01/03/2023
Meet another member of the MINS team: Professor II Kristian Åtland. He is a political scientist, Russia and Ukraine specialist and teacher of international relations theory at the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSV). Kristian has been with Nord University as a part-time faculty employee since January 2020. His primary employer is the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), where he has worked as a Senior Research Fellow for more than two decades.
Kristian holds a PhD in Political Science from UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. He has also studied Russian, History and East European Area Studies at the University of Oslo. In his younger years, he studied Russian language and literature at the Pushkin Institute and Moscow State University, back when the country’s name was “the Soviet Union”. More recently, in 2007–2008 and 2019–2020, he was a Fulbright Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES), University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to joining FFI in 2002, he spent eight years in the Norwegian Foreign Service. Having gone through the Foreign Ministry’s trainee program (“aspirantkurset”), he served as a desk officer in Ministry’s Russia and CIS division, as Second Secretary at the Norwegian Embassy in Kyiv and later as Consul at the Norwegian Consulate General in San Francisco.
During his academic career, Kristian has written numerous research reports, articles, and book chapters on topics related to the Arctic, Russia and other parts of the post-Soviet space. Many of his recent publications have dealt with military developments in Northwest Russia as well as interstate relations and security challenges in the Barents Sea and the circumpolar Arctic. He has also written extensively on Russia-Ukraine relations and he is a frequently used media commentator.
This semester, he is course coordinator for SAM5024/5025, “Great Powers and the New World Order”. He is also in charge of an externally funded research project called “Russian signaling in the High North after the invasion of Ukraine”. The latter is a joint Nord/FFI/Barents Observer undertaking.
The summer is his favorite season. In his spare time he likes to go bike riding, either in California, on the backroads south of Oslo, or in the Venabygdsfjellet mountains, where he owns a cabin. Sometimes, he records GoPro videos during his bike rides and posts them on YouTube. He is also an amateur car mechanic, a decent accordionist and an aspiring home cook and baker 🔧 🎶 👨🍳
If you want to know more about Kristian, you may check out the following pages:
- Nord University: https://www.nord.no/no/ansatte/Sider/NORD06044679.aspx
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=jD0QUQwAAAAJ&hl=no
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/AtlandKristian
- YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com//videos
If you are lucky, you will run into him on campus in Bodø 👨🏫
