Nicholas Barker: From War to Pseudo-Peace: Explaining Variation in Civil War Outcomes
The aim of the project is to identify and explain different paths from war to peace. The research question asks what explains variation in the outcomes of transitions from civil war to peace, and addresses the deeper problems of how wars end and what kind of peace follows. The research objective is to explain why some transitions from war to peace end in the resolution and transformation of the conflict and the establishment of a stable, enduring peace, whereas other transitions only superficially look like peace but in fact see the wartime conflict being channelled into new forms, and perpetuated even in the absence of large-scale violence. Neither a war nor quite a ‘real’ peace, such an outcome is rather a ‘pseudo-peace.’ Empirical variation in the types of peace that follow civil wars is not well conceptualised or theorised in existing literature which relies on a misleading dichotomy between war and peace, conflating war with violence and peace with its absence. This project aims to close the gap between the empirics of peace and the concepts and theories used to analyse peace, and to identify the factors and mechanisms that explain variation in outcomes of war to peace transitions.
Izabela Surwillo: Energy Security and Its Logics: The Case of Germany
If Copenhagen School securitisationtheory aimed to explain the processes through which certain politicized issuescome to the fore of the security agenda while grounding its theoreticalframework within a single ‘logic of war’, a closer look at the empirical casesof energy security dynamics complicates this view. Energy security proves to bea multidimensional and cross-sectoral phenomenon that involves multiple actorsand meanings and that comes to the fore of public policy and security agendathrough different logics. Building upon a modified three energy security logicstypology established by F. Ciuta (2010), the presentation will focus on theempirical findings of the German case – following recent fieldwork in Berlin. Bylooking at the debates and policy developments around pipeline politics (withthe emphasis on Ukrainian gas crisis of January 2006 and Nordstream project)and shift to renewable energy sources (with a focus on accelerated nuclear phase-outafter accident in Japanese Fukushima and national project of ‘Energiewende’) thepresentation will aim to: 1) map outdifferent constellations of actors that play a role in the developments ofenergy security debates and policies in the German context; 2) show how thisconstellations are not conducive for the ‘logic of war’ to appear in thatcontext in relation to different energy security issues; 3) illustrate how thehierarchization of energy security dimensions that prioritizesenvironmental/ecological aspect creates energy security discourse and policydevelopments that are cross-sectoral in character and that reflect - other than‘logic of war’ - energy security logics.
Chair: Erin Jenne