In the first week of April the annual conference of the International Studies Association takes place in San Francisco, United States. At this years edition, scholars interested in global ocean politics will gather at the event. Over ten panels focus on the oceans – seven of which are part of the coordinated panel series #OceanicIR – and an informal reception – the Blue Drinks – will allow scholars to network. This continues the tradition established in 2023.
Together with Beth Mendenhall and Bec Strating I am organizing a mini-workshop in which we explore oceanic regions and I am presenting three papers linked to ongoing ocean politics research:
Blue Waves – How the Oceans made IR, with Jan Stockbruegger, debunks the myth that IR has been seablind and shows at what moments in time, the oceans were crucial for disciplinary developments.
Sneaky Foreign Policy. Small Island Agency in the new age of geopolitical competition, with Anders Wivel, develops a pragmatist-realist framework for the study of small island agency and investigates the case of Solomon Islands.
“The ship has reached the shore”: The amalgamation of communities of practice of the high seas, with Maren Hofius, provides an interpretation of the BBNJ negotiations from the perspective of community of practice theory.
Dr. Christian Bueger is a Professor specialised in maritime security, ocean governance and international relations theory. He works at Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. He is also an honorary professor of the University of Seychelles, a research fellow at the University of Stellenbosch and the Co-Director of the SafeSeas network.
Previously he was professor of international relations at Cardiff University and held visiting fellowships at the National University of Singapore (2015 & 2018), University College London (2015) and the University of Copenhagen (2013 & 2014). He was a Leverhulme Fellow at the Greenwich Maritime Institute, London (2011) and a research fellow at the Institute for Development and Peace, Duisburg, Germany (2010).
Professor Bueger is the author, co-author and editor of several books and articles on global governance, international practice theory, the politics of expertise, maritime security, and contemporary maritime crime. In his current grant funded projects he is studying regional responses to maritime crime in the Indo-Pacific and maritime security practices in Ghana. His research has been funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust Fund, and the Danish Development Agency (DANIDA). In 2013 he was recipient of an ESRC future research leader award.
He was the lead editor (Europe) of the European Journal of International Security (Cambridge UP) from 2014 to 2019, and the founding editor of piracy-studies.org – the research portal for maritime security (until 2019). Actively combining research with practical work he regularly act as consultant and speaker at conferences on international policy, maritime security and transport security. His research has featured in different media, including, among others, ITV, The Guardian, Africa Renewal, Veja or The New Internationalist.
He obtained his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy (2010). During his PhD studies, he was a visiting researcher at Cornell University and a research assistant to the European Report on Development 2009. Prior he graduated as a Diplom-Politologe from the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.
