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Tholens, Simone

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Simone Tholens is Associate Professor of International Relations at John Cabot University, and part-time professor at the European University Institute/Robert Schuman Centre. Her main research interest are interventions, security assistance, bordering processes, and materiality of global war practices, as well as theories of contestation and practice. She has worked on these issues in the Middle East, Western Balkans and South East Asia. In her research, she combines critical approaches to security & conflict, with practice-based methodologies. Professor Tholens was previously a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University (2016-2021), and the Co-founder and Director of the Centre for Conflict, Security and Societies. She has also taught at Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe as an Adjunct Professor, teaching Conflict Management and Europe-Middle East relations. After graduating with a PhD in International Relations at the European University Institute (2012), she was a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the EUI, working on the ERC funded Borderlands project (2013-2016). She has also been a visiting fellow at the Norwegian Institute of Foreign Affairs (NUPI) and the Wissenshaftszentrum Berlin (WZB) and has held the Leverhulme Trust’s International Academic Fellowship (2020-2021).

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    “(Re)Ordering the Mediterranean: The Evolution of Security Assistance as an International Practice
    (2024) Tholens, Simone; Al-Jabassini, Abdullah
    Security assistance – foreign actors training and equipping security forces in another country – has proliferated in the Mediterranean over the last decades. Now, more than a decade on from the Arab Uprisings, security assistance cannot be considered merely a tool to obtain strategic objectives, but is in itself a site of competition, collusion and potential collision. In this Introduction to the Special Issue, we develop a framework deploying reordering as a lens through which comparative and interdisciplinary explorations can develop comprehensive and critical views of the evolution of security assistance in the Mediterranean. We propose a theoretical framework centred on international practice and socio-material network theory, which brings different types of providers and recipients, as well as the discourse-material structures underpinning them, into a common frame. The framework conceptualizes security assistance as operating at vertical (between provider and recipient), and horizontal (between vertical blocks) levels. It can purposefully be analysed across three dimensions – knowledge, materiality and networks. In so doing, we may be able to observe how, despite the absence of formal institutions, norms or governing mechanisms, security assistance constitutes an international practice and contributes to the ordering, and continuous reordering, of the Mediterranean as a governable geospatial field of intervention.
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    An EU–South Mediterranean Energy Community: The Right Policy for the Right Region?
    (2014) Tholens, Simone
    The European Commission has spelled out its policy ambition for EU energy cooperation with the southern neighbourhood with plans for the establishment of an ‘Energy Community’. Its communications make clear that an Energy Community should be based on regulatory convergence with the EU acquis communautaire, much in the same vein as the existing institution carrying the same name; the Energy Community with Southeast Europe. It is puzzling that the Commission insists on repackaging this enlargement concept in a region with very different types of relationships vis-à-vis the EU, especially when considering the lukewarm position of key stakeholders in the field. According to them, any attempt to introduce a political integration model in this highly sensitive issue area in the politically fragmented MENA region might run the risk of hurting the incremental technical integration process that has slowly emerged over the past few years.
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    Which and whose authority? EU support to security governance in Aceh
    (2012) Tholens, Simone
    This article focuses on the use of informal justice systems to support Community Based Policing with the aim to create legitimacy between state and society in post-conflict processes. It analyses the EU's involvement in reviving the customary justice system adat in Aceh, Indonesia in order to discern how the concept of authority is mediated from an international organisation to local stakeholders via Security Sector Reform (SSR). The article operates with three conceptions of authority present in situations of security sector assistance: modern, postmodern and traditional. It explores the different faces of authority present in the case of Aceh, and unravels which and whose authority the EU propagates through its support to SSR. The article finds potentially contradictory processes at work, and highlights the need for more research on the use of informal justice systems within SSR.
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    Practices of Intervention: Assembling Security Force Assistance in Lebanon
    (2021) Tholens, Simone
    This article examines the material-discursive assemblages at work in Security Force Assistance (SFA) programs. Departing from the idea that SFA follows a patron-client type relationship, or that it is normatively bounded, it argues that SFA is emergent and negotiated via epistemic practices. It identifies three sets of practices at work – i) identifying the epistemic object; 2) establishing boundaries of action; and 3) rendering visible the material nexus. The article draws on the case of SFA to Lebanon since 2006 to demonstrate how heterogeneous material elements, global discourses, and actors' interests and agendas are translated and stabilised in SFA programs.