Asle Toje

Asle Toje (born February 16, 1974) is the Deputy Leader of the Norwegian Nobel Committee (2018-2023). He is a foreign policy scholar and was Research Director at the Norwegian Nobel Institute from 2009 until he joined the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Toje is a regular contributor to the Norwegian foreign policy debate, including as a regular columnist in the Dagens Næringsliv, Minerva. In the Norwegian foreign policy discourse he has been a proponent of democracy, market economy, the rule of law, and conservatism. Toje has in recent years spent most of his time on issues at the intersection of nuclear disarmament, peace and geopolitics.

Academic career
Asle Toje was educated at universities in Oslo and Tromsø before going on to study international relations (Dr. Phil.) at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 2006. According to his own statement, Toje belongs to the neoclassical realism school in. As an academic, Toje is best known for having further developed the "transatlantic bargain" thesis, in which he argues that the US presence through NATO and European integration in the form of the EU constitutes a so-called "integrated complex". In 2010, he published the book The European Union as a Small Power: After the Post-Cold War.