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Kjølv Egeland

NORSAR, Norway (CAT Program)
Theories of Change and Nuclear Disarmament
14 October 2024 - 18 October 2024
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Kjølv Egeland is a senior researcher at NORSAR, a research institute in Norway, focusing on nuclear politics and disarmament. Kjølv finished his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2018 and spent four years as a post-doc at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po in Paris.

He joins the Paris IAS in October 2024 for a group research stay as part of the CAT collaborative program, working with researchers Lyndon Burford, Heba Taha, Tom Vaughan, and Jana Wattenberg.

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Research Interests

International security, nuclear disarmament, climate politics, IR theory

Theories of Change and Nuclear Disarmament

(Collaborative project, awarded a NetIAS Constructive Advanced Thinking grant, 2021-2024)

Theories of Change and Nuclear Disarmament (TCND) seeks to initiate interdisciplinary conversations between researchers on the question of nuclear disarmament and how it might be achieved. Scholarly conceptions of 'change' as a concept are relatively limited within the fields of international relations (IR) and security studies, with mainstream theories often reproducing an implicit methodological 'continuationism' which discounts the possibility of meaningful change of, or within, the international system. Nuclear weapons are therefore too often accepted as an inevitable presence in world politics. TCND engages researchers from diverse disciplines on the concept of 'change’ and asks whether accounts of change processes from outside of IR might allow us to think about nuclear disarmament in a new light. Questions include: how much must change—is nuclear disarmament possible only in the context of much wider, sweeping changes in world socio-economic order, or can it be achieved through smaller, targeted interventions? Would the advent of a more just and peaceful world guarantee nuclear disarmament, or would nuclear weapons somehow remain? How can lower-order social changes be leveraged to feed into this process? How can interdisciplinarity contribute to answering these questions?

Key Publications

'Climate security reversed', Environmental Politics, 2023

'A theory of nuclear disarmament', Contemporary Security Policy, 2022

'Who stole disarmament', International Affairs, 2020

32532
2024-2025