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I am postdoctoral researcher at the Department of political science at the University of Oslo, Norway. During 2020-21 I am also a visiting postdoc at the Department of Politics, University of Manchester. I work in the field of normative political theory, and my research interests lie mainly in global issues of distributive and remedial justice, with a particular focus on military and non-military interventions to protect human rights.

In May 2017 I received my PhD for the dissertation Who Should Intervene? Distributing the duties of humanitarian intervention from the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. My dissertation answers questions such as: What are the most central concerns when allocating the duties of intervention? Who should commit their military forces to carry out the intervention? How should the economic and material costs of intervention be distributed? Which reforms should be implemented to ensure that the duty to intervene can be effectively discharged and the burdens shared fairly?

I am currently working on a project called ‘Rights-protecting interventionism beyond the use of military force’, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (grant number 288654). In this project I investigate how states should respond to human rights violations in other states more generally. Existing research has established the permissibility of military responses to genocide and crimes against humanity, but has mostly ignored how states should respond other rights violations, using means short of military force. To fill this gap, in this three-year project I will employ normative analysis to examine a novel view called Rights-Protecting Interventionism (RPI). RPI follows from a commitment to global justice and human rights, and says that external intervention is, in principle, morally permitted whenever human rights are violated by a state. RPI recognizes that there are different ways of intervening, and maintains that interventions are permissible so long as they are not disproportionately coercive. The project proceeds in two stages, evenly split in terms of time: The first step identifies the most plausible version of RPI. The second step focuses on normative guidance, investigating factors that speak against RPI, such as practical implementation, tolerance and self-determination, and epistemic uncertainty and humility, before considering if and how RPI should be applied. The project will offer normative conclusions about what states seeking to adopt an ethical foreign policy may and must do in order to protect human rights in other states, providing new knowledge of the nature and limits of external enforcement of rights in international politics.

You can read more about my research and publications by clicking here.

Email: f.d.hjorthen@stv.uio.no / fredrik.hjorthen@manchester.ac.uk