Indra Øverland

Who is Indra Øverland?

Indra Overland is a Norwegian specialist on the former Soviet Union. He did his Ph.D. at the Scott Polar Research Institute of the University of Cambridge, UK, and has later published on a broad range of issues related to energy politics, aid and indigenous peoples in the post-Soviet area. The Ph.D. was awarded the Toby Jackman Prize at the University of Cambridge.

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 and Assistant Professor at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway.

Some of his main works include Caspian Energy Politics: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation, The Caspian Sea Region towards 2025.

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.