Centre for Security Research

Parliaments and security conference 23-24 June 2021



CeSeR’s held its 2021 annual conference (postponed from 2020) on ‘Parliaments and Security’.

CeSeR’s 2021 annual conference was on ‘Parliaments and Security’. While parliaments’ roles in security have often been neglected in practice and in scholarship, the importance of parliaments in security has received significant attention in recent years.

The conference was a stock-taking exercise of the current understanding of parliaments and security.

Papers papers presented by

  • Andrew Defty (University of Lincoln)
  • Ugo Gaudino (University of Kent)
  • Chuck Hermann (Texas A&M University)
  • Lynsey Mitchell (Abertay University)
  • Michael Lister (Oxford Brookes University)
  • Falk Ostermann (Justus Liebig University Giessen)
  • James Strong (Queen Mary University of London)
  • Burcu Turkoglu (Bilkent University)
  • Wolfgang Wagner (Free University Amsterdam)

Themes of the cutting-edge work included

  • scrutiny and accountability
  • parliamentary discourse
  • changing dynamics in parliamentary-executive relations over time, especially in the UK
  • constitutional differences and variations in national cultures
  • securitization and exceptionalism

Through discussion, conference participants identified a number of blind spots in work on parliaments and security.

Areas for future research

  • parliaments beyond Western Europe and the US
  • historical perspectives
  • endogenous rules affecting parliaments, not just external constraints
  • parliaments’ roles in security policies beyond the use of force and beyond votes
  • the role of security experts and clerks in parliaments
  • individuals in parliaments and executive-parliamentary relations
  • the relationship between the public(s) and parliaments in security affairs
  • the opportunity to more directly connect this area of research with parliamentary studies, and to use multiple methodologies, including experimental surveys
  • comparative regional analyses

We look forward to the scholarship that will be published from the research presented at the conference and to seeing the developments in this area of research. We thank the participants for presenting and serving as discussants at the conference and Benjamin Martill for chairing a session.

Juliet Kaarbo and Andrew Neal, Co-Directors, Centre for Security Research