Iver B. Neumann

Iver Brynild Neumann (born 10 October 1959) is a Norwegian political scientist and social anthropologist. He is the current Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (since 2012). He is also research director at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Adjunct Professor in International Relations at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

The son of Hjob Henrich Neumann (1914-1983), professor in Geology at the University of Oslo and Rigmor Neumann née Bakke (1925-2005), dentist, Neumann was born into a family of Norwegian civil servants and grew up in a Western suburb of Oslo. His early schooling was in the natural sciences (examen artium, Persbraaten Gymnas, Oslo, 1978).

Following two years of studying Russian at the Norwegian Army Language School (a NATO spin-off of the U. S. Defense Language Institute), he went in for the humanities. After studies in Russian, English, Social Anthropology and Political Science at the University of Oslo, he abandoned an M. Phil. Programme in English language and literature to finish an M.Phil. in Political Science (1987). He then went up to Oxford to study International Relations, in his own account in order to join the English School of International Relations theory, earning an M. Phil, in 1989 and a D. Phil. in 1992.

In 1988, while still a student, Neumann took up a job at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and began to publish extensively. Neumann’s doctoral work was on the role played by Europe in Russia’s identity formation and foreign policy, and resulted in two books, Russia and the Idea of Europe (1996) and Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (1999). While the former is basically an empirical work detailing Russian debates on Europe from the Napoleonic Wars to Perestroyka, the latter is a work of post-structuralism, arguing that Europe is constituted, among other things, by its exclusion of others, first and foremost Ottomans and Russians. Neumann has maintained a presence in Russian Studies, serving as Professor of Russian Studies at Oslo University 2005-2008

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