A new blog post summarizing the results of last weeks workshop on piracy and technology is available at piracy-studies.org. The blog sketches out the dimensions that require consideration in the development and use of technology in the fight against piracy.
Political Methodologies in Practice.
At Cardiff we are organizing a Joint Doctoral Training Workshop of the Wales DTC, July 2-4, 2014. This three-day event is hosted by Cardiff University and brings together two distinct but complementary Wales DTC pathways: Conflict, Security and Justice (day one) and Language-Based Area Studies (day three). The second day is mainly devoted to core inter-disciplinary issues that are of relevant to postgraduate students in both pathways. This innovative workshop is open to all postgraduate research students in Wales and (at a nominal charge of £25) to all ESRC-funded students throughout the UK.
The workshop will include over 20 speakers from staff and students at Cardiff, Aberystwyth and Swansea Universities. Keynote lectures will be given by Professor Jef Huysmans (OpenUniversity) on ‘Methodological Acts’ and Professor Alistair Cole (Cardiff University) on ‘The Past, Present and Future of Language Based Area Studies’. Speakers and workshop leaders include David Boucher, David Bewley-Taylor, Rob Bideleux, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Jonathon Bradbury, Christian Bueger, Gerard Clarke, Gordon Cumming, Andrew Dowling, Mark Evans, Paul Furlong, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Nick Parsons, Roger Scully, Ian Stafford, Peter Sutch, Elisa Wynn-Hughes, and Matthew Wall. Continue reading
Discussing the upcoming NATO Wales Summit with ITV
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.