"Norway is a Peace Nation" : Discursive Preconditions for the Norwegian Peace Engagement Policy

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, Norway has been involved in peace promotion efforts in conflicts literally all over the world. This thesis explores how this activist peace promotion has been made possible, and how it has been naturalized as an integrated part of Norway’s foreign policy. It adopts a discourse analytic approach; through a broad empirical investigation of texts that concerns the peace engagement, it lays out how the engagement has been discursively constructed. The aim of this investigation is to uncover structures of meanings and understandings in the discourse, the resulting realities, and their effects on Norwegian policy.

The main conclusion is that after the revelation of Norway’s role in the Middle East peace process, a distinct peace engagement discourse came into being. The dominant representation of the peace engagement within this discourse had several important effects: It provided a very positive view of the Norwegian efforts; inscribed Norway with considerable agency and ability to contribute to peace; constructed the Norwegian approach as unique and efficient; and laid out a combination of self interest and altruism as the motivation for the policy. It also linked the activist peace engagement to the very identity of the Norwegian nation. It thus legitimized, naturalized, and defended the policy. We may therefore conclude that the discourse has been an important precondition for the expansion and continuation of the peace promotion efforts.

The thesis has also focused on the temporal development of the discourse. It has shown that besides the dominant representation, there also emerged two alternative representations of the peace engagement. The realist representation challenged the policy through constructing the efforts as taking attention away from Norwegian national interests, hindering proper foreign policy prioritization and a ‘realistic’ assessment of Norway’s role. The idealist representation was in principle positive to the engagement, but it constructed the Norwegian policy as being too concerned with furthering of self interests and criticized the foreign policy practice for being out of touch with the peace nation image. The analysis also shows that from 2003, the discourse was opened, and the dominant representation was challenged more fiercely than previously. Discursive struggle thus marks this period, and this resulted in the beginning denaturalization of the peace engagement as a prominent Norwegian foreign policy practice.