Lecture Abstract:

The last decades have seen a renewed interest in the role regional organisations might play in the maintenance of regional peace and security. This presentation seeks to contribute to the debate on strengthening the Global Peacebuilding Architecture by exploring existing partnerships between the United Nations and regional organisations in the areas of conflict prevention and peacebuilding and devotes special attention to the contribution that the EU could make to multilevel security governance.

About the Speaker:

Luk Van Langenhove studied psychology and criminology at the VUB where he also obtained his PhD in 1981. He started his career as a researcher at VUB and became Deputy Secretary-General of the Belgian federal ministry of Science Policy in 1992. In 2001 he was appointed founding Director of UNU-CRIS, the Institute for Comparative Regional Integration Studies of the United Nations University in Bruges. From 2008 until 2010 he acted as Vice-President of the International Social Sciences Council.

Since 1 March he is Research professor at the Institute of European Studies (IES at the VUB (Free University of Brussels) and the Scientific Coordinator of the EL-CSID project, a 2.4 million Euros research grant under the Horizon2020 programme. The project will study the potentials of science and cultural diplomacy for the EU’s policies.

He currently also chairs the Academic Board of BACES, the Brussels Academy of China-EU Studies and continues to act as Director of UNU-CRIS in Bruges.