Ludvig Norman

Biography

I received my PhD from Uppsala University in 2013 and have since then worked as Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Government in Uppsala. For the academic year 2016-2017 I am taking up an appointment as Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley where I am joining the Institute of European Studies. I am currently embarking on a new avenue of research focusing the dynamics between the political mainstream and radical right-wing political movements at the European level. This is also the subject of an ongoing book project to be completed by 2018. Apart from an interest in European politics and international political orders more generally I also nurture an interest in research methods, more specifically qualitative methods and process tracing. I teach methods and at the Department of Government in Uppsala and have previously published on these issues in the QMMR Newsletter of the American Political Science Association.

Education

MA Södertörn University College
PhD Uppsala University 2013

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

International organizations and security politics have been at the heart of my research, with a specific focus on the European Union. More recently, I have broadened my research focus to include questions of how international political orders built around broadly defined liberal democratic values respond to the emergence of radical right-wing and extremist political movements. In this context I am engaging with notions of militant democracy and more general debates in political theory on the limits of democratic (international) political orders.  On a theoretical level my research has been informed by an interest in how norms, ideas and social practices shape preferences of institutionally situated actors, to help explain their actions. Concretized in empirical research, qualitative interviews and document studies have been used to unveil the dynamics of processes leading to particular outcomes. This research has fed into theoretical debates specifically developed in the field of International Relations (IR) in recent decades. Discussions on the social mechanisms underlying broader international dynamics, such as institutional stability and change, cooperation and conflict, are an intrinsic part of these debates. The focus on social action in the international sphere also dovetails with methodological discussions on how to best uncover such mechanisms. Previous work has appeared in European Journal of International Relations, Journal of European Public Policy and Review of International Studies.

Websites

• UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies

• Uppsala University

Books

Articles