Board Profiles

Victoria Basham

Cardiff University

EISA Portfolio: President of EISA

Victoria Basham is Reader (Associate Professor) in International Relations at Cardiff University, UK. Prior to joining Cardiff in January 2016, Victoria worked at the University of Exeter, and before that, spent several years at the University of Bristol obtaining her undergraduate degree in Social Policy and Politics, completing her PhD on gender, race and sexuality in the British Armed Forces, and carrying out an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, during which she was also a Visiting Fellow at the York Centre for International and Security Studies, Toronto, Canada.

Victoria’s main research interests lie in the field of critical military studies, a burgeoning sub-field of international studies that seeks to centre questions about militarism, militarisation and military power. Her work examines how war, and war preparedness, shape people’s daily lives and how daily life can, in turn, influence and facilitate war and other geopolitical outcomes. She is particularly interested in how gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and social class shape the prioritisation, use and perpetration of military force, especially in liberal democratic societies. Victoria is an editor and co-founder of the Taylor & Francis journal Critical Military Studies, and also co-edits the Advances in Critical Military Studies book series for Edinburgh University Press. Victoria has served on the EISA governing board since 2015 and was elected its President in 2017.

Maria Raquel Freire

University of Coimbra

EISA Portfolio: Treasurer of EISA

Maria Raquel Freire, Jean Monnet Chair, is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra (FEUC) and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the same University, in Portugal. She received her PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent, UK, in 2002. She is currently director of the PhD Programme in International Politics and Conflict Resolution, CES|FEUC; and Head of the International Relations Department at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra. She is also a member of the Scientific Council for Social Sciences and Humanities of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), and of the Governing Board of the European International Studies Association (EISA).

Her research interests focus on peace studies, particularly peacekeeping and peacebuilding; foreign policy, international security, Russia and the post-Soviet space. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as European Politics and Society, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, East European Politics, European Security, International Peacekeeping, International Politics, Asian Perspective, Global Society, La Revue Internationale et Stratégique, Journal of Conflict, Security and Development, among other. She is the author of Conflict and Security in the Former Soviet Union: The Role of the OSCE, Ashgate, 2003, reprinted in 2018 with the Routledge Revivals Series; A Rússia de Putin: Vectores Estruturantes de Política Externa, Almedina, 2011; co-editor of Managing Crises, Making Peace: Towards a Strategic EU Vision for Security and Defense, with Maria Grazia Galantino, Palgrave, 2015; and of Competing for Influence: The EU and Russia in Post-Soviet Eurasia and of Russia and European Security, with Roger E. Kanet, Republic of Letters (2 vols.) 2012, as well as of Russia and Its Near Neighbours: Identity, Interests and Foreign Policy, also with Roger E. Kanet, Palgrave, 2012, among other.

Maria Mälksoo

University of Kent

EISA Portfolio: European Workshops in International Relations

Maria Mälksoo is Senior Lecturer in International Security at the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical security studies, memory and identity politics, international political sociology and critical International Relations theory. She is the author of The Politics of Becoming European: A Study of Polish and Baltic Post-Cold War Security Imaginaries (Routledge, 2010) and a co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012). She has published on European security politics, liminality, memory wars, memory laws, transitional justice and foreign policy in eastern Europe and Russia in the International Studies ReviewEuropean Journal of International Relations, International Political Sociology, Security Dialogue, Review of International Studies, Contemporary Security Policy, Communist and Post-Communist StudiesJournal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, The Estonian Historical Journal, and in various edited volumes.

Dr Mälksoo earned her PhD and MPhil degrees from the University of Cambridge. She has held visiting fellowships at the Centre for International Studies, LSE and Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and has previously worked at the University of Tartu, Estonia. She has policy experience from the Estonian Ministry of Defence, International Centre for Defence and Security, Tallinn, and the Office of the President of Estonia. Maria currently sits on the editorial boards of Contemporary Security Policy, Journal of Genocide Research, International Political Anthropology and New Perspectives. In parallel to the EISA Governing Board, she also serves at the CEEISA Executive Committee.

Mathias Albert

Bielefeld University

EISA Portfolio: Relations with Other Associations

Mathias Albert is Professor of Political Science at Bielefeld University and one of the Directors of the Institute for World Society Studies there. He is currently speaker of the doctoral research training group ‘The emergence of modern world politics’. He has written, co-authored or edited numerous books and written or co-about one hundred and thirty articles and chapters in the field of international relations. He is also active in youth research, and one of the leaders of the German Shell Youth Studies since 2002. Mathias is particularly interested historically in and sociologically grounded analyses of the system of world politics. More specific current projects deal with practices of military force comparisons, the changing politics of the polar regions, and implications of the quantum revolution for the social world.

His latest book publications are: A Theory of World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and The Politics of International Political Theory (ed. with A. Lang; Palgrave, forthcoming 2018).

Valeria Bello

United Nations University

EISA Portfolios: Association Consolidation and Policy Development; EISA Social Media

Valeria Bello is Associate Professor in Sociology at the Blanquerna Faculty of Communications and International Relations, University Ramón Llull, Barcelona (Spain) and expert consultant on inequalities, migration and human security for a variety of international agencies and governments. From 2012 to 2018 she has been Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University, Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility (Barcelona, Spain), where she coordinated the research area of “Migration and Inclusion”.

She has been one of the two United Nations University’s leading experts for the SDG 10: “Reducing Inequalities” for the year 2018 and is the founding scientific coordinator of the UNU Migration Network, which she has coordinated from February 2014 until January 2016. Before her experience in the United Nations, Valeria Bello was Marie-Curie Sklodowska Post-Doc Researcher at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI) from 2009 to 2011. She has also worked as assistant coordinator of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence of the University of Trento (2003-2009) and assistant professor at the University of Trento (Italy) from 2005 to 2009.

She holds a PhD in Sociology and Political Sociology from the University of Florence, Italy (2007), and since then she has been teaching at several universities in Europe on a variety of subjects of relevance in the fields of international political sociology and international relations. In particular, her main research interests concern the role of both identity and non-state actors in the area of migration and interethnic relations, as well as in the area of international and human security. Her works focus on prejudice, extremisms, discriminations and the securitization of migration, as well as on migration and climate change. Valeria Bello is author of several articles, special issues, policy reports and books. Her most recent book is “International Migration and International Security. Why Prejudice is a Global Security Threat” (Routledge, April 2017).

Maj Grasten

Copenhagen Business School

EISA Portfolio: Communications and Exploratory Symposia

Maj Grasten is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Business and Politics, Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Her research sits at the intersection of the fields of International Relations and International Law, with a particular focus on international organizations and legal bodies, transnational governance, experts and knowledge production in international law. Her research deploys multi-sited ethnographic methods in tracking how global policy processes are developed and structured. She has been a visiting fellow at Universidad de los Andes, Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, Freie Universität Berlin, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. At CBS, she is also affiliated with the research project ‘Civil Society in the Shadow of the State (CISTAS)’. In her capacity as board member of the European International Studies Association (EISA), she is responsible for organizing the annual Exploratory Symposia in Rapallo and the EISA newsletter.

Jef Huysmans

University of London

EISA Portfolio: Early Career Research Development

 

Jef Huysmans is Professor of International Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He co-convenes the research cluster Doing International Political Sociology. As Board member of the EISA he is responsible for developing an Early Career Researchers Development portfolio, organizing the Early Career Researchers Workshops for PEC, and liaising on the Olympia Summer Academy.

He is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity, the securitization of migration, critical methods, and international political sociology. Currently he is working on security and democracy in times of surveillance, the political life of methods, the political significance of the everyday, and fracturing worlds.

He has published widely in leading journals in international studies, politics, and European studies. He is author of Security Unbound. Enacting Democratic Limits (Routledge, 2014), The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. (Routledge 2006); and What is Politics? (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). He edited with Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik The Politics of Protection. Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency. (Routledge 2006); with Patricia Noxolo Community, citizenship, and the ‘war on terror’: Security and insecurity. (Palgrave 2009), with Xavier Guillaume Citizenship and Security. The constitution of Political Being. (Routledge 2013), and with Claudia Aradau, Andrew Neal and Nadine Voelkner Critical Security Methods. New Frameworks for Analysis. (Routledge, 2014)

Website

Doing International Political Sociology

Beate Jahn

University of Sussex

EISA Portfolio: Prizes, Awards and Developments in the Discipline

Beate Jahn received her PhD and her Habilitation at Goethe-University, Frankfurt. She has taught International Relations at the New School University in New York as well as at the Universities of Frankfurt and Darmstadt and is now Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She has been the Director of the Centre for Advanced International Theory and the Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Relations. Her research interests revolve around liberal internationalism, ideology and classical and critical theory. Her publications include Moral und Politik (1993), The Cultural Construction of International Relations (2000), Classical Theory in International Relations (2006), Liberal Internationalism (2013) and numerous articles in core IR journals. On the EISA governing board she is responsible for prizes and awards.

Anna Leander

Graduate Institute, Geneva

EISA Portfolio: Responsible for Mid-Career Development, Mobility & Inclusion

Anna Leander is Professor of International Relations at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, with part-time positions also at PUC, Rio de Janeiro and at the Copenhagen Business School. She studied at Sciences Po. Paris, the London School of Economics and received her PhD from the European University Institute. She is known primarily for her contributions to the development of practice theoretical approaches to International Relations and for her work on the politics of commercializing military/security matters. Her current research pursues these interests focusing specifically on the digitally mediated politics of commercialized security.

She is current involved in two research projects the Nordic Centre of Excellence for Security Technologies and Societal Values and the Violence Prevention Initiative. She has extensive editorial experience and is currently editing the Cambridge Elements in International Security, Context to International and the Routledge series of Private Security Studies. She has also been the member of number of research councils, policy-advisory bodies and boards of professional associations. She is currently Vice Chair of the Academic Board of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies and a member of the German Research Council Working Group on Peace Research.

Ole Jacob Sending

Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

EISA Portfolio: Publications

Sending does research on global governance, with a particular focus on the role of international and non-governmental organizations in peacebuilding, humanitarian relief, and development. His publications have appeared, inter alia, in International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, and International Theory.

Juha Vuori

University of Tampere

EISA Portfolio: Programme Chair for the PEC19 Conference

Juha A. Vuori is Professor of International Politics at Tampere University in Finland, and an Adjunct Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki. He is most known for his work on securitization theory, visual security studies, and Chinese politics. His current research engages with social imaginaries of estrangement, the political aesthetics of security and related concepts, and Chinese Internet-Control.

He is currently involved in research projects on the Colours of Security (Kone Foundation), and on Imposing Security through US campus carry legislation (Academy of Finland). He is part of the managerial group of the NordSTEVA Nordic center of excellence, the current president of the Finnish Peace Research Association, and former president of the Finnish International Studies Association.

Anna Wojciuk

University of Warsaw

EISA Portfolio: Academic Freedom and External Developments

Anna Wojciuk, Associate Professor of political science at the University of Warsaw (Institute of International Relations). She specialises in international relations theory and in educational policy. Wojciuk graduated from the Institute of International Relations, University of Warsaw and the Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. She was a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School for Social Research, Polish Academy of Sciences (2005-2009). She defended her Ph.D. in International Relations at the University of Warsaw (Ph.D. dissertation: Evolution of the Notion of Power in the Theory of International Relations and its Analytical Applications).

Anna Wojciuk was a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the EUI, Florence (2017/18), Visiting fellow at Harvard University (Department of Government and Harvard Kennedy School of Government, 2008/2009), a Visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York (School of International and Public Affairs, 2008), in European University Institute in Florence (2013 and 2017/18 as Fernand Braudel Fellow), Cornell University (2016), and at CERI Sciences-Po in Paris (Chercheur invité, 2009).

Her publications include: Empires of Knowledge in International Relations. Education and Science as Sources of Power for the State, Routledge 2018 and co-authored with Jacek Czaputowicz International Relations in Poland. 25 Years After the Transition to Democracy, Palgrave 2017.