Join Simone Tholens as she presents her most recent research at the RSC Seminar Series, using a new framework to analyse security cooperation beyond the traditional investment-return logic and shining a light onto the complexity of security relationships in the Middle-East.
In this event, Professor Simone Tholens will discuss her paper, "Security cooperation in conditions of competitive polycentricity," which examines security cooperation as a relational practice unfolding under conditions of competitive polycentricity.
Security cooperation practices and instruments - such as overseas military bases and training-and-equipping programmes for foreign security forces - have become central to the exercise of influence below the threshold of war. Rather than functioning as purely instrumental tools, these practices have become embedded in broader economic, political, and social projects designed to generate durable entanglements across domains. Much like a marriage, security cooperation entails long-term commitments whose anticipated returns are rarely immediate or measurable, but instead lie in the cultivation of relational pathways that hedge against future uncertainty.
As such, security cooperation requires analytical approaches that emphasize relationality and meaning-making. This paper advances a relational framework structured around five dimensions: continuity, optimism, happiness, fidelity, and prosperity. It applies this framework to a regional analysis of the Middle East, where established and emergent actors compete for influence through a dense and overlapping web of security relationships. This study demonstrates that, while transactional arrangements and marriages of convenience remain important, security cooperation is sustained by deeper constitutive processes that exceed investment–return logics. It becomes clear, then, that at the regional level patronage operates through negotiations of commitments as much as through material exchange.