I’m a Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), until September 2023 also a PhD fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Political Science and the Danish Institute of International Studies (DIIS). I have a monthly column on global politics for the Norwegian daily Klassekampen (2017-2020 for Dagsavisen), and co-edit the Scandinavian language IR journal Internasjonal Politikk. I’m also a board member of the Human Rights House Foundation.

I do theoretical and historicising work on ideology, resistance to dominant ideologies and hegemony, international liberalisms and liberal self-perceptions, ‘illiberal’ and postliberal actors and the Global Right, international order, (mis)recognition, state ideals, and sovereignty. I am particularly interested in critical social and political theory connected to the international sphere, ideological dominance and contestation, and idea(l)s of the state. I have also published on Norwegian, US, Western, Chinese and Russian diplomacy and international politics, particularly in relation to ideas of (contested) moral values, liberal exceptionalism and liberal order, as well as work on the broadly defined ‘Global Right’ and their ideas of global politics. I have lived/studied/worked in Wales, Egypt, the US, Russia, Kazakhstan, England, Tajikistan and Denmark, and speak Russian.

My thesis, a monograph (2018-2022, defended after maternity leave September 2023), is titled Towards a Social Theory of International Ideology, Ideological Scripts, and Counter-Ideology. Rethinking ‘Liberal International Order’ and the Far Right’s critique. How does ideology work in relation to the state as a subject and the international as a distinct realm, and what specific forms of resistance does the dominance of an ideology create? In essence, it is about understanding how ideologies as realized ideal world views function in structuring the international - and how projects of resistance differ depending on what they negate, both in form, content, and consequences. Empirically, I historicize and disentangle specific forms of liberal international ideologies after 1945 and 1989 and what I theorize more broadly as counter-ideological movements. For the latter part I look at the broadly defined global right’s internationalism in Europe, Russia and the US, and their ideas of ‘illiberalism’ and world politics and how and where that aligns with the rhetoric of non-Western great powers. I am especially interested in the limits to discursive change and performativity, and materialist philosophies of language and its intersections with conceptual history and ideology. In relation to political theory, it deals with the concept of resistance and realist and radical politics - but from the right.

I was part of the Velux-funded research project ‘World of the Right’ at DIIS (led by Vibeke Schou Tjalve), and led a three-year policy research project at NUPI for the Norwegian Ministry of Defence on national and far right anti-liberal international politics in Europe, Russia and the US (2018-2022). At NUPI I am now part of the project ‘A Conceptual History of International Relations’ (CHOIR) funded by the Norwegian Research Council, though here starting my main work in 2024. Starting in 2024 I will also work on the Norwegian Research Council-funded project ANGER, on anger in global politics.

Please follow the links above to see academic publications, my column on international affairs [in Norwegian, some available through external translation in Danish and English], work in progress and more. I can be reached at mh@nupi.no.