Local Roots of Global Peace: International Conference on Global Security Studies

June 24-25, 2016

Eurasia International University, Yerevan (Armenia)

Sponsored by:

Eurasia Partnership Foundation (Armenia), Stonehill College (United States) and Eurasia International University (Armenia)

The end of the Cold War gave rise to new forms of conflict as well as cooperation; to increasingly globalized crime as well as supranational responses to them. The steep decline in inter-state wars and parallel, yet more intermittent, reduction in civil wars, has been an encouraging trend worldwide. Yet, in more immediate terms, humanitarian emergencies such as the Syrian civil war are still raging, with the death toll conservatively estimated by the United Nations at around 250,000 in 2014 and refugee flows of over 4.5 million. With evidence of both terror from above and terror from below in Syria and Iraq, these crises have far reaching implications outside of the region, including global terrorism and the refugee crises within the EU. Outside of the Middle East, other areas with frozen conflicts, de facto states, and unstable peace are creating instability, in a world politically and militarily divided.

In essence, the globalized world has become both more and less peaceful. On the one hand, there is a strong trend of cooperation between states, international organizations and civil society groups on various global problems that defy purely state-centric responses. On the other hand, push-back from states on the grounds of state sovereignty and geopolitics has also been significant. Whether in post-war Central America or Western Balkans, political solutions to armed conflicts developed a tendency to mutate to terrorism, corruption and organized crime such as trafficking in humans, drugs and weapons.

The purpose of this conference is to make sense of these seemingly disparate and contradictory trends. How do we explain and study the global decline in armed conflicts and the increase of crime against the backdrop of a globalized world? Is the 21st century shaping up to be more or less peaceful than the century before? What has led to an increase in global crime? What is global security? What are the effects of “frozen conflicts” on global security? What is a global security order? Is there one? How does the global economy affect levels of global crime? How should we think about those consequences of globalization that are “lawful but awful”?

The conference seeks to explore these questions in terms of their significance for Global Security Studies. Explaining how the experiences from developing countries confirm, conform and challenge traditional understandings of Global Security Studies is one of the overarching goals of the conference.

Final agenda of the conference here.