When I made the decision to study political science back in the early 2010s I had no clear idea what political science was or where I was headed studying it. What I did have, like many others of my generation, was a general sense of system failure following the 2008 financial crisis and the Euro crisis. It seemed clear that the international regimes we relied on were more fragile than we had grown up believing. It also seemed clear that the generation above us had somehow failed to inspect them with a sufficient amount of scrutiny.

I also had the advantage of growing up in the Norwegian countryside, in a family that had taken an active position against EU membership in the 1990s and somehow refused to let go of this battle decades after the referendum was won and people could have been reasonably expected to move on with their lives. So while the financial crisis came as a surprise, observing the EU with some degree of scepticism was part of my upbringing more or less since I left the cradle.

Beyond the (by then) obvious challenges of the Eurozone, I found the challenge of solidarity between member states in asylum policy to be a particularly interesting problem. This was perhaps motivated in part by the fact that I grew up with a campsite turned asylum reception camp as one of our closest neighbours, taking the school bus every morning with kids from all kinds of places who had for reasons beyond my understanding at the time been made to live even further away from civilization than myself.¹ The challenges of the Common European Asylum Policy became the focal point of my bachelor and Master's studies at the University of Oslo.

Meanwhile, some public intellectuals in Norway decided that the power of international courts had to be scrutinized, establishing the PluriCourts Centre for the Study of the Legitimate Roles of the Judiciary in the Global Order. This affected me when PluriCourts hired me as a research assistant, and I found myself working for two years collecting data on the Court of Justice of the European Union and participating to the best of my ability in what was by all standards an excellent international research community.

Throughout all this I came to believe that alongside social democracy, the promise of a rule-based human rights oriented international order is pretty much the only worthwhile invention to come out of the post-war era. While this is not a particularly profound insight, the constant attacks on human rights and institutions like the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice these days makes it nevertheless carry some relevance.

I found the supranational rule of law in the European Union to be a good match for a research agenda rooted in this world view, asking not only how we can establish a strong international legal order but how we can ensure its efficiency as well as legitimacy. This lead me to conduct my doctoral research at the European University Institute in Florence for four years, and eventually lead me to the University of Copenhagen where I am doing a three-year postdoc in political science studying the application of EU law.

My work tends to take an interdisciplinary character. While I consider myself entirely a political scientist, the first years of my doctoral work was done at the department of law at the EUI, before I changed to the department of political science in the final year and defended there. When I'm not reading or writing, a lot of my time is spent doing data work in R. In the authumn of 2024 I was lucky enough to serve as coordinator for an excellent cohort of Master's students in European politics at the University of Copenhagen, which I enjoyed quite a lot. Other than this experience, my focus these days is entirely on research.

If you're looking for a CV, ORCID keeps track of my career to a satisfiable level of detail. Some technical information about this website is available here.

  1. I did, of course, have a vague idea that these people came from areas of conflict and needed a safe place to stay. What I only understood later was the Norwegian policy of housing asylum seekers in absurdly remote places in an effort to compensate for the majority population's tendency to abandon rural areas.↵