Professor Iver B. Neumann joins the IR Department at LSE in September 2012 as the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations, and he introduces himself here:

I’m interested in how the species is organised and in the self- and other-understanding of groups understood as a constitutive element of same. That interest was culled by studying the Soviet Union and ‘the West’ in the 1980s, and then led me to study the everyday practices of diplomacy and of governmentality. I am now taking the same concerns to a study of the historical relationship between nomadic and sedentary polities where the steppe met the forests.

I studied in Norway and Britain, and Norway has been my base until now (twenty five years at  the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, interspersed with stints in MFA, a three-year period as Professor in Russian Studies at Oslo University and as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence). There’s been a lot of teaching, much of it in the areas of social theory, IR theory and method (discourse and practice analyses).

There’s a lot of family life, eating and drinking, reading and watching big idea works of arts and then there is doing (not watching) sports. I am easily enthused and, by the same token, easily bored. By the looks of it, I should qualify as LSE compatible. Looking forward to working with you.