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.
Category Archives: Events and Presentations
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.
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. “
Talk on Piracy @ Bristol
On 19th of February I will give a talk in Bristol titled “The Rise and Fall of Somali Pirates: Theorizing Maritime Security Governance in Eastern Africa”. The talk is part of the Global Insecurities Centre Visiting Speaker Series and takes place in Room G2, 10 Priory Road – Wednesday 19th February, 1pm. In the talk I discuss the current state of Somali piracy and present a number of insights from my ongoing ESRC-project on counter-piracy. Specifically I am interested in the effects of Somali piracy and the prospects for maritime security governance in Eastern Africa in the mid-term.
Public Lecture on the Performativity of Piracy in Cardiff
On 12th February 2014, 5.00pm, Room 2.18 65-68 Park Place, Cardiff, I will give a lecture that draws on my recent research on the performativity of piracy. Here is the summary:
This talk is an invitation to an adventure with pirates and social theorists. Mobilizing a broad arsenal of cultural resources such as current movies about piracy from Captain Phillips to The Expendables, computer games, legal texts or pirate statistics, Christian Bueger asks in this talk what the agency of contemporary pirates is and why piracy is problematic. In the talk Somali pirates enter into a dialogue with social theorists, such as John Dewey, Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault. The result is an outline of different forms of contemporary agency and means of producing international problems. The following discussion provides an opportunity to debate the state of Somali piracy as much as different forms of performativity.
Call for Papers: Maritime Securityscapes, WISC Frankfurt 6-9.8.2014
The maritime remains an unchartered space of international relations. The discipline of International Relations largely treats the maritime as an empty space that requires to be bridged without paying attention to what happens at sea. While the discourse on naval power has addressed the maritime as space of military action, this panel series intends to broaden our understanding of the oceans by studying it as a securityscape. The panel series invites contributions (paper, panel, or roundtable proposals) that study maritime security and ocean governance broadly understood. In what way is the maritime increasingly securitized? What are the larger consequences of security action at sea? How can maritime security challenges including, but not limited to, piracy, smuggling, migration and non-proliferation be governed? What regimes, institutions, projects or technologies are required to deal with maritime security?
The panel series is organized jointly by the Counter-Piracy Governance project at Cardiff University, the Maritime Security program of Coventry University, and by the Universität der Bundeswehr, Munich. All paper proposals should be accompanied by a brief author biography (2-3 sentences) and an institutional address and be emailed to Dr Christian Bueger at buegercm@cf.ac.uk by no later than 25th of November. The World International Studies Committee Conference will take place between 6-9 August 2014 with decisions about submissions made by the conference organisers by February 2014. Further details can be found at: http://www.fb03.uni-frankfurt.de/46347686/wisc
In the Field: Conference on “Good order at sea off Eastern Africa: Beyond piracy”
From 18.9.-.20.9.2013, the 3rd International Conference on Strategic Theory in Dar es Salam, Tanzania will explore which lessons can be learned from Somali piracy and how maritime security governance in the region can be strengthened. The conference attended by academics, defense experts and maritime security practitioners is organized by the Faculty of Military Science, Stellenbosch University and the Royal Danish Defence College.
At the conference I will give a presentation titled “Learning from Piracy. Challenges of Maritime Security Governance”. More information is available here.
Roundtable on Special Issue: The Global Fight Against Piracy
Together with the journal Global Policy and the Greenwich Maritime Institute I organize a launch event to discuss the special section on Contemporary Maritime Piracy. The special section discusses the problem of piracy from different disciplinary perspectives and is the outcome of a workshop held in London in 2011. Confirmed panellists for the event include Professor Christopher Bellamy, (Director of the Greenwich Maritime Institute) Dr Christian Bueger (Cardiff University), Dr Douglas Guilfoyle (University College London), Dr Axel Klein (University of Kent), Dr Anja Shortland (Brunel University), as well as representatives from the maritime security sector. Further information on the event is available here.
Workshop on Piracy Studies
On 30th of September I am organizing a one day workshop investigating the contributions different disciplines can make to the global fight against piracy. The workshop is hosted by the Greenwich Maritime Institute, and 15 participants from different disciplines and countries contribute. Further information is available here.