Indra Nobl Øverland is a Norwegian specialist on the former Soviet Union.
Education
He did his Doctor of Philosophy at the Scott Polar Research Institute of the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and has later published on a broad range of issues related to energy politics, aid and indigenous peoples in the post-Soviet area. The Doctor of Philosophy was awarded the Toby Jackman Prize at the University of Cambridge.
Career
He has worked for the Norwegian Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Nordic Research Board. Currently he is Acting Head of the Department of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) and Assistant Professor at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway. Some of his main works include Caspian Energy Politics: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan (Routledge, 2010), Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation (Ashgate, 2009), The Caspian Sea Region towards 2025 (Eburon, 2010).
He is best known for his contribution of the concept "slippery slopes" to the theorisation of the resource curse.
"Slippery slopes" refers to the difficult decision that authoritarian and semi-authoritarian rulers make between crackling down on opposition or allowing it to simmer, and the potential role of natural resource rents in making this decision. Overland has appeared regularly as a commentator in the main Norwegian media, as well as in international media.
Indra Øverland represents NUPI in the RussCasp project, a large-scale, five-year joint research project of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Economy Poyry on petroleum issues in Russia and the Caspian region. RussCasp is financed by the Norwegian Research Council.