Dr Maria Julia Trombetta

Expertise summary

International Relations theory (Constructivism, critical approaches); Security Studies (critical security studies, securitization theory, sociological approaches to security, security and governmentality, the politics and genealogy of fear); Environmental Politics (global environmental governance: environmental and climate security, including the securitization of migration and environmental conflicts); Securitization of natural resources, including food security; Energy Politics (energy security and energy governance, geopolitical aspects of energy transitions, perception of security in energy policy and diplomacy, environmental and energy policy in China, EU common energy policy); Institutional Economics; Methodology of Social Science.

Research Interests

My main fields of research are critical security studies and environmental governance. At theoretical level, I am interested in the theory of securitization and in sociological approaches to security. My empirical research has focused on environmental conflict and currently I am working on climate and energy security, with cases studies on the EU and China. I am interested in theoretical debates within IR and methodology of social sciences.

My research covers three interrelated topics:

• a critique of securitization theory and its implication for understanding global governance;
• energy security discourses; 
• environmental and climate security (including environmental conflict and securitization of natural resources).

My work on securitization is providing me with the theoretical framework to undertake research on energy security, climate security environmental conflict and it will provide the basis for a research project on securitization, threats politics and global governmentality. I am interested in how attempts to consider issues like the environment, energy or migration as security issues are transforming security practices and determining new institutional arrangements. In doing so, my work draws on the insights of the Copenhagen School on the performative power of speaking security but integrates them with contributions from the work of Beck on Risk Society, the research on security as governmentality and the work of Foucault.

Julia has a PhD in international politics from Aberystwyth University, a master in Environmental Governance from the University of Pavia (European School for Advanced Studies) and a MSc in Economic and Social Science from Bocconi University.

Before moving to UNNC, Julia was a Post-Doctoral Researcher and a Senior Research Fellow at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, where she worked on projects on geopolitics of energy, energy governance and energy transitions. She taught at Aberystwyth and at Oxford Brookes.  Before studying for her PhD she collaborated with ISPI and Bocconi University and published on environmental and security issues, focusing on East Asia and China. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study US environmental policy.

Undergraduate
• Global Environmental Governance 
• International Political Economy 
• Contemporary Security 
• Natural Resource Governance  
• Approaches in History and Political Science 
• Diplomacy: Past, Present and Practices 
• Food Security  

Postgraduate
• Global Environmental Governance 
• International Political Economy 
• Contemporary Security