Workshop, April 18-19, 2008

April 18-19, 2008
Suffolk University, 8 Ashburton Place, Boston, MA
Room: Sawyer 427

The workshop will examine the reasons for and implications of changes in national security cultures, and explore the extent and scope for international security governance in light of those changes.  It will deal with the barriers and opportunities posed by national security cultures to regional and global security governance with respect to the national understanding of the external environment, the preferred instruments of statecraft (coercive versus persuasive), the pattern of interaction (unilateral, bilateral or multilateral), and institutional choice.  A further study aspect relates to the joint production of technology in security tasks and to variations in their level of ‘publicness’ in the (a)symmetry of threats (i.e., the costs associated with any failure to provide security), and in defence costs (i.e., the marginal costs of providing security).

The aim of the workshop is thus to provide a stock-taking of the common framework and to explore how the stipulated guidelines and empirical indicators apply to the ten countries plus the EU.  Thus, individual papers/presentation to the workshop will provide a first-cut account of perceived security threats and the preferred instruments and institutions of response by elites in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, the UK, the USA and the EU.  The objective is to obtain a group picture or to determine the extent to which cooperation in security governance is possible among the ten countries plus the EU and to differentiate country behaviour by the four respective governance categories: prevention, assurance, protection and compellence. Each country report will follow a common rubric in terms of security governance examined and empirical indicators chosen.

Participants