6 May 2015
Deutsch Security Square
The Deutsch Security Square is a research centre established at the Department of International Relations Faculty of Social Sciences of the Charles University of Prague. It has been founded with the aim to promote collective research of security in the best tradition of the scholarship of Karl Deutsch seeking, in his words, "more knowledge for greater competence and more compassion."
We strive for academic excellence without prejudice in terms of methodology as long as the research is theoretically sound, innovative and thorough. The ethos of Deutschian scholarship we seek to promote is one that rests less on methodological assumptions about the possibility of measuring and modelling social reality; and more on the emphasis of rigorous, transparent, collective and transdisciplinary research. We take inspiration from Karl Deutsch's liberal approach to security, and take seriously the challenge to the realist paradigm by striving to zoom in and out of the ‘leviathan’ of the modern state when thinking about security, stressing the importance of both norms, ideas and discourses; and of social practice of (in)security. The focus on the latter situates our inquires at the intersection of international relations and international political sociology that thinks beyond the state institutions and even elites’ practices and knowledges. (If you wish to read more about the currency of Deutschian scholarship and the Centre’s directions of following Karl Deutsch's intellectural heritage, we invite you to read introductory essays by Richard Ned Lebow and Ondrej Ditrych.)
Deutsch Security Square
