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Photo: Council of Europe/flickr
Photo: Council of Europe/flickr

It’s Sweden’s turn to organize the annual European Security Research Conference under its Presidency of the EU. The conference will be held in Stockholm 29-30 September 2009 bringing together around 800 representatives from research, industry, European institutions, public authorities and the security sector. This is the event of the year if you’re going to influence the shaping of policies and research options for Europe’s future.

As the world’s leading open access information service for international relations and security professionals, the ISN naturally attends this event. A series of promising European research projects will be discussed in Stockholm and we look forward to contributing our expertise and reach out to an ever wider audience. More news will follow.

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Politics in Motion

ISN Booth
ISN Booth

Greetings from the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Toronto.

In the first time in its 104 years, the meeting takes place outside the US. According to the organizers, this traveling across a border is symbolic for the conference theme “Politics in Motion: Change and Complexity in the Contemporary Era”. The event, consisting of hundreds of panels and an exhibition, looks at what is new, different and unusual in politics today and aims to think about what knowledge is needed to deal with change and complexity and address today’s crucial challenges.

Emotions and Politics

Looking for the unusual in the thick conference program, I attended a panel on neuropsychology and international politics. The panel converged two fields that have been unconnected previously: brain science and international politics.
The presenters advocated the consideration of emotions when studying political decision making. Evidence shows that cognition (thinking) is actually preceded by emotions (feelings). Hence, “rational” decisions are taken on the basis of emotional beliefs. According to the panelists, it is, however, still unknown how cognition and emotions work together in different situations.

What do these findings in brain science mean for political science and international affairs?