On Sunday 19 February 2023, proceedings continued for the ACRPS Strategic Studies Unit’s annual conference, “Security and Strategic Studies: The State of the Field”. The day’s events began with a lecture by Rex Brynen, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, titled “Wargaming as a Methodological Tool in Security Studies for Analysis and Education” and chaired by Bassel Salloukh, Head of the Politics and International Relations Programme at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI). Brynen argued that wargaming and other serious games can be a valuable tool for better understanding a broad array of strategic challenges, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of strategic gaming as a methodology, highlighting basic approaches and considerations, and identifying additional resources for security studies scholars and practitioners.
Panel 3 of the conference, titled “War, Warfare, and Defence Studies”, was chaired by Mohamad Hamas Elmasry, Chair of the Media Studies Programme at the DI, and featured four presenters. Stathis Kalyvas, Gladstone Professor of Government at the University of Oxford, presented a paper entitled “The Logic of Substitution in Political Violence” that discussed reconceptualizing the full spectrum of political violence. The panel’s other speakers addressed strategic issues related to the war in Ukraine, with Jacek Bartosiak presenting his paper titled “Military Transformations and the Future of Strategy: Lessons from Ukraine”, followed by Maria Zolkina’s study, “Public Resilience as a Factor of National Security in the Times of War: The Case of Ukraine in 2014-2022”. Petro Burkovskyi concluded the panel by presenting “Ukrainian Volunteer Military Units: From Underdogs to Masters of Modern Warfare”.
Marwa Farag, Associate Professor at DI’s School of Public Administration and Development Economics chaired the conference’s fourth panel, “Terrorism and Insurgency Studies”. Aaron Y. Zelin, Richard Borow Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, presented the first paper, “From Terrorism and Insurgency to CT and COIN: The Taliban’s Fight Against the Islamic State’s Khurasan Province”. Next, Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, discussed “The Case for Critical Terrorism Studies: Revisited”, followed by Kumar Ramakrishna, Professor of National Security Studies at Nanyang Technological University, who presented a contrasting perspective through his paper, “The Case against Critical Terrorism Studies: Revisited”. Marzena Zakowska, Associate Professor of National Security at the War Studies University in Warsaw, concluded the panel with her paper on “Hybrid Warfare and State-Sponsored Insurgencies: The Case of Eastern Ukraine”.
Panel 5, the final session of the day, was devoted to “Civil-Military Relations” and chaired by Sidahmed Goudjili, Assistant Professor in the Critical Security Studies Program at the DI. Abdel-Fattah Mady, Head of the Unit of State and Political Systems Studies at the ACRPS, opened the session with his paper “The State of the Subfield of Civil-Military Relations”, followed by Risa Brooks, Allis Chalmers Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, who presented “Understanding Variation in Civil-Military Relations in the Arab World”. Next, Ilir Kalemaj, Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of New York in Tirana, discussed his paper on “Serbian-Albanian Civil and Military Relations as Precursors to Solve the Western Balkan Conundrum”. Malath Alagha, a lecturer at the Joaan Bin Jassem Academy for Defence Studies, concluded the day’s proceedings with his paper, “The Democratization of Civil-Military Relations and its Impact on the Development of the Defence Industry in Turkey (2002-2022)”.
The conference will continue until Monday, 20 February 2023, at the ACRPS in Doha. Every panel is also being livestreamed on ACRPS social media, with live translation available in Arabic and English.
