In March and April 2015, the SOURCE project team at KCL RCIR, led by Didier Bigo and Mederic Martin Mazé is convening a series of seminars to investigate the relations between societal security, international development and social policies from an international and European perspective. In these short pieces, Mederic briefly reports the debates and research expounded in the three seminars. Please note the third seminar in the series will be held on Thursday 2nd of april, all are welcome.
I
THE CHANGING POLITICS OF INEQUALITY: CONTEMPORARY CONTESTATIONS IN THE FIELD OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIETAL SECURITY
This seminar was held on Thursday 5 March 12-1pm, Pyramid Room, 4th Floor King’s Building, Strand Campus.
On Thursday 5 March 2015, the KCL-SOURCE team and the KCL Research Centre in International Relations hosted a talk by Joao Nogueira on inequality, the politics of development and societal security. Joao P. Nogueira is Associate Professor of International Relations at the International Relations Institute at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary University of London. He is co-Editor in Chief of the ISA Journal International Political Sociology. His fields of research are international relations theory and inequality in world politics.
In his talk, professor Nogueira recalled that, for the past three decades, inequality has been a secondary issue in the agenda of international development. It is only very recently that this concept has become a feature of reformist approaches challenging economic orthodoxies. But inequality is different from the claim of social change and welfare demands of the seventies as well as from an agenda of social security. Now inequality is supposed to bolster societal resilience in the context of contemporary crisis of neoliberalism. The presentation discussed some examples of this conceptual shift and their impact on the politics of development. In the discussion, Prof. Nogueira and the audience engaged with how inequality is framed by International institutions (world bank, IMF) and how this framing impact the current European debate on inequality and societal security and resilience.
II
MAPPING INEQUALITY- FINANCE- DEVELOPMENT : METHODOLOGY CONCERNING MULTI-CORRESPONDANCE-ANALYSIS- LESSONS FOR ANALYSING SOCIETAL SECURITY?
This seminar was held on Wednesday 11 March, 5-6 pm, 2/19 Waterloo Bridge Wing, Franklin Wilkins Building, Waterloo campus.
On Wednesday, the KCL SOURCE team invited Prof. Frédéric Lebaron in coordination with the ERSC Doctoral Training Centre of King’s College London. Frédéric Lebaron was appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines in September 2013, and at Sciences-Po Saint-Germain-en-Layes in 2014. His work deals with the professionals of economics, economic public policies and socio-economic dynamics in Europe and beyond. Frédéric Lebaron is also recognised as one of the best specialist of geometric data analysis.
Prof. Lebaron delivered a one-day training session on mapping methods and especially on multi-correspondence analysis and their relations with a Bourdieusian approach. He explained both methods and how he has used them in his own research on the European Central Bank. To show that the methods can be applied to very different terrains, Médéric Martin Mazé additionally presented his own PHD research. He applied multiple correspondence analysis to a database of more than 230 international projects concerning border management in Central Asia, including projects funded and implemented by the European Commission. Both research projects shed light on how societal security is framed in Europe and beyond, in relation to border management on the one hand, and monetary policies on the other.
III
MAPPING THE FIELD OF EUROCRACY AND MAPPING THE FIELD OF THE PROFESSIONAL OF SECURITY : CONVERGING APPROACHES FOR RESEARCH ON SOCIETAL SECURITY?
This is an upcoming event to be held on Thursday 2 April, 11 am – 1 pm, War Studies Meeting Room, 6th Floor, King’s Building, Strand Campus London.
The KCL Research Centre in International Relations and the SOURCE team at KCL are delighted to host a talk by Didier Georgakakis on the structure of the field of Eurocracy.
The field of Eurocracy corresponds to the transnational social space where actors struggle to define the tools, policies, instruments and values of the European Union, as well as the properties that one must possess to legitimately get involved in these struggles. This concept therefore provides a fruitful venue to map the institutions and professions of societal security in Europe. The presentation will bring the field of Eurocracy to bear on the European actors of security. The discussion will centre around the possible convergence in terms of methods and contents with the approach of the transnational field of the guilds of security management developed by Didier Bigo.
Didier Georgakakis is a full professor of political science a the University of Paris I Pantheon – Sorbonne and a visiting professor at the College of Europe in Bruges. He was previously a professor at the Institut of Political Studies of Strasbourg, where he held a Jean Monnet Chair in Political Sociology of EU institutions. His current research focuses on the European civil service and the reconfiguration of the EU’s institutional and administrative fields since 1995.
RCIR: Research Centre in International Relations 