Ever heard the sentence “This is how we do business” – salespeople and agents love it and I thought it might be applicable to what I do … same as I also try to sell my idea, not literally, but the framework should enhance people to easily understand what I do:

As always some words are needed, here a rough explanation, I would like to approach the concept of Security Community from two angles. The first which is tangible, looks at the things in place and what is actually happening, the second one looks at the role of leadership and how this enhances the the process of establishing a Security Community. Thereby my work during the next days will focus on the general concept outlined by Karl W. Deutsch and the role of leadership in International Relations.

The structure of my dissertation is developing and therewith also the number of resources. I decided to install Citavi again, a good tool to manage resources for academic writing, it’s quite good but not perfect, the procedure to put resources from the web into it, is not how it is meant to be. I think it is really helpful, because you could tag and categorize your resources, which is useful if you skim read a lot and want to make use of it sometime later.

A short note about this website, work is still in progress so tonight I tried briefly to implement a multi-language plugin, but I need to work it out in more detail.

Today is Day 1 of four weeks in the library at the University of Leeds. The ressources here a very good, never found so much books on East Asia, but it is not really suprising with such reknown scholars and a a big East Asia Studies program.

The purpose of today was to get a better understanding of the Deutschian concept of a security community and to find some more literature besides the one I knew already about. Besides what I have already mentioned, Dosch (1997) and Adler & Barnett (1998), I found another interesting source by Huges & Meng (2011), it’s a reader with shortend journal articles, which I actually not intend to read, but I wrote down the interesting articles and hopefully find them online. Most valuable out of that will be Adler’s article, but I guess it’s quite similar to the book. Another intersting book is by Ganguly et al. (2010), as the title indicates (The Routledge handbook of Asian security studies) it focuses on the big picture of Asian security, nevertheless it will give some insight on the broader situation in Asia.

After all the library research, I also managed to get some reading done, the first two mentioned ones were at my focus and somehow I get an understanding how to fit the Greater Mekong Subregion into the Deutschian concept, but more reading has be done.

For all of you who are interested, the library will put a new search frontend in place very soon, it’s called Encore

Ressources:

Ganguly et al. (2010). ‘The Routledge handbook of Asian security studies’, New York, Routledge.

Huges C. & Meng, L.Y. (2011). ‘Security studies : a reader’, Rutledge, New York.

As the ‘Security Community’ concept by Karl W. Deutsch will be an important part for my research, I was quite happy to stumble upon the following last week:

“Arnfinn Jorgensen-Dahl’s doctoral dissertation, completed in 1975 and published in 1982, was ‘the first extended analysis of regional cooperation in Southeast Asia’. This study concluded that ASEAN ‘represented “a signifcant move toward” a sense of community in the Deutschian conception within non-communist Southeast Asia’” (Poeu 2001, p. 123)

The section also mentions a work by Huxly (1996), even if it focuses on ASEAN, it will be a big help. Besides that I also got sth. written by Dosch (1997), Adler & Barnett (1998) and Collins (2007).

Ressources:

Adler, E. & Barnett M. (1998). ‘Security communities’, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Dosch, J. (1997). ‘Die ASEAN: Bilanz eines Erfolges. Aktuere, Interessenlagen, Kooperationsbeziehungen’, Abera Verlag, Hamburg.

Collins, A. (2007). ‘Contemporary security studies’, Oxford University Press, Oxford

Huxly, T. (1996). ‘International relations’, in Mohammed Talib and Tim Huxly (eds) Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies, London, New York and Singapore: I.B. Tauris Publisher and Institute of Southeastern Asian Studies.

Peou, S. (2001) . ‘Realism and constructivism in Southeast Asian security studies today: a review essay’, The Pacific Review, 15: 1, 119-138.

As I’m approaching my MA Dissertation these days, I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts and findings. Primarely this page is not meant to be a blog, there are a lot of other blogs out there, but sharing what I will stumble upon under the maxime of academia is still interesting.