Authors' Workshop on Patron-Client Relationships in World Politics

Between June 13 and 16, 2024, we successfully completed an Authors’ Workshop on Patron-Client Relationships in World Politics in the medieval Dornburg Castle of World Cultural Heritage (Thuringia, Germany). The goal is to publish a volume which re-invigorates research on this topic in International Relations, edited by Rafael Biermann (FSU Jena), Nicoló Fasola (University of Bologna) and Ivica Petrikova (Royal Holloway, University of London).

The workshop is an integral part of a multi-year research project facilitated by the Chair of International Relations at FSU. The project, initiated in 2021 with another workshop in the Dornburg Castle, seeks to develop a systemic conceptualization of patron-client relationships and explore its analytical utility, explanatory potential, and limitations in contemporary international relations research. In a first stage, we had focused on patron-client relations in secessionist conflict. An upcoming special issue on this topic in the interdisciplinary journal Territory, Politics, Governance will soon make the first insights from this research program available to the scientific community. In a second stage, we have expanded the scope of the project to investigate patron-client relations in world politics in general. Consequently, the project has advanced through further workshops: one in the summer of 2022 in Thessaloniki (Greece), a European Workshop in International Studies (EWIS) by the European International Studies Association (EISA), and another in the spring of 2023 in Toulouse as part of the Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR). These events have brought together a group of senior academics and early career researchers who now form the backbone of the project. In Toulouse, we decided to take the next step and aim for the edited volume mentioned above.

Our recent multiday Authors’ Workshop in Dornburg was dedicated to this task. The event began on the evening of June 13 with an insightful public lecture in the Astoria Lecture Hall of FSU Jena, delivered by General Heinrich Brauß, a former NATO Assistant Secretary General for Defence Policy and Planning. General Brauß talked about current global security shifts. In his lecture, he identified and analyzed the major threats and challenges faced by NATO and Germany from a political-military perspective. These included, among others, a hostile Russia, various consequences of climate change including armed conflicts over shrinking resources, and the potential return of Donald Trump, with his NATO skepticism, to the Presidency of the United States.

The next morning, fifteen of us gathered for three days in Dornburg to discuss each other’s individual contributions to the book and provide feedback on the chapter drafts submitted beforehand by the participants. Some more who could not physically attend were looped into our discussions online. We were delighted by the interest in our research project, which attracted scholars based in Australia, Italy, Norway, and the United Kingdom, among others. The topics were also very diverse, ranging from more theoretical pieces to applications of the patron-client concept in a wide range of issue areas and across many state and non-state actor types. Geographically, the case studies covered almost all global regions. The most innovative papers explored the application of the concept beyond the state-to-state orthodoxy and narrow focus on security, both of which dominate the existing scholarship.

All in all, the latest workshop was a success and moved us closer to our goal of publishing the book. As the next step, revised chapters will be submitted and discussed by the editors in Rapallo (Italy) within the framework of EISA’s Exploratory Symposia in October 2024. Our ultimate goal is to have the final text ready for publication by 2025.

The workshop was financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research within the framework of the research network “Conflict and Cooperation in Eastern Europe” (https://konkoop.de/External link).