A New Twist on the “Copenhagen School”

17 April 2012, 1045 EDT

Authorities in Denmark have charged a university professor with assisting “foreign intelligence operatives”, believed to be Russian. Professor Timo Kivimäki, a conflict resolution expert, who teaches international politics at the University of Copenhagen, is accused of “providing or attempting to provide” information to four Russian government officials on several documented instances between 2005 and 2010. The indictment claims Kivimäki, who was born in Finland, intended to give the Russians “information relating to individuals and subjects connected with intelligence activities”.

Kivimäki says that he had no idea that the Russians he worked for were spies.

RIA reports that:

The Finn, who has been suspended from his job as professor of international politics at the University of Copenhagen, admitted to providing consultancy services to four Russian diplomats between 2005 and 2010 and said he had charged some 16,000 euros for the work, the Helsingin Sanomat daily reported.

Denmark’s security agency PET says the diplomats were spies.

Kivimäki might have passed information about his students, who the Russians could have then used to recruit agents in Denmark, PET’s former head told YLE earlier this week.

But Kivimäki said there was no evidence to back the allegations and insisted that he was “innocent.”

He also said he was “relieved” that the matter was going to court.
He faces up to six years in jail if convicted.

Sounds not at all obvious; much depends on the nature of the evidence held by the Danish authorities. Still, an unusual story for the international-relations field, at least in the developed world and in this day and age.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.