Upcoming: Paper for Millennium conference at LSE

Photo credit = leelver

Next month, I'll be heading to London to present a paper at the Millennium: Journal of International Studies annual conference featuring this theme: "Out Of The Ivory Tower: Weaving the Theories and Practice of International Relations."

Here's the abstract I submitted for my paper, “Cooperative Security: Grand Strategy meets Critical Theory?”

Major powers are frequently urged to embrace grand strategies tied to particular international relations theories. In the case of United States foreign policy, scholars usually analyze a well-known set of strategic choices -- primacy, selective engagement, off-shore balancing, collective security, and cooperative security. These grand strategy choices have typically been favored by relatively mainstream realist, neorealist, liberal and neoliberal thinkers in IR. This paper explores the evolution of cooperative security from its clear ties to liberal and neoliberal international relations theory to its current understanding in world politics, which is surprisingly consistent with critical IR theory. Cooperative security no longer merely implies multilateralism, negotiation, and arms control. Rather, security is now more frequently described as indivisible and genuine cooperation requires shared decision-making and consensual practices. Even nongovernmental organizations are increasingly granted a voice in security discussions. While weapons and warfare remain very important security concerns, the cooperative security agenda today includes ideas associated with human security. This has meaning for the unit of analysis (both the actor providing security and the actor being secured) and for the breadth of the security agenda, which currently seems to include poverty, environmental calamity, global inequality, and hunger. In all, the evolving notion of cooperative security offers a potential promising pathway towards achieving the emancipatory ideals associated with critical IR theory.

The conference is the weekend of 22-23 October, but I'm going to be in the area Monday through Friday, 17-21 October, as well and am still looking for academic opportunities.

I'll be searching for pints of well-hopped bitters too.


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