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Jef Huysmans holds a Chair in Security Studies. He is also director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities, Governance (CCIG) at the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Jef Huysmans joined the Open University in 2002, after six years of teaching and research at the University of Kent at Canterbury. He gained his PhD from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium) in 1996.

Course development and teaching

Jef Huysmans co-chaired, with Dr Prokhovnik, the OU course team of the level 3 POLIS course Living political ideas (DD306). Previously he worked on the third level international studies course A world of whose making (DU301) and the second level politics course Power, dissent, equality: understanding contemporary politics (DD203), for which he wrote the introductory book What is Politics? (Edinburgh University Press 2005).

He has supervised several Ph.D. students among others in the field of security studies, international political theory and grassroots politics.

Research interests

Jef Huysmans has published widely on security theory, the securitization of migration, asylum and refugees, and international political theory. Currently he focuses on the diffusion of insecurities and implications for democracy, political theories of the everyday and critical methodologies in security studies. He conducts his new work on the everyday politics of insecurity with OU and other colleagues through the university’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance. He is Principal Investigator of the project ‘International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies’ funded by ESRC programme International Networking and Training Opportunities (2009-2011).

Jef Huysmans also works on the political significance of mobility, specifically in relation to European citizenship. He led, with Dr Aradau, work package 3 Enacting mobility: making a more democratic European citizenship for the OU-led, European Union funded (Framework 7) project Enacting European Citizenship (2008-10).

He edits the journal International Political Sociology, with João Pontes Nogueira from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.

He chaired the research network COST Action A24. 'The Evolving Social Construction of Threats' (2005-2008) and was also associate researcher in the Framework Programme 6 project The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security, for which he produced a multimedia module on the politics of freedom and security.

From September 2004 until December 2006, he conducted with Professor Thomas Diez (University of Birmingham) a two year ESRC research project Migration, Democracy and Security (MIDAS), which compared the securitization of the free movement of people in Germany and the United Kingdom after 9/11.

PhD supervision areas

Critical security studies
International political theory
Securitisation of migration and mobility
Interstices between security and citizenship
Interstices between democracy and security
Acts of citizenship
The everyday as site of international politics

Last updated: 22 July 2013