Last week two Danish ministers, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lene Espersen, and the Minister of Economic and Business Affairs, Brian Mikkelsen, questioned the security political impact of letting private companies operate vital and critical infrastructure businesses. Is it in the interest of the Danish state to let private companies (even foreign companies) run businesses such as airports, power plants and telephone lines, they ask? Read the rest of this entry »
At yesterday’s seminar at DIIS about Academia and Foreign Policy Making: Bridging the Gap three speakers – Alyson Bailes (University of Iceland), René Dinesen (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and Stephan De Spiegeleire (The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies) - gave their view on whether the much-mentioned “gap” between theory and policy is there, and whether it is widening or narrowing. Read the rest of this entry »
“One man’s terrorist, is another man’s freedom fighter.” This cliché which came up in the discussion at CASTs recent workshop on the boundaries of terrorism is one of the most fascinating and enduring misunderstandings in the public discourse on and (sometimes not so) academic study of terrorism. The misunderstanding seems to be that Read the rest of this entry »
Can words be terrorism, can they hurt and maybe even kill? This was one of the central questions raised for me by this weeks CAST research seminar “State peace and social peace – what’s the difference?” with law professor Henning Koch on the treatment of hate speech by European courts. In my understanding it appears that ‘hate speech’ is criminalized by courts not because is is directly hurting or violent but because its form of an indirect threat against the security of individuals and societies in the sense that hate speech is not Read the rest of this entry »
What is the role of popular culture in domesticating security threats? That is a question that is slowly gathering some interest among security studies with works by among others Maura Conway, James Der Derian, and Lene Hansen. One of the starkest, most chilling and I would argue most influential movies in securitizing the cold war nuclear threat to some of us growing up during the 1980s was WarGames (1983). This came back to me when I recently in long-term project to research a cultural history of terrorism based on movies came across Echelon Conspiracy (2009), which can be seen as an upgrade of WarGames for the post-9/11 era. Read the rest of this entry »
On Wednesday March 17, Professor of Constitutional Law, Henning Koch (HK), presents a paper entitled “State Peace – Social Peace. Concepts, consequences and catches” at the monthly CAST research seminar. Reading through the paper in preparation for the discussion tomorrow, it struck me that comments on law are always also comments on politics – albeit a frozen, sedimented type of politics. HK thought-provokingly leads us through the differences between the restrictions to the freedom of speech in the US (who has none) and Europe (who has quite a few) as they developed from the formulation of the fundamental rights in the 18th century. And he shows us – through the reading of judgments and dismissals of the European Court of Human Rights – how these restrictions are juggled in Europe today. But what seems to me to be lurking underneath the legal argument is a comment never made explicit in the paper: A comment on politics. A comment on whether restrictions to the freedom of speech are necessary or superfluous. Whether they are a remnant of history never corrected over the course of time or a prerequisite for social peace in Europe. I for one look forward to hearing Henning’s response to this issue of frozen politics. But maybe that’s just because I am a political scientist.
For more on the research seminar see: http://cast.ku.dk/events/seminars/dokument2/
Trine Villumsen, CAST
Why did the field of security studies take different paths in Europe and the USA? On Wednesday March 10, 3-5pm CAST:s director Prof. Ole Wæver will give a talk “The self-understanding of security researchers: Why the theories of the field went their own separate ways in the USA and Europe” on the development of security studies during the last 15 years and the reasons for the development of two distinct and separate subcultures. The talk argues that a main difference between the two cultures are their different views about the role of the social scientist in society.
The talk is the second in a series of talks in 2010 on “The role of the social scientists in society” arranged by Forum for the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. This is a newly founded forum that aims to promote the interdisciplinary discussion of the philosophy of the social sciences. Toward this end, its main goal is to organize 3-4 talks each term on some topic within the philosophy of the social sciences. The talks will take place at the Faculty of the Social Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. They will typically be conducted in Danish.
The definition of security is ever widening outside as well as inside academia. Now security threats are also what is inside our heads. In Saudia Arabia in May 2009 the first conference on intellectual security or ‘thought security‘ as an appearingly admiring American TV- producer attending the conference put it.
The First National Intellectual Security Conference: Concepts and Challenges was organized by the Prince Nayef Chair for Intellectual Security Studies at King Saud University in Riyadh. This chair was launched May18 2009 and is the host of the first academic program in Intellectual Security Studies, one of the University’s most notable program according to its wikipedia webiste. According to the official description, the logo “represents a man considering many options, and the logo adopts the right option as halfway between two extremes as represented by the square in the centre, thus the intellectual security is achieved by avoiding the two extremes.“ This is very much a state-sponsored research as it Read the rest of this entry »
CAST:s workshop on “The limits on terrorism” demonstrated that terrorism is an “essentially disputed concept” difficult to define and to reach consensus about. But something else that came up is that it is important to continue to keep on trying and discuss its contents, especially so as the term is all the time used uncritically outside (and inside) acamdemia to doing political and legal work. And there has also been some attempts within academia to try to come up with various ‘consensus definitions’, some which I here use to come up with my preferred definition of terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »
Granted, Jon Stewart and his team on The Daily Show has bagged a good measure of on-the-job-training in political analysis. Nevertheless, this clip on Obama and his Afghanistan politics comes across as a rather sophisticated combination of theoretical models:
- first part implies that the structural conditions of the presidency cancel out any individual differences and makes Obama equal Bush.
- last part suggests that this might alienate his old constituency without winning him a new one.
Conclusion: Palin in 2012.
Ulrik Pram Gad, Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.
