Security in Transition: an Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Security Gap
In December 2010, Mary Kaldor, leading a team of junior and senior researchers, was awarded a large grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a five-year research programme entitled Security in Transition: An Interdisciplinary Investigation into the Security Gap.
The twentieth century model of security, based on the rule of law and policing within nation-states and conventional military forces externally, is no longer applicable to twenty-first century global security risks. The security gap refers to the fact that millions of people live in situations of intolerable insecurity as a consequence of armed conflict, organised crime, terrorism, financial crisis, poverty and inequality, environmental degradation, vulnerability to natural disasters to name but some of these risks, and yet current public security provision is not designed to address these sources of insecurity and, indeed, as recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown, sometimes makes things worse.
'Security in transition' is about investigating and identifying the nature of the security gap and tracking the ways in which public and private agents are adapting. It has five components: narratives; indicators; rules; tools; and geographies. The programme is ground-breaking in that it puts forward a new analytical frame for understanding contemporary security challenges and will use an innovative interdisciplinary methodology. It also has considerable public significance because security is so closely bound up with legitimacy and and because its findings, including a database of indicators of insecurity, are expected to have great relevance for policy-makers.
Crowdsourcing Conflict and Peace 'events' in the Syrian Conflict
This project aims to create a database on the conflict in Syria, capturing both instances of violence and of peace-making. This database will include ‘events’. An ‘event’ is defined as an instance of (1) the use of violence; (2) a local negotiation or cease-fire; (3) the formation or disbandment of armed groups. These are gathered through crowdsourcing. This involves creating a web-platform where people in Syria with a mobile phone (text-messaging) or internet connection can report these events, as they see them happening. The project has made contact with a network of local civil society organisations, many of which are involved in negotiating cease fires, and will encourage members of these networks to participate in the crowd-sourcing effort. The result is a database that records instances of the use of violence and attempts at peace-making, and that details the date and location at which these happened, and what parties were involved.
The database can be used to analyse patterns (e.g. why certain areas are more violent than others, or what contributes to the success of a local peace agreement) and it is intrinsically important to record instances of human suffering as a matter of historical record.
Whole-of-Society Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding
A new research project, funded by the European Commission’s Horizons 2020 programme, entitled “Whole-of-society Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding” (WOSCAP) will be hosted at the CSHS Unit from June 2015. The 30 month project is led by the Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC) in the Netherlands and comprises 10 partners across the European Union and including universities and think tanks in Ukraine, Georgia, Yemen and Mali, where the project will carry out in-depth case studies. The research is aimed at improving EU capabilities in conflict prevention and peacebuilding by addressing issues of sustainability and local participation in the external interventions. It will examine in particular how the EU can resolve some of the dilemmas and paradoxes of external interventions, propose new norms and practices and set out an agenda for future research.
The project draws on previous work done by the CSHS unit on local ownership , human security research methodologies and ICT and drone technology. LSE researchers will lead an assessment of EU interventions in the area of rule of law and governance, and will also head research on how external interventions can make better use of both military and civilian technologies. CSHS will also direct efforts within the project to develop communities of practice, involving civil society as well as policy-makers and security practitioners in proposing and implementing changes to EU policy.