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| European Security & Transatlantic Relations |
| Overview |
European security is going through dynamic changes. The three major regional and international organisations - EU, NATO, OSCE - their members and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are still digesting the lessons they learnt in the conflicts of the 1990s and continue to be involved in such areas as the Balkans. Especially for the EU the recent enlargement, although it has widened the European security community, also introduces new influences in an already difficult process of making common security and defence policy. At the same time developments in the regional and global security environment are raising a set of transnational, intra and inter-state challenges. These range from human rights violations, migration, economic development and access to natural resources over organised crime and global terrorism to WMD proliferation and long-running as well as emerging intra and interstate conflicts within Europe, its immediate neighbourhood and further afield. These challenges are particularly complex, because they demand that the EU, NATO and OSCE, European governments and non-governmental organisations develop co-ordinated or complementary soft as well as hard security measures for the short, medium and long term. Initiatives that aim at these multiple levels, such as the EUs two strategies on regional security and WMD proliferation as well as co-operation on enhancing internal security, already exist, but their successful implementation depends on a range of domestic and international factors.
The programme aims to critically examine perceptions of, as well as existing and emerging responses to, these challenges to European security at all levels and generate proposals for new solutions. Open to all analytical approaches, it seeks to foster a lively and constructive discourse between academic scholars, policy analysts and practitioners in policy making, diplomacy, the armed forces, industry and NGOs. The programme views the transatlantic relationship as such an important element in European security that it forms a distinct strand in the research agenda, but as current developments in European security are also fuelled by internal and external factors not primarily linked to transatlantic relations it treats European security as an independent subject of analysis. This is not least, because the EU and individual member states are expecting -and expected by external actors - to make their own contributions to regional and global security. How far the EU and member states are capable of meeting these expectations, what this means for NATO and the OSCE, what indeed the future of these three organisations is in European security, and how far supra-state, state and non-state actors are successfully responding to the new security challenges are salient questions the programme aims to address. It therefore focuses on the following sectors:
- Challenges to and Developments in European
Security
- The EU as an actor in Regional and Global
security
- Military Capabilities in Europe
- Defence Procurement
- Global Terrorism and Transnational Organised Crime
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| Programme Leader - Dr Andrea Ellner |
| 01524 221585 - aellner@cdiss.org |
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In addition to leading the European Security and Transatlantic Relations programme, Dr Ellner is Acting Director at the Graduate Institute of Political and International Studies and Lecturer in International Relations, University of Reading with research interests in role theory, foreign policy analysis and international, European, Central and South Asian security, transatlantic relations, defence policy, arms procurement and armaments co-operation (especially naval), nuclear (non-)proliferation.
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Dr Ellner is author of the following publications:
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European Perspectives on Security Lessons of the
Conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East and Africa
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Innovation and Surface Ships - The Type 82
Destroyer and the Future Fleet Working Party, in Mariners Mirror
(forthcoming)
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Le Project NFR-90 (Frgate de lOTAN pour les
annes 1990) in Jean-Paul Hebert and Jean Hamiot (eds.)
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Histoire de la cooperation europeenne dans
l'armement (CNRS, forthcoming 2004)
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Whither Transition - Development and Security
in former Soviet Central Asia, Journal of International Development,
Vol.9, No. 4, 1997.
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