Topics

The Centre's staff specialise on several topics related to democracy, democratization and political transitions.

CGSG Experts on Development & Democracy

Dr Andrea Teti works on the European Union's democracy-promotion strategies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, as well as on Egypt specifically. His work has been funded by the Carnegie Trust and by the AHRC. In addition, he is part of Professor Haerpfer's team on the Arab Transitions project, funded by the EU's FP7 programme.

Professor Christian Haerpfer leads a major international project funded by the European Union's Framework 7 programme on public opinion and transitions in the Arab World after the Uprisings which began in Tunisia in December 2010.

Dr. Patrick Bernhagen was investigator on a project on Civil Society and Multilevel Governance, Connecting Excellence on European Governance programme (CONNEX WP5-B1), led by Prof. William Maloney (University of Newcastle) and Prof. Jan Van Deth (University of Mannheim).

Dr Karen Salt (History) is an expert in Carribbean history and postcolonial politics, and is currently Director of the Centre for the Study of History, Culture and the Environment and teach and supervise students in Caribbean studies, African diaspora studies, and political ecology. Her work reaches across disciplinary boundaries at the University of Aberdeen by affiliating as an associate with the Centre for Sustainable International Development and working with an interdisciplinary team of scholars on the Management Team of the Principal's theme of environment and food security.

Centre affiliates work on various topics related the problems of economic growth economic, sustainable and inclusive development. Through Professor Hilary Homans, Director of the Centre for Sustainable International Development.

Aberdeen is the 'European capital of oil', and central to the politics of oil in the UK and the North Sea. CGSG includes experts in various aspects of energy law and politics.

CGSG Energy Experts:

Prof. John Paterson (Law) is an expert in systems theory, the regulation of risk, governance in the EU, corporate governance, and energy law. He has been involved in several international projects both in research and teaching. He has also provided specialist training in oil and gas law and in corporate governance for the corporate sector, expert advice in international arbitration, and consultancy to international organisations. With with Professor Julian Webb, he is series editor of the Law, Science and Society series published by Routledge-Cavendish.

Dr. Emre Usenmez (Law) is a lecturer in Oil & Gas Law specialising in vertical legal arrangements, regulations and their economic implications. In late 2010, he additionally began providing independent consultancy to a client base in Caspian, Middle Eastern and Turkic (CASMET) countries.

Prof. Paterson and Dr Usenmez are also foudning members of the University's Centre for Energy Law.

Dr Karen Salt is CGSG's foremost expert on food security. As part of an interdisciplinary team of scholars, she sits on the Management Team of the Principal's research theme of Environment and Food Security. Karen is also currently the Director of the Centre for the Study of History, Culture and the Environment, and teaches and supervises students in Caribbean studies, African diaspora studies, and political ecology.

The Centre for Global Security and Governance addresses the security challenges of the 21st century.

CGSG staff explore a range of topics, from terrorism to political radicalisation, cyber-security to nuclear weapons, to the laws and policies adopted to address the phenomenon of terrorism both in the United Kingdom and globally.

CGSG International Security, Radicalisation and Post-Conflict Transitions Experts:

Dr. Joanne McEvoy is Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, specialising in Ethnic Conflict and Peace Processes, the role of International Organisations in Post-Conflict Peace-Building, Power-Sharing in Deeply Divided Places, and Minority Rights in Europe. She was previously Post-Doctoral Research Fellow to work on a Leverhulme Trust project exploring the cooperation among international organisations (the EU, OSCE and Council of Europe) on minority rights in Europe, and Sawyer Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Penn Program in Ethnic Confict, University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Andrea Oelsner is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics & IR. Her work focuses on International Security, Latin America, Theories of International Peace, International Organizations, Mercosur and the Southern Cone of Latin America.

Professor M.E. Smith’s project on 'A European approach to conflict resolution? Institutional learning and the ESDP’ (see below), it engages with the question of how the European Union has managed to meet this challenge.

Dr. Andrea Teti (sustainable political and economic reform, EU Neighbourhood Policy)

James Wyllie is Reader in Strategic Studies in the Department of Politics & Internatioal Relations, and a recognised international expert on strategic doctrine, nuclear weapons, and European and Middle Eastern security. Between 1992 and 1997 he was a specialist correspondent (Middle East) for the monthly Jane’s Intelligence Review, during which he published over 40 articles on Middle East security issues. He makes frequent contributions to BBC and independent radio current affairs and news programmes. Since 1997 he has been a senior academic member of the RAF Higher Level Defence Studies Board, and between 2001 and 2004 he was a member of the UK Council of Military Education Committees. He is a regular speaker at the Royal College of Defence Studies, and for over twenty five years has delivered presentations to a variety of academic, military and political audiences in the UK, Europe and elsewhere. He is also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies.

Project:

A European approach to conflict resolution? Institutional learning and the ESDP

In this EU-funded project, Professor Smith examines the extent to which international organizations can learn and. He also looks at the factors that determine whether such organizations develop capacities for self-awareness and endogenous organizational change. His work investigates these questions in the context of the European Union (EU). Specifically, it examines the dramatic expansion in security missions led by the EU since 2003, a capacity that many observers doubted was even possible for the EU.

To explain this change in organizational behaviour, the project intends to develop a theory of organizational learning to analyze the EU’s instigation and implementation of more than 20 security operations in various regions under the auspices of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). In addition, with these missions the EU has shown a growing capacity to innovate in security affairs, using a unique civilian crisis management (CCM) capacity linked to security sector reform and other EU policy tools, including the CSDP, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).

These changes demand further examination in light of not only the growing ambitions of the itself but also in terms of the increasing demands for security assistance placed on a variety of IOs, such as the UN, NATO, and the OSCE. The initial phase of the project will focus on four key ESDP operations as detailed case studies – Macedonia, the Palestinian Authority, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Bosnia-Herzegovina – to explain this innovation.

Following the investigation of these representative cases, the later stages of the project will examine more recent EU security operations in hopes of developing a general theory of EU organizational learning in the area of foreign/security/defence policy. The project also hopes to generalize beyond this theory to other EU policy domains and, potentially, other IOs at the regional and global levels. In doing so the findings could have major implications for global governance.

Centre for Global Security and Governance plays integral role in major international event

The Centre for Global Security and Governance was crucially involved in a major external event in March which involved the European Parliament, the European Centre for International Affairs and two other academic institutions.

The Remembering In The Future: Policies and Practices of Remembrance to Prevent Mass Atrocities workshop took place in Brussels on 7^th March 2013 to coincide with the European Day of Remembrance for the Righteous. Held at the European Parliament, it was created by the European Parliament, the European Centre for International Affairs and MEPs Niccolò Rinaldi and Ivo Vajgl of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), with the support of our Centre for Global Security and Governance, the Budapest Centre for the International Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities and the University of Groningen. The aim of the workshop was to reflect on the strategies that the European Union is adopting in the field of remembrance and prevention of mass atrocities.

Over 30 delegates attended the one-day workshop, which featured a keynote speech from Adama Dieng, Special Advisor to the Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon of the United Nations on the Prevention of Genocide, and the presence of guest-of-honour Ong Thong Hoeung, a Cambodian intellectual who has written on the Cambodian genocide and his personal experiences in re-education centres upon his return to Cambodia from France in 1976. Concluding remarks were chaired by Dr Andrea Teti, Lecturer in International Relations and Director of the Centre for Global Security and Governance. Andrea is also Research Director for Societal Issues for the European Centre for International Affairs.

The Centre for Global Security and Governance explores the laws and policies adopted to address the phenomenon of terrorism both in the United Kingdom and globally.

CGSG Radicalisation,Political Violence, and Terrorism Experts:

• Dr. Archie Simpson (intelligence)
• Prof. Tom Weber
• Dr. Jim Wyllie (terrorism)

The University of Aberdeen is engaged in devising solutions to some of the gravest threats to infrastructure.

Through its Cloud Stewardship Economics Project (funded by the Technology Strategy Baord and jointly run with HP Labs, the University of Bath, Sapphire, Validsoft, Marmalade Box and the Institute of Information Security Professionals (IISP)), the university has been exploring how cloud computing - the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data - can best be utilised in securing business infracture.

The Trust Economics Project aims to device methodology that allows companies to make decisions about security investments based on costs and benefits for the company. Its goal is to develop a system capable of integrating both security and economic needs into the decision making process for delivering network and information security. The project is conducted jointly by the University of Aberdeen, Hewlett-Packard, Merrill-Lynch, Newcastle University, University College London, and the University of Bath.