Christian Bueger

Category Archives: Events and Presentations


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Into the Blue: Ideaslab on Maritime Security

ideaslab picOn June 26th/27th we are organzing an IdeaLab on Maritime Security at Cardiff University. The objective of the two days IdeaLab is to explore how the maritime as a security space can be grasped from different disciplinary and practical perspectives. The intent is to discuss work in progress, exchange perspectives and develop ideas of what theoretical and practical contributions a collective project of transdisciplinary Maritime Security Studies can make to understanding the maritime and to facilitate the governance of maritime life. The aim is to address general theoretical questions pertaining to the maritime space as a field of international activity, to consider the governance of the maritime and the securitization processes underlying it and to study the international strategies towards maritime capacity building in regions such as Eastern and Western Africa. The IdeaLab will hence focus on the following themes:

  • How can the maritime as a space of international practice be theorized?
  • From Seapower to Maritime Security: How does the securitization of the maritime unfold?
  • After UNCLOS: What are the challenges for governing the maritime?
  • What responses to maritime threats such as piracy are available?
  • What maritime security strategies are required for just and sustainable order at sea?
  • What are the roles of navies, coast guards and development agencies in capacity building and external assistance in maritime security and developing the blue economy?
  • What are the objects, methods and priorities of Maritime Security Studies?

The Ideaslab will feature contributions by Kimberly Peters (Aberystwyth), Jon Anderson (Cardiff), Douglas Guilfoyle (UCL), Peri Roberts (Cardiff), Peter Sutch (Cardiff), Anna Leander (CBS), Tobias Burger (FU Berlin), Heiko Borchert (Sandfire), Bryan Mabee (Queen Mary), Xu Ke (Xianmen), Lindsay Bremner (Westminster), Basil Germond (Lancaster), James Baker (Sandhurst), Ian Lynn (Royal Navy), Peter Roberts (RUSI), Thorsten Bargfrede (EEAS), Merceds Rosello (House of Oceans), and John Guy. A detailed report is available here. 


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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 →


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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”?


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In the Field: Contact Group Meeting in New York

CGPCS LogoFrom 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.


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Sociology of the Discipline of IR Workshop in Berlin

Brainstorming on the Sociology of IR @ FU 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.


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PhD Course on the Methodology of Interviewing in Politics

Home of the Department of Politics and International Relations

On April 9th, 14:00-18:00, I am teaching together with Ian Stafford a PhD training course on different methodologies of interviews. The course provides an advanced introduction to the methodology of interviewing in a political science context. Along with text analysis, interviewing is perhaps the most widespread qualitative method used in political science and international relations. Interviewing is however not only one of the most complicated and resource intensive methods, but also requires a high degree of methodological reflexivity. In this short course we discuss the core problems of planning, conducting and interpreting interviews as well as writing with interview data. The course is suitable for PhD Researchers in Political Science and International Relations in all stages of their research. In the course we discuss the following issues: Continue reading →


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Roundtable on Ocean Governance @ Cardiff University

1981837_542379992548900_4835037357932295673_nOn April 8th we will discuss questions of maritime security and ocean governance in a roundtable on “How can the oceans be governed?” at Cardiff University. The roundtable brings together a range of scholars from Cardiff University from different disciplines working on maritime issues. The roundtable is a further step in strengthening cross-disciplinary collaboration in the field of maritime research. Further information is available here. In my own presentation I will discuss how the new maritime security agenda changes our understanding of the oceans and how they will be governed in the light of the UK’s upcoming maritime security strategy. I argue that what is going on here is quite a substantial if not radical revaluation of the meaning of the sea and an entirely new attempt to govern the oceans. The security logic is creeping into one of the last domains that was untouched from it before. The sea is becoming securitized. If you are an optimist this will imply that more attention will be paid to what happens at sea and the oceans as a social and environmental space will be better off. If you are a pessimist that will imply new forms of control and new sources of disputes and violence, and potential of escalation.


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Conference on Future Challenges of Maritime Security

Maritime Security is a complex, interconnected challenge and addressing it requires close cooperation and coordination among different agencies, including the navies. On April 1st and 2nd I participated in a conference organized by the Naval Staff Strategy Unit and the Global Directions program of Merton College Oxford which aimed at discussing how to rise to these challenges. The conference drew together a range of participants from think tanks, universities, NGO’s, IO’s and navies to ask which strategies can be developed for navies in a maritime security environment. In the conference different regional theaters, including the Gulf, the Mediterranean, or the Gulf of Guinea were discussed as well as the broad range of maritime security issues, stretching from illegal migration and fisheries crime to piracy and climate change were debated. In my own contribution I drew on a recent article published in African Security to ask how a maritime strategy can be build around the task of the facilitation of maritime security communities. Building maritime security communities is a viable end for maritime security strategy. Two core challenges however arise, firstly, the problem of overlap and regime complexity, and, secondly, how to ensure ownership and and organic growth of security communities.


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International Studies Association Conference in Toronto

From March 25th to 29th I will be participating in the 55th Annual Conference of the International Studies Association. I am part of five panels. On Wednesday Felix Bethke and me present our new paper on the sociology of IR, which presents a bibliometric analysis of fashion trends in IR. Our Panel “WC13: IR Going Places: Empirical Investigations of a Dividing Discipline” has an exciting range of papers discussing quantitative approaches to the sociology of the discipline.  In “WD10: Critical Security Studies Methods Cafe”, we draw on the great experience from last year and discuss methodologies and methods for the study of security. Together with Vincent Pouliot I’ll be running the table on practice approaches. On Friday I participate in the  Roundtable “FB06: Assemblages and International Theory”. We discuss the outcomes of the new edited volume on Assemblages (Re-Assembling International Theory. Assemblage Thinking and International Relations, edited by Michele Acuto and Simon Curtis, Palgrave MacMillan). On Saturday I am part of two panels. In the Panel “SB07: “Be Kind, Rewind”: ANT, Pragmatic Sociology, and Innovative Frameworks for IR” I will present my recent work on Piracy and Problematization theory. Finally, I will be the discussant for the Panel “SC44: Knowledge in International Relations” which discusses different approaches to Knowledge and Epistemic Practices in IR.


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Performativity and Agency Workshop in Frankfurt

From 21-22. of February I am participating in a workshop titled “Performativity and Agency in International Politics”. The workshop organized by a team from the Goethe University brings together an interesting crowd of researchers working on performative theories, ranging from expressions of post-structuralism, international practice theories to STS and ANT work. I am presenting a new paper titled “Performing piracy: A note on the multiplicity of agency. Or, Pirates in an Adventure with Social Theorists”. Below is the abstract of the paper. Send me an email if you are interesting in reading the draft.

“This is a study of pirate agency. Starting from an understanding of agency as an effect of ‘agencements’, I offer a reconstruction of six of such formations. Relying on different experiences with Somali piracy, ranging from watching movies, playing computer games, participating as observer in various meetings, taking field notes, talking to interlocutors to reading academic literature, I show how different agencements produce different forms of agency. Throughout this reconstruction we meet different pirates, the pirate who refuse to be a pirate, moral bandits, enemies and villains, criminals, entrepreneurs, and pirates as ‘symptoms’. These are forms of agency that are effects of the relations and practices of distinct agencements. Various ‘actors’, ‘objects’ and ‘practices’ produce these relations: journalists, moviemaker, actors and directors, game developer and graphic artists, diplomats, military officers and international bureaucrats, as well as various scientists across the disciplinary spectrum, including economists, peace researcher, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, computer scientists, or political scientists are all in the business of producing pirate agency. They engage in a diverse set of rhetorical and material activities, such as calculating, modelling, drawing, negotiating, writing or history telling and engage with a broad host of objects, artefacts and inscriptions, such as movies, graphs, formulas, games, policy documents, or legal texts. The analysis presents a primer for the study of multiplicity of agency and its production. “