‘Security-Development Nexus in Bilateral Donors’ Policy Doctrines

The CSDS director Vladimir Bartenev opened a discussion by making a presentation ‘Security-development nexus as an element of discourse: challenges of mapping narratives and content analysis’, in which he emphasized the absence of a unanimous  understanding of the ‘security-development nexus’ concept, and provided an outline of his own approach. The CSDS Deputy Director Elena Glazunova in her presentation focused on making a distinction between two notions: ‘development’ and ‘development assistance’. She appealed to concentrate in examining the narratives with ‘development’ component of the nexus conceptualized as ‘development assistance’. The CSDS experts discussed narratives about security and development and resulting multitude of nexus proposed by Maria Stern and Joakim Öjendal from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Nikolay Yudin stressed that such an approach may lead to redundancy of interpretations. Experts concluded that it is important to concentrate on a limited number of key narratives instead of searching for all interpretations in the donors’ discourse.       

The second part of the workshop was more practical. The CSDS research fellows presented results of their examination of the key bilateral donors’ doctrinal documents. The primary aim of the work was to trace the evolution of views on the interdependence of security and development and changes in combination of narratives. A separate task was to apply the methodology of content analysis to the study of doctrinal documents and see how counting frequency of key words and sequences may help in understanding the particularities of a specific donor’s approach to security-development nexus.  

Olga Kulkova made a presentation on an evolution of the official discourse on security-development nexus in the European Union. Philipp Trunov presented results of his analysis of the Federal Republic of Germany’s approach to the use of political, diplomatic and military instruments in resolving addressing complex security issues, while Oxana Popova explored the FRG’s strategy of international development cooperation. Luiza Khlebnikova and Altunay Aliyeva identified some characteristic features of representation of the security-development nexus in the doctrinal documents of Canada and Turkey respectively.

In his wrap-up of the discussion the CSDS Director Vladimir Bartenev emphasized once again the importance of an elaboration of a consistent methodology for studying the security-development nexus that will help deliver credible results. The CSDS experts agreed to use the results of the workshop in their research papers and the inputs in the anthology and an upcoming collective monograph.