Visiting Fellow: Professor Filip Ejdus, University of Belgrade

Hosted By:  Professor Thomas Scotto

Date of Visit: 31 January - 9 February 9th

Purpose of Visit:  Tom and Filip are co-investigators of a project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation on citizen and elite attitudes towards European defence.  Together, they collaborated on a paper looking at gaps in mass-elite attitudes towards NATO ascension in Sweden an Austria.

Beyond their research collaboration, the visit was incredibly fruitful at building potential links between the School and the University of Belgrade.  On 7 February, Filip gave a guest student enrichment seminar on Ontological Security that was attended by approimately 40 postgraduates in programs across SSPS.  Discussions of a Memorandum of Agreement between Glasgow and Belgrade were held with Professor Bill Cushley, AVP for External Relations, and Glasgow academics in international relations were invited to take part in a Belgrade-Ohio State project aimed at the gamification of constructivist international relations meeting taking place in Serbia in June.

Bio:  Filip is a scholar of International Relations, with research focus in International Security. He studies how identity, memory, emotions and rationality affect security policy and international interventions. The geographic focus of his interests are the EU, Western Balkans, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. H has published extensively in academic journals in the fields of political science, international relations and security studies. Filip's most recent book is Crisis and Ontological Insecurity: Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). He is also the founder and co-Editor in Chief of Journal of Regional Security.

Currently Filip is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Political Science, University of Belgrade. From October 2015 to October 207 I was a Marie Curie Fellow at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol where he was working on a project titled Local Ownership in Security Sector Reform Activities Within CSDP Interventions of the EU.

In addition to these academic interests Filip has been closely involved with public policy as a board president of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, board member of the Open Society Foundation’s (OSF) in Serbia, academic coordinator at the Belgrade Security Forum and the co-chair of the Regional Stability in South East Europe Study Group at the PfP Consortium of Defence Academies and Security Studies Institutes.