Convenor

Beatrice de Graaf is a historian and a security, crisis & terrorism researcher. She is also the Scientific Director at Adapt!

panel participants

Bart Schuurman is Professor of Terrorism and Political Violence at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, and head of the research group by the same name. 

panel participants

Sarah de Lange is Professor of Dutch Politics at the Institute for Political Science.

Larissa Böckmann holds a Master’s degree in Empirical Research on Democracy and a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and Philosophy from the University of Mainz. During her studies, she acquired international experience in Spain and Colombia and work experience with different NGO’s. 

convenor

Rasmus Dahlberg Is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business Centre for Societal Security and Resilience (SECURE) at Roskilde University

panel participants

Andreas Hagedorn Krogh is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business
Roskilde School of Governance

Svante Aasbjerg Thygesen is a PhD student affiliated with the Center for Societal Security and Resilience (SECURE) and Roskilde School of Governance at Roskilde University. 

Kerstin Eriksson is an Senior Lecturer at the Department of Design Sciences, LTH, Lund University.

about

When COVID-19 hit the in early 2020, a Nordic crisis management principle known as the responsibility principle (a principle of decentralized preparedness planning and crisis management stating that whoever is in charge during normal times also has the responsibility in extraordinary situations) was tested: managing a full-scale crisis response across virtually all societal sectors and with an open-ended timeline which stretched for months and, as it turned out, years. After the pandemic, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian government commission reports all concluded that the responsibility principle had to some extent been challenged by either strong or absent political leadership, centralized as well as decentralized decision-making and strategic, top-down direction-setting competing with local autonomy in various combinations and measures in the three countries. Based on findings from RESECTOR, a NordForsk-funded project 2023-26, this panel asks what we learned about responsibility from managing the most severe societal crisis since the Second World War?

Thijs van Dooremalen(Leiden University)

Convenor

Thijs van Dooremalen is Assistant Professor at Institute of Security and Global Affairs, at Leiden University. His research focuses on how and why events can cause transformations within national public spheres (media, politics, policy making).

about

Crises come into being through meaning-making processes: whether events or situations are considered crises, how they should be tackled, and what future lessons could be taken from them are all matters of ‘framing contests’. This panel is open to papers studying these processes from different academic backgrounds, using a diversity of methods, and a variety of crisis cases. Possible research questions could be: What determines who wins crisis framing contests? How is this impacted by institutions, types of crises, or country contexts? How do framing contests differ across crisis stages (e.g., preparedness, responses, mitigation)?

PANEL PARTICIPANTS

Assem Dandashly is Associate Proffesor Political Science at Maastricht University.

Daniel Laufer, is a Professor and Head of the School of Communication Studies at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

Gergana Noutcheva  is Associate Professor in International Relations and European Foreign Policy at the Political Science Department of Maastricht University.

panel participants

Stijn Willem van ’t Land works as a researcher and PhD candidate for the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA). He will talk about the factors and mechanisms through which foreign terrorist attacks turn into domestic crises

Ioana Sendroiu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. Iona will discuss how big oil companies are seeking to settle climate crisis claims

Wouter Jong got his PhD at Tilburg University. He is a crisis management and crisis communication consultant. Wouter will discuss how crises reshape the way organizations are publicly compared and evaluated

Yijing Wang, is Full Professor and Chair of Strategic Communication, with a focus on Responsible and Sustainable Organisations and Business in the Department of Media and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Jori Kalkman (Wageningen university &research)

Convenor

Jori Kalkman is an Associate Professor at Wageningen University & Research. His research focuses primarily on crisis management, disaster response and societal resilience.

about

Governments across the globe are adopting plans to build more resilient societies. Classic crisis management studies provide helpful building blocks through research on citizen responses to disaster, differences in vulnerability among various social groups, and spontaneous support from emergent volunteer groups. In this panel, we build on these classic insights to take research on societal resilience into the new era.

Find out more information about this panel here.

Kees Boersma is Full Professor of socio-technical innovation and societal resilience in Faculty of Social Sciences (at the Department of Organization Sciences) and the Faculty of Science (at the Science, Business & Innovation group) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Nathan Clark is an Assistant Professor within the Department of Organization Sciences at Vrije University Amsterdam. 

Anastasiia (Nastya) Poberezhna is a PhD Fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University

panel participants

Claudia Morsut is an
Associate Professor at University of Stavanger

Jesse Michael Millek is an ancient historian and archaeologist specializing in the history and cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean during the Late Bronze Age.

Oscar Nowlan is a PhD candidate at the Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science and Research Fellow at LSE Cities.

Martin Lodge is professor of political science and public policy at the London School of Economics (LSE)

Kati Orru is Associate Professor in Sociology of Sustainability, Institute of Social Studies at University of Tartu, Estonia

Sten Hansson is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Tartu.

Lihi Lahat is
Associate Professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at Sapir Academic College, Israel, and an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia University, Montreal.

convenor

Mark Rhinard is Senior Research Fellow at the Europe Research Program at UI. His research focuses on European cooperation questions, especially in the areas of external and internal security. 

panel participants

Niels van Willigen is Professor by Special Appointment in Strategic Studies at the Institute of Political Science.

Nad’a Kovalčíková is a Senior Analyst in charge of the Transnational Security portfolio at the EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS)

about

Civil defence and societal resilience have moved to the centre of European security. The EU and NATO each provide essential parts of the preparedness puzzle, but neither can deliver them alone. NATO’s role in deterrence, defence planning, and civil preparedness increasingly depends on capabilities, infrastructures, and regulatory instruments associated with the EU. The EU’s preparedness agenda, meanwhile, operates within a security environment still structured largely through NATO. Against a backdrop of geopolitical and transatlantic strain, this panel examines how the two organisations can combine their distinctive strengths, where cooperation remains difficult, and what civilian and military approaches to preparedness can learn from one another.

convenor

Magnus Ekengren is Professor of Political Science at the Swedish Defence University in Stockholm.

Magnus is a former Swedish diplomat and was previously Deputy Director at the Policy Planning Unit of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, where he dealt with EU enlargement and institutional reform, the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy. 

about

From Signal to Action: Governing Early Warning in Transboundary Crisis Environments

Many classical challenges of crisis management now unfold across political, sectoral, and geographical boundaries. One such challenge is early detection of emerging crises (the identification and interpretation of weak signals before escalation) paired with timely intervention. From pandemics and terrorism to disinformation and climate risks, acting across boundaries has become increasingly complex. In cooperative governance systems such as the EU and NATO, early warning relies on pooled information, shared sense-making, and coordinated pathways that help move from signal to action. This panel will bring together scholars and practitioners to explore what classical theorizing has to say about how transboundary detection and intervention can be organized for reliability and legitimacy.

Convenors: Magnus Ekengren & Mark Rhinard

For paper proposals, contact Magnus Ekengren

magnus.ekengren@fhs.se

panel participants

Aline Bartenstein is a political scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Sustainability Transition Policy at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU).

Nikki Ikani is Assistant Professor Intelligence and Security at Leiden University.

Andrea Wiegman (1973) is a historian and foresight expert. She works for the Dutch Ministry of Finance, the Tax Authorities, and the FIOD, searching for early signals and blind spots in detecting new financial fraud or violations of integrity

Sara Talebian is a Research Fellow at SEI Headquarters, International Climate Risk and Adaptation Team, Global Agendas, Climate and Systems Division.

Eva Michaels is an assistant professor in intelligence and security at Leiden University and a senior fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. Her research explores how European actors anticipate and respond to recent security crises.

Dan Hansén is an Associate professor in Department of Political Science at Swedish Defence University.

About

As the concept of resilience has gained prominence across crisis management studies, organizational research, and public policy, it has often been mobilized as a catch-all explanation for how organizations and societies cope with, adapt to, and recover from disruption. While this diffusion has enhanced its visibility, it has also contributed to conceptual ambiguity and analytical overlap with a range of closely related ideas.

This track hosts contributions that revisit organizational and societal resilience through the lens of classic works and foundational debates in crisis management and neighbouring fields. In line with the overall aim of the conference to re-anchor the field in its intellectual roots, the track encourages authors to reflect on how resilience connects to, diverges from, or builds upon established concepts such as crisis detection, decision-making under pressure, high reliability, turbulence. Contributions are further invited to examine resilience from different analytical perspectives, including networks, institutionalism, agency, power and politics, and to discuss its relevance for broader concerns such as innovation, and ethics.

The track is structured around three interrelated sessions, each corresponding to a distinct level of analysis through which resilience and its neighbouring concepts can be revisited and re-anchored in classic crisis management debates.

Panel participants session 1

Christopher Ansell is Professor of Political Science. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and the Faculty Director of Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Managemen

Arjen Boin is Professor of Public Institutions and Governance at the Institute of Political Science. He is also a senior partner at Crisisplan and academic advisor at Adapt!

Tanja Klenk is a Professor of Public Administration and Public Policy at the Helmut-Schmid-University Hamburg. Her principal research interests lie in the field of the governance and administration of the welfare state and comparative social policy.

Rómulo Pinheiro is Professor of Public Policy and Administration, Deputy Head of Department and member of the research group on Public Governance and Leadership (GOLEP). He is a co-track coordinator at the Digital Transformation (CeDiT) based at UiA.

convenors

Lydie Cabane is senior Assistant Professor at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs. Her main interests include crises, governance, public policy, states, expertise, European Union and global politics.

Vasiliki (Billy) Tsagkroni is Senior Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at the Institute of Political Science.

panel participants

Olivier Borraz is
CNRS Research Professor at the Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CSO), Crisis-Lab

Antoaneta Dimitrova is Professor at Institute of Security and Global Affairs at Leiden University

Nena Oana is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam within the  Political Economy and Transnational Governance programme group.

Rasa Bortkevičiūtė is the Head of Science and Research Department at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University

about

Crises are moments of rupture, but also of political transformation. While classical crisis research has examined the politics of crisis management, recent research now call for systematising the reverse question: how does crisis management reshape politics itself?

This panel examines how crisis management reshapes political authority, legitimacy, accountability, and state-society relations across policy domains, levels of governance, and over the long term. It is particularly interested in three clusters of questions. First, how do emergency powers, executive discretion, and the rise of expert authority reconfigure democratic accountability and state-society relations? Second, what kind of politics emerge from crisis and the ‘crisisification’ of policy-making? For example,  how do crisis communication strategies affect political trust, polarisation, and public compliance? Third, it is time to revisit classical questions about crisis and power in light of contemporary experience: when do crisis interventions consolidate incumbent power, and when do they open windows for reform, institutional learning, or contestation? Under what conditions do temporary measures become permanent features of governance, and with what consequences for democratic legitimacy?

By bringing diverse methodological and theoretical  perspectives into dialogue, the panel aims to build bridges across crisis research and political science, and to outline a comparative agenda for studying how governing under pressure transforms the political landscape over time.

This initiative is organized under the support of the ECPR Network on the Politics of Crisis Management.

Interested in presenting a paper in this panel? Please contact Vasiliki (Billy) Tsagkroni (v.tsagkroni@fsw.leidenuniv.nl) and/or Lydie Cabane (l.d.cabane@fgga.leidenuniv.nl) 

Tanya B. Corbin

Convenor

Tanya Buhler Corbin is Professor of Disaster Management and Department Chair, Emergency, Disaster and Global Security Studies, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide.

PANEL PARTICIPANTS

Iuliia Hoban is Assistant Professor of Human Security and Resilience, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Jialing Huang, Assistant Professor of Communication, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

about

Building resilience for transboundary crises through emerging digital technologies

This interdisciplinary panel examines how learning and adaptation during crises are reshaped by emerging digital technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, examined in the context of classic theoretical foundational works in crisis management studies. Drawing on seminal works on sensemaking (Weick, 1995; Boin, McConnell, ‘t Hart, 2021), social amplification of risk (Kasperson et al., 1988; Tierney, 2014), and resilience and adaptation in crisis contexts (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2015), the papers explore how artificial intelligence and digital innovations influence learning, sense-making, and resilience. Across different geopolitical, cultural, and generational contexts, the contributions show that crisis learning is not neutral or automatic, but socially conditioned and politically embedded. Public engagement with AI-assisted crisis communication reveals how trust, meaning-making, and perceived legitimacy are filtered through national identity, political ideology, and crisis type, challenging assumptions of objectivity. At the same time, digital innovations such as AI-supported mentorship illustrate how adaptive learning and resilience can be cultivated over time among conflict-affected youth by strengthening social capital and relational support. However, we are early in our use and understanding of the effects of AI tools on human cognition; the Logos et.al. paper investigates potential advantages and limitations of AI assisted crisis management. By integrating classic crisis and resilience theories with contemporary challenges posed by AI and prolonged crises, the panel highlights how learning emerges through contested interpretations, adaptive practices, and evolving relationships between humans and technology.