Defence and strategy

The organizers of the Belgrade Security Forum are pleased to invite security scholars and researchers to submit proposal papers for the second Belgrade Security Forum (BSF) to be held on September 20-22, 2012. The Forum is the biggest international security conference in Southeast Europe each year gathering several hundred top level policy and decision makers, NGO leaders, experts, academics and journalists. The overarching topic of this year's Forum will be Coping with the Crisis: Challenges for Security and Democracy. The Belgrade Security Forum is a unified event divided into two portions: an academic event on the first day, and a policy portion encompassing the next two days. The subtopic of the academic event will be “Security Community Building: Bridging the Theory/Policy Divide”. All accepted papers will be presented during the academic portion (September 20) of the Forum. The aim of the academic event is to feed scholarly insights into the policy portion (September 21-22) of the Belgrade Security Forum. 

Rationale

Over the last several decades academic and policy communities which deal with international politics and security have significantly parted ways. The goal of the conference is to help bring the two worlds together in order to widen and deepen the knowledge and practice of security community building. In addition to studying how policy and academic security communities of practice overlap into “constellations of practices,” the conference aims to build one such constellation. The organizers are welcoming papers which offer challenging, innovative and policy oriented ideas on how to better overcome gaps between theory and practice in security community building. We are specifically interested in papers drawing on the recent “practice turn” in International Relations and Security Studies. We are also willing to consider submissions dealing with the impact of economic crisis on regional security as well as the regional level of analysis more generally. 

Conditions

Participants will be selected on the basis of their application. All submissions are required to contain the applicant’s CV (up to 2 pages) attached to his/her paper proposal (up to 400 words). Submissions should be made electronically to office@ccmr-bg.org entitled “Call for paper proposals for BSF 2012”. The applicants should clearly state whether they would like to be considered for accomodation and travel grant.

The deadline for submissions is 15 April 2012.

Incomplete applications will be excluded from our review. All successful candidates will be contacted by 1 May at the latest. The organizers will financially support travel and accommodation expenses of selected participants on needs basis. After the conference all papers will be peer-reviewed for publication in the Journal of Regional Security (former Western Balkans Security Observer), academic journal of the Belgrade Center for Security Policy.

For more information visit http://www2.belgradeforum.org/pre-event.html.