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The Diplomacy of Monsters
How do non-state actors participate in the games of international diplomacy? What strategies and tactics do actors, such as rebel groups, sub-state governments, governments in exile, diaspora, cities, or sports clubs employ when they act on the international stage? And in what way does this change or transform the practice of diplomacy? Those were some of the questions we discussed at a workshop from 29th to 30th of May which was hosted by the Wales Governance Centre and organized by the Department of Politics and International Relations. Continue reading
Technology and Piracy
What role does technology play in the fight against Somali piracy? What future prospects lie in different technologies to curb and prevent piracy in the long run? What new regulatory challenges arise? These are the question a workshop hosted by the Copenhagen Business School and organized by the Center for the Resolution of International Conflict and the Counter-Piracy Governance Project addresses. The one day workshop titled “Technological Solutions to the Piracy Problem? Challengers Ahead and Lessons Learned from the Horn of Africa” brings together different stakeholders, including different maritime security agencies, the shipping industry, maritime lawyers and maritime security scholars together to discuss the prospect and risks of a technologization of piracy.
Joint EISA Workshops in Izmir
The European International Studies Association (EISA) the successor of the Standing Group of International Relation (SGIR) of the ECPR has a new meeting format: joint workshops that take place in one location. This year’s is the second installment and takes place in Izmir, Turkey. At the event we have organized a workshop that discusses how approaches from sociology of science can shed new light on international relations problems and the discipline. The workshop is titled “Practices of Knowledge-Generation and Mobilization in International Relations” and jointly organized with Gerard van der Ree (Utrecht University) and Félix Grenier (University of Ottawa). I am attending from the 22nd of May and will be presenting two papers, one is the forthcoming paper on epistemic practices and the translation of piracy, the other one the paper co-authored with Felix Bethke, that investigates in how far IR is a discipline driven by “fashions” rather than rational progress. A detailed description of the workshop is available here.
CAST’s Translations of Security Conference in Copenhagen
From the 20th to the 21st of May I am attending the conference “Translations of Security: Changing social understandings of threats, risks and dangers” which marks the significant achievements of the Center for Advanced Security Theory (CAST) of the University of Copenhagen in the field of security studies. The three day event brings together a range of prominent security thinkers and especially foregrounds the exchange with other disciplines as well as practice. This is how the organizers sum up the conference theme
In contemporary security, an increasingly wide range of agencies, organizations and businesses play a central role in defining security policy and security political knowledge. This ‘diffusion’ of security knowledge and management changes the mere meaning of our concepts and practices of security – what is at stake in the processing of threats, risks, dangers and security.
Ole Waever discussing the evolution of security theory at CAST conference
The conference will take ‘new security studies’ beyond the established theoretical debates and schools and ask questions to translation of security across disciplines and in practice. In theoretical and empirical terms it will address how meetings between different fields of practice continually challenge, modify or maintain social understandings of security threats, risks and dangers.
At the conference we will thereby attempt to think security beyond securitizations and not focus on how different sectors or fields increasingly incorporate one specific security logic (securitization). Instead, this conference will draw attention to how different spheres, organizations, and cultures manage threats and what happens when objects or issues move among and across these.
New Perspectives on the Public
How can one theorize and understand “publics”, their formations and their effects on politics and the organization of societies? What is, if any, the difference of a crowd and a public? These are some of the questions that the interdisciplinary conference “New Perspectives on the Public at Westminster University addresses. More information is available here. I am attending the conference on May 15th and chair one panel. It is a great opportunity to reflect on my field work what kind of publics counter-piracy governance entails. Is the contact group a public? What does it imply if the group wants to focus more on “public diplomacy”?
In the Field: Contact Group Meeting in New York
From May 14th to 17th I am attending the counter-piracy week of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS). I primarily attend as a participant observer to further record and study the working practice of the CGPCS, its plenary and its working groups. During the week the reform of the group’s structure and the future of counter-piracy will be discussed. At a side event after the plenary meeting the initial results of the lessons learnt project of the CGPCS (see llp.piracy-studies.org) will be introduced and discussed. I will give a presentation in which I will present some initial findings with regards on the replicability of the CGPCS experience in other contexts.
Sociology of the Discipline of IR Workshop in Berlin
Brainstorming on the Sociology of IR @ FU Berlin
Over the next days I will be attending the workshop “Studying International Relations Beyond the West: Between Divides and Diversity” in Berlin. The workshop organized by Wiebke Wemheuer-Vogelaar and Ingo Peters from the Free University Berlin, brings together a range of authors interested in the sociology of the discipline and how IR practices differ across locales and sites. The workshop documents how thriving the sociology of the discipline has become, and as the workshop’s paper document how familiar and strange IR is at different places around the world. Contributions to the workshop discuss IR in places ranging from China to Africa and Russia, and discuss problems such as gatekeeping, publishing, or gender.
In the Field: Consultation with NATO’s Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Center
To discuss and finalize the process of a potential contribution of the Big Three for the Lessons Learned Project of the CGPCS I visited NATO’s Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Center (JALLC) in Lisbon, Portugal. The JALLC will most likely take the lead in compiling the lessons of the naval multilateral missions and the Shared Awareness and De-Confliction Mechanism (SHADE) by which the naval contributions in the Gulf of Aden and the wider Western Indian Ocean are coordinated.
US State Department Official visits to discuss Lessons Learned on Maritime Piracy
Yesterday, we had the pleasure to welcome Donna Hopkins in Cardiff. Mrs. Hopkins is the maritime security coordinator of the U.S. State Department and former Chairman of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS). She was visiting the university to discuss the first outcomes of our Lessons Learned Project. Cardiff University joined an international consortium of leading research institutions in November 2013 commissioned by the CGPCS to capture its experience, draw lessons of its work and ask how its success story can be replicated. The CGPCS is the main global governance vehicle driving the concerted efforts by the international community to curb piracy off the coast of Somalia. Somali piracy has threatened international trade and commerce and seafarers since 2007. The CGPCS was founded in 2008 following up on a Security Council resolution to address this challenge. If hundreds of ships were attacked between 2008 and 2012, and over one thousand seafarers held hostage for ransom, since 2012 no piracy attack was successful. The CGPCS is behind the tremendous success of the international community in containing piracy. The Lessons Learned project is capturing this success story and in a two year effort attempts to analyse it in order to draw lessons for other core challenges of global governance. Throughout the day we discussed some of these lessons with Mrs. Hopkins and the students of my MSc piracy seminar had the opportunity to meet and discuss their research projects with her.