical consequences for peace, development and health. Autocratic states behave detrimental to the interest of small states as they challenge the multilateral order and are less interested in negotiated, compromise solutions to global problems.

Principal investigator: Ann-Marie Ekengren, Professor.

Financier: Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, 2025.

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The study follows the negotiations over the EU’s development aid budget for 2028–2034 and analyzes how member states, especially Sweden, formulate and advance their priorities, and which ones ultimately shape the outcome.

Principal investigator: Magnus Lundgren, Associate Professor.

Financier: Expert Group for Aid Studies (EBA), 2025.

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The Nordic governments have agreed on an ambitious political goal: to strengthen the region’s resilience and, within the field of crisis preparedness, to achieve a "borderless Nordic Region." Cooperation in this area is based on the so-called Haga Declarations. However, the pandemic exposed a clear discrepancy between vision and reality – the introduction of national border controls during COVID-19 demonstrated how far the coordinated Nordic crisis response still is from becoming a reality. Our research project examines this gap between, on the one hand, the Nordic states’ declared commitment to joint crisis preparedness and, on the other hand, their thus far limited capacity for actual coordinated crisis management.

Principal investigator: Ulrika Möller, Associate Professor.

Financier: The Swedish Research Council, 2024.

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Civil society in European countries is becoming more diverse and transnational largely as a consequence of migration. Yet the significance of these changes on foreign policy is under- researched. This project will address this gap by examining the impact transnational civil society actors have on foreign policy in European democracies.

Principal investigator: Lisbeth Aggestam, Associate Professor.

Financier: The Swedish Research Council, 2022.

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The GenDip Program aims to identify and analyse the changing nature of gender in diplomacy.

Principal investigator: Ann Towns, Professor.

Financier: The Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

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The project examined how states conduct campaigns to be elected as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council. The research analyzed why states seek the position, what influence they expect to gain, and which strategies they use to secure support.

The study combined a broad analysis of campaign patterns among UN member states with in-depth case studies of the campaigns of Sweden, Iceland, and Finland.

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The project examined why mediation in armed conflicts has declined, despite a significant increase in international mediation capacity. During the 1990s, roughly twice as large a share of the world’s conflicts were mediated compared to today, raising the question of what lies behind this development.

The researchers analyzed changes both in conflict patterns and in how armed conflicts were managed, in order to better understand why mediation is being used increasingly rarely, even though more actors than ever have the capacity to mediate.

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The project examined how the Nordic countries managed foreign policy role conflicts in a time of growing international confrontation and challenges to the liberal world order. The researchers analyzed how liberal small states balanced their normative ideals—such as democracy, human rights, and international cooperation—against the need for military security.

The study included comparative analyses of the five Nordic states, showing how the tension between value-driven politics and realpolitik security demands shaped their foreign policies.

The project was a collaboration between Linnaeus University, the University of Gothenburg, and Uppsala University.

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The project examined the emerging international regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on three areas: warfare, the judiciary, and the labor market. All three areas involved AI applications that raised political and ethical dilemmas and therefore prompted initiatives for international regulation.

The project was a collaboration between Stockholm University and the University of Gothenburg.

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Over the past decades, states and organizations have invested substantial resources in building the capacity to resolve armed conflicts through diplomatic means, particularly through mediation efforts. At the same time, these actors had become increasingly inclined to proscribe—meaning to criminalize or otherwise blacklist—armed groups.

Researchers and practitioners in conflict resolution had long pointed out that such “terror listing” could complicate or even render mediation missions impossible. The project, therefore, aimed to enable quantitative testing of how terror listing affected mediation by collecting data on proscription in armed conflicts between 1945 and 2020 and creating the first dataset of its kind.

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