About Glenn Diesen

Biography

Glenn Diesen is Professor of Political Science at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where he teaches and researches in the Department of Business, History and Social Sciences. His work focuses on geoeconomics, Russian foreign policy and Eurasian integration, examined primarily through a neorealist lens and with close attention to how economic interdependence is converted into political power.

Born in 1979 and raised in Holmlia, Oslo, by a Norwegian father and a Dutch mother, he left Norway at twenty-one and spent the following two decades abroad. He studied commerce at the University of Wollongong and business at the University of Sydney, spent two years studying Russian language and literature at Saint Petersburg State University, and then turned to international relations at Macquarie University, where his master's thesis examined Dmitry Medvedev's proposal for a new European security architecture.

In 2014 he completed a joint doctorate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Macquarie University under the supervision of Wolfgang Wagner and Steve Wood. His dissertation, Inter-democratic Security Institutions and the Security Dilemma, examined why security institutions that exclude a major power tend to deepen rather than resolve the insecurity they were created to address. That question has shaped much of his later work on NATO, the European Union and Russia.

He lectured at Macquarie University from 2011 to 2017 and held an adjunct research fellowship at Western Sydney University before moving to Moscow as a visiting scholar, and subsequently professor, at the Higher School of Economics. He returned to Norway in 2020 to join the University of South-Eastern Norway and was promoted to full professor in 2021.

Scholarship and public engagement

Diesen is the author of nine monographs and co-editor, with Alexander Lukin, of two volumes on Eurasia's return to the centre of world politics. His books have been published by Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Rowman & Littlefield, Bloomsbury, Springer and Clarity Press, and have been translated into German and Spanish. His articles have appeared in journals including Asian Politics & Policy, the Journal of Contemporary European Studies and the Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

Since 2018 he has served as an associate editor of Russia in Global Affairs, Russia's leading English-language foreign policy journal. He sits on the advisory boards of the International Institute for Peace in Vienna, the Center for Nationalism Studies in Sarajevo and the journal Contemporary World Economy, and has participated in the Valdai Discussion Club.

Beyond the academy, he hosts one of the most widely followed independent podcasts on international affairs, with regular guests including John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Chas Freeman, Douglas Macgregor and Yanis Varoufakis. His Substack, read by more than 44,000 subscribers, publishes essays and interviews on the war in Ukraine, European security, and the emergence of a multipolar world order. He has also written for Norwegian outlets including Aftenposten and Ny Tid.

Diesen has consistently argued that the war in Ukraine is a tragedy that should never have happened, that NATO's eastward expansion without an inclusive security framework was a major contributing cause, and that a durable settlement requires diplomacy grounded in a realistic appraisal of the interests of all parties.