From the 2nd to the 6th of September I will be attending the annual conference of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco. I will be a participant on two panels. I will be discussing fieldwork methods in the frame of “The Methods Cafe” (Thu, September 3, 12:15 to 1:45pm, Nikko, Ballroom II) as well as presenting on a roundtable “Author Meets Critics: “A Theory of Contestation” by Antje Wiener” (Sun, September 6, 8:00 to 9:45am, Parc 55, Fillmore).
Category Archives: Events and Presentations
Pirates @ PublicUni, Cardiff, Chapter
As part of the 6th PublicUni event, 6th of August, at the Chapter Arts Centre Cardiff, I will discuss my research on pirates. The idea of PublicUni is to present ongoing research short and crisp in an accessible manner (more info here). In my talk I address the question ‘Whatever happened to the Somalia pirates?’ Since Captain Phillips hit the movie theatres two years ago, it has become remarkably quiet about the pirates of Somalia. I hence will explains the rise and fall of piracy. For the other speakers at the event see the program here. A very short summary of the event is available here.
Science Diplomacy Writeshop @ Oxford
The concept of “science diplomacy” has become an increasingly fashionable way of discussing both the role of science and technology within global governance as well as how science itself constitutes a field of diplomacy. At a one and a half day workshop at Exeter College, from 12.-13.7., we are meeting to discuss the concept and how it can be used as a starting point for an innovative agenda. The goal is to identify mechanisms as well as cases representative of the science/diplomacy interaction. The event is part of the new science diplomacy project of the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) of the University College London.
Summary of 18th CGPCS Plenary
Last week I attended the plenary of the CGPCS at the UN headquarters. I published summaries of the main discussions of the working group meetings and the plenary on the website of the CGPCS. Find them published here. For the first time the plenary has also been recorded and is available on UN web tv (part 1, part 2). During the plenary I gave an update on the Lessons Learned Project and also presented our forthcoming article on the future of the maritime security architecture in the Western Indian Ocean.
BISA conference in London
From the 17th to the 19th I attended the 40th conference of the British International Studies Association. With 700 participants it was the largest BISA conference so far. And with a location right next to Tower Bridge perhaps the one with the nicest view from the conference facilities. At the conference I presented at two roundtables which focused on the state of Security Studies and the rationale of the new European Journal of International Security (find a summary of the roundtables at the EJIS website here). In addition I also participated in a roundtable on Methods and Critique. Overall it was good to see a thriving British IR community in action. The discussion on methods and methodology continues to be one of the major themes the discipline is currently discussing, which is a move into the direction. What kind of social science IR and its many subcommunities wants to be is after all crucial a question of how it wants to combine theory and empirics and what types of empirical experiences enrich the formulation of theory and concepts.
The Anthropology of Internationalized Politics
That Anthropology and International Relations (IR) share a range of common interests is increasingly becoming more obvious. In consequence there is a thriving debate about concepts, methods and empirical observations between both disciplines. A growing number of researchers adopts the ethnographic spectrum of methods to study internationalized politics, ranging from bureucracies such as the police, to development work or international organizations and global governance. On June 10-12th I attended a workshop hosted by the University of Bremen and held at the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst in which a range of forthcoming studies at the intersection of anthropology and IR were discussed. The organizers phrased the rationale for the workshop well, when they argued that “The promise of an anthropology of internationalized politics then is that the enlarged empirical basis and an enlarged theoretical language would allow for new theoretical growth. It would be based on an enlarged empirical experience (Erfahrung) and not just derived from conceptual discussion alone or from theoretical deduction that are then checked against a mass of numerical data. Such a research approach would start out with an enlarged understanding of what empirical data is, and it would try to interpret it with an enlarged theoretical vocabulary.”
The Indian Ocean – One Region or many?
The politics of maritime space is only rarely in the focus of international fora. Conferences devoted to the Indian Ocean region are a rare event, especially in Europe. On June the 9th the German ministry of Foreign Affairs in collaboration with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Robert Bosch Stiftung, organized a one day conference on the region. The conference was titled “The Indian Ocean: A Maritime Region on the Rise.” The background of the conference was that Germany’s foreign policy currently is in a phase of renewal. After decades of searching for Germany’s place in the world, the foreign office now wants to think foreign policy differently and aims to set new impulses, identify new themes and new spaces to strengthen international cooperation. Part of this innovation agenda, is Germany’s new focus on maritime security, as evidenced in the G7 declaration from earlier this year. Continue reading
Concepts at Work
Concepts are one of the main material of international politics, yet, often is the task to study them left to historians and political theorists. In order to correct that, the Workshop “Concepts at Work” (Jerusalem, 31.5-1.6.) intends to broaden the picture. Organized by Piki Ish Shalom from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem a rich set of studies on concepts such as self-determination, international community risk, sovereignty, or homeland will be discussed. At the workshop I will present a first sketch on the life of the concept of blue economy and how it has shifted meaning over the past 5 years. The workshop program is available here.
ReCAAP ISC Piracy and Sea Robbery Conference 2015
On Thursday, 22nd of April I will be attending the annual ReCAAP ISC piracy conference. The conference is held as part of the Singapore Maritime Week and is this year titled “Separating Fact from Fiction”. It is organized together with BIMCO, INTERTANKO, and S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS). The event features two scenario-based panel discussions using case studies based on real incidents occurred in Asia. Speakers representing the shipping industry, IMO, enforcement agencies and relevant governmental agencies are invited to speak about their roles, expectations and challenges in each scenario. This will be an exciting opportunity to see the ReCAAP ISC in action as they work on disseminating best practices and awarness raising.
Experimental Governance in Practice. Talk @ NUS Polsci
On April, 16th, I will give a talk at the Department of Political Science of NUS. In the talk titled “Experimental Governance in Practice. The Case of Counter-Piracy off the Coast of Somalia” I will present some of the insights that can be gained from counter-piracy for global (security) governance in broader term. The abstract is below:
“International actors increasingly turn to global governance arrangements that are informal and experimental in character. The majority of research so far tends to describe institutional settings rather than analyse what actually happens in such arrangements. This presentation introduces the results from a detailed case study on the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia. The study draws on premises from the practice turn in International Relations Theory and an ethnomethodological tool kit. It reveals what experimenting means in practice and outlines what the broader consequences of the turn of policymakers towards experiments will be.”
The seminar takes places at Thursday, 16th of April 2015, 3.30pm to 5.00pm, Block AS1-04-01, PS Staff Meeting Room, Department of Political Science, NUS.