On Monday 20 February 2023, the ACRPS Strategic Studies Unit concluded its conference, “Security and Strategic Studies: The State of the Field”. Across eight panels and two public lectures, leading scholars and expert practitioners presented their research and addressed major issues within the different subfields of Security and Strategic Studies.
The third day began with a lecture by Anthony King, Professor and Chair of War Studies at the University of Warwick, titled “Warfare in the 21st Century: Urban Battles in Ukraine” and chaired by ACRPS researcher Aicha Elbasri. King addressed three main questions: what are the reasons for the rise of urban insurgencies over the past three decades, what has caused the confrontations between Ukrainian and Russian forces in urban areas, and how can the various battles between the two be analysed?
ACRPS researcher Ayat Hamdan chaired the conference’s sixth panel, “Intelligence Studies”, which included four presenters. Peter Jackson, Chair in Global Security at the University of Glasgow, opened the panel with “The Past, Present, and Future of Intelligence Studies”, followed by Owen Sirrs, Adjunct Professor of Security Studies at the University of Montana, who discussed his paper titled “Intelligence Studies in the Arab World: The Case of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate”. Next, Gordon Akrap, Assistant Professor of Information Science at the University of Zagreb, presented “Intelligence and Hybrid Threats: Interdependence and Intertwining”. Ghazi Al-Assaf, Associate Professor of Defence Economics at Joaan Bin Jassim Academy for Defence Studies, concluded the panel with his paper, “Economic and Financial Intelligence: The Role of Early Warning Systems in Predicting the Financial Crises”.
The seventh and final panel, “International Security”, featured four contributors and was chaired by Beverly Milton-Edwards, Senior Advisor in the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, Visiting Fellow at Magdalene College, the University of Cambridge, opened the panel presenting a paper titled “A Nuclear Moment”, followed by Tomasz Smura, Director of Research Office at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, who discussed “Modernization of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army: An Impact on International Security”. Tony Lawrence, Head of the Defence Policy and Strategy Programme at the International Centre for Defence and Security in Tallinn, Estonia proceeded to discuss his paper titled “Military Assistance and War Outcomes: Russia’s War in Ukraine, after which Mahjoob Zweiri, Director of the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University, concluded the panel with a paper titled “Iran and New Regional Security Dynamics”.
Omar Ashour, Director of the ACRPS Strategic Studies Unit, gave the conference’s closing remarks, which he began by thanking conference participants, organizers, and the faculty of the Doha Institute’s Critical Security Studies Programme. Ashour then made note of the conference’s outcomes, which will be released in a peer-reviewed edited volume featuring selected conference papers. The volume will be published by the Arab Center titled The Doha Handbook on Security and Strategic Studies in Arabic, with an English version by a Western university press, along with several ACRPS Strategic Papers. Finally, Ashour argued that this round of the conference and its previous iterations represent the Strategic Studies Unit’s contributions to the field, and that the topics discussed are taught as part of the curriculum of the Doha Institute’s Critical Security Studies Programme.
