Stephan De Spiegeleire- MA, MIA, C.Phil
- Principal Scientist at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies
Stephan De Spiegeleire
- MA, MIA, C.Phil
- Principal Scientist at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies
About
164
Publications
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Introduction
Professional researcher in international relations, security and defence with almost 20 years of experience in some of the world's leading research institutions.
I try to combine substantive depth with methodological rigor and creativity, always with a clear policy focus in mind. Although my research interests are very broad, my special areas of expertise are European security and defense policy, as well as Russian and Ukrainian foreign and security policy (including their domestic sources). The key themes running through most of my current research projects are network-centrism, (meta)foresight and adaptive planning
Current institution
Additional affiliations
March 2005 - present
Education
August 1989 - May 1993
August 1986 - June 1987
September 1984 - June 1986
Field of study
- Histoire et politique internationales
Publications
Publications (164)
This paper provides the epistemic equivalent of an 'MRI' scan of the English and Russian literature on deterrence in an international security context. Using a variety of different recent datasets and -tools, the paper exposes a surprisingly high number of glaring weaknesses and holes. The paper’s first, more ‘technical’, section presents compellin...
Most countries put significant amounts of time and effort in writing and issuing high-level policy documents. These are supposed to guide subsequent national defence efforts. But do they? And how do countries even try to ensure that they do? This paper reports on a benchmarking effort of how a few “best of breed” small- to medium-sized defence orga...
With the increasing complexity and volume of data, the transformation from streaming information into actionable knowledge becomes more and more challenging and requires a synthesis of computational and substantive approaches. In this view, the collaboration between developers and substantive experts is essential for obtaining meaningful and strate...
Artificial intelligence (AI for short) is on everybody’s minds these days. Most of the world’s leading companies are making massive investments in it. Governments are scrambling to catch up. Every single one of us who uses Google Search or any of the new digital assistants on our smartphones has witnessed first-hand how quickly these developments n...
With the increasing volume of data, there is a growing need for dynamic data visualization to help reveal instant changes in data patterns. There exist many commercial visualization tools, but traditional scholars are often disengaged from the tool development process; thus, the choice of functionalities is contingent upon tool developers whose cho...
"The other side of the security coin" recognizes societal resilience to conflict as the foundational pillar of peace. Avoiding traditional conflict-centric metrics such as the number of battle-related fatalities, level of insurgency activities, or total amount of displaced peoples, this study outlines positive drivers of peace within the realm of s...
Events unfolded once again at a swirling pace in 2016. Terrorists hit Europe’s capital in March. The British population voted for Brexit in June. Turkish armed forces failed to topple Erdoğan in July. A resurgent Russia flexed its military muscles again in the Middle East and actively interfered in American elections, in which the American populati...
Based on a number of old and new datasets, this report finds evidence of a pathological condition in international relations it calls ‘assertivitis’:an affliction characterized by an almost pathological (from a Western European point of view) inclination to assert one’s power, especially in negative ways. We find one case – China – of developed ass...
The policymaking community puts ever more emphasis on basing policy on rigorously collected and curated objective evidence (‘evidence-based policy’). But what is the equivalent for the future of what ‘evidence’ is for the past and present? This paper presents some examples of what we call ‘Foresight 3.0’: an attempt to distil more insights about th...
We are seeing new and promising forms of cooperation flourish all around us. Many of them share a number of interesting characteristics: they tend to be peer-to-peer, dynamic, surprisingly informal, 'open', etc. Some of them are even starting to tackle some global challenges. This report sketches a few of these new forms of cooperation and explores...
Eight observations from two practitioners about the use and utility of strategic foresight in security and defense planning.
"National security starts with strategic anticipation: what are the risks for the Dutch national security? How can the Netherlands prepare for this, and what choices and investments are needed in order to do so?
The HCSS Strategic Monitor analyses global trends in cooperation, confrontation and conflict, and identifies the most important security...
2014 is the year in which Russia's growing assertiveness morphed into aggression. This report uses some existing and builds a few new datasets in order to chronicle what actually happened during this year.
"Palm oil and soy can be considered as two of the most important agricultural
commodities in the global food system. The global annual production is ever increasing,
to serve a growing world population that is now eating more meat and processed
food. This has and will likely continue to have significant impacts on the environment,
our ecosystems, o...
The policymaking community puts ever more emphasis on basing policy on rigorously collected and curated objective evidence (‘evidence-based policy’). But what is the equivalent for the future of what ‘evidence’ is for the past and present? This paper presents some examples of what we call ‘foresight 3.0’: an attempt to distill more insights about t...
This study points to worrying trends in how far two great power contenders, Russia and China, have been willing to go to assert themselves in the international arena. It concludes that increased willingness to resort to brinkmanship has heightened the danger of a ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’-type event that could spiral into uncontrollable escalation....
Since its last bottom-up security and defense review (2010), the Dutch government has committed itself to strengthening its ‘strategic anticipation’ function. Various public and private actors participate in this effort by examining trends and developments in the global security environment and by teasing out their potential security implications f...
![Figure 3-Emergent vs. deliberate strategy [Mintzberg 1994]](profile/Stephan-De-Spiegeleire/publication/224885787/figure/fig4/AS:667853636263951@1536240123292/Emergent-vs-deliberate-strategy-Mintzberg-1994_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 4-Areas where real options are used [Copeland 1998]](profile/Stephan-De-Spiegeleire/publication/224885787/figure/fig5/AS:667853636263955@1536240123404/Areas-where-real-options-are-used-Copeland-1998_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 6: Characteristics of organizational networks [Riemer 2002]](profile/Stephan-De-Spiegeleire/publication/224885787/figure/fig2/AS:302719974821891@1449185474823/Characteristics-of-organizational-networks-Riemer-2002_Q320.jpg)
Capability-based planning has become the gold standard for defence planning. It is increasingly understood as encompassing a broad range of abilities beyond just military materiel and personnel, evolving into a much wider range of factors. It has also helped NATO defence planners adapt forces to requirements rather than fit ends to means. But there...
The objectives of the Joint Operations 2030 Study were to:
• Consider the impact that potential future global security environments could have on joint
operations across a range of representative operations;
• Determine the types of capabilities that may be needed in this future environment; and
• Consider how applied technologies might have a pote...
This article presents early observations from the experiences of two early adapters of a new generation of national security strategies, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The new strategies are broader in scope in addressing security challenges and are "whole of government,' even increasingly "whole of society' in nature. The strategy develop...
The gap between practicioners and theorists of international relations shows few signs of narrowing on either side of the Atlantic. Whereas a certain tension between these two groups may be inevitable (and even desirable), this paper will explore a number ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript
HCSS analysed 76 peer-reviewed academic studies and 42 expert opinions on the security implications of financial-economic crises. .This analysis found three main pathways by which financial-economic crises impact international stability and security
• Economic crises impact the balance of power at both the regional and global levels. They alter the...
In the past decade, Ukraine has known steady if unspectacular labor migration flows in both westerly and easterly directions. It has been demonstrated that this 'escape valve' has provided many Ukrainian families with additional means to survive the difficulties of the country's painful transition period. There is much speculation that the new 'div...
Questions
Questions (14)
Data-intensive research is still all the rage these days. Breakthroughs in AI (and especially NLP) seem likely to only accelerate its adoption. But can anybody provide examples (preferably from different disciplines) of instances where such research discovered entirely new insights into topics that scholars had been working on for a long time, or where it just totally undermined ruling paradigms in the field?
Think of Putin and Crimea, Milosevic and Kosovo Polje, Jerusalem, Saudi as the 'guardian of the holy places', etc.
Extracting causal relationships from texts is far from trivial, but there are quite a few intriguing pieces in the recent literature that discuss how this could be done. E.g. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2014/650147/. The 'technology readiness level' of this work seems significantly below that of things like entity, sentiment, event, etc extraction. But at least some progress seems to have been made.
Given the availability of so many large full-text academic databases, it would be of course fantastic to be able to 'extract' all of the causal hypotheses that have been formulated over the years in various disciplines. But so does anybody know of any existing textmining tools that can already do this - even if it's just for English?
Textmining tools are becoming ever more useful, but it remains difficult to find good tools for CJK languages. If anybody knows of good tools for - especially - Chinese, I'd be grateful for a link.
Cooperation is an important topic in all social sciences and quite a few natural ones. Some of those have taxonomies (typologies, classification schemes, whatever you want to call them) of the different types of cooperation in THEIR discipline. E.g. economists/management theorists have different types of cooperation between companies (e.g. for 'strategic alliances - ranging from consortia to M&A; or from contractual to transactional arrangements, etc.). Ecologists talk about mutualism, commensalism, etc. And I can go on and on. I've also been surprised that I have not been able to find this in the disciplines where I would have expected to find this. Game theorists have thought deeply about the nature of strategic interaction, but apparently less about the different TYPES of cooperation. To network scientists, a node seems to be 'just' a node and an 'edge' just an edge. Public choice scholars look a lot at aggregating individual choices, but again I haven't found any systematic treatment of the types of cooperative choices.
My question: has anybody ever come across an attempt to derive some taxonomic principles ACROSS these disciplines? Whereby we try to lift these discipline-specific classification schemes of types of cooperation between THEIR units to a higher level of abstraction in order to explore what a taxonomy of cooperation 'primitives' might look like. The idea would be to then explore which 'types' within this taxonomy occur more 'in the wild', what their pros and cons are.
Any pointers to any relevant literature would be greatly appreciated. And if you are genuinely interested in this, please do drop me a note and I will then invite you to the collaborative online space where we are exploring these issues in more detail. Thanks!
I am looking for good (dynamic - i.e. dynamic gif or video) visualizations that show how turbulent real-life international scale-free networks can be. For instance, the global propagation of computer viruses; of 'viral' memes, etc. Can anybody help me?
Is there a (preferably open-source) tool available that generates co-occurrence tables for n-grams? I.e.: that can tell you which n-grams a bigram like "water security" tends to co-occur with within an certain (user-defined) 'window' - say within 2 sentences before or after its occurrence in a sentence?
Does anybody know of a good piece of software that allows the analyst to find interesting similarities and/or differences across long lists of items that each have a certain value? To give a concrete example: we use a number of different textmining tools to find the associations between various concepts that appear in a corpus. The strength of the association is calculated on the basis of some algorithm that looks at the likely co-occurrence of two concepts within a certain text segment (e.g. a sentence, or 3 sentences, or a paragraph). We do that year per year, which gives us a list for each year with the top-n concepts that are associated with another concept that is the object of the analysis (e.g. security). Each one of those associated concepts has a label (e.g. energy) and a value (e.g. 20, meaning that there is a .2 probability that the term 'energy' co-occurs with ‘security’ across the entire corpus. E.g. the concept 'security' is associated with the concept 'energy' with a value of Y in 2010 and a value Z in 2011; or with the concept 'ethnic' with value W in 2010 and value X in 2011. And there are 100s of these concepts in every one of those ‘yearly’ lists and we also have data for many years. Is there an easy way to automate the analysis of such ranked lists?
Does anybody know of any useable textmining software programs that do topic modeling and also cover Chinese as a language? This seems harder to find that I had thought. I found things like FudanNLP - (http://code.google.com/p/fudannlp/) and Ictclas (http://www.ictclas.org/ictclas_download.aspx), neither of which I have been able to make work so far. Pingar (http://apidemo.pingar.com/AnalyzeDocument.aspx) doesn't seem to have topic extraction. Mallet does seem to have a Chinese module and does have topic modeling, but I have yet to figure that one out too. Does anybody have any other suggestions?
