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My aim is to find out how the (diverse) understanding of state is actually creating the dilemma in first place; in a best-way scenario, my aim is to show that the problems are not problems per se but rather self-created dilemmata developed through concept implications

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Experiencing the presentations and writing our reports, it seems we have found a comfortable status quo - a problem has been given to us, and we try to solve it. However, given the cases of Haldor Topsøe, Control Risk and PET, we have different imaginations of state being brought to us - assuming that state is implicitly contextualized differently in each situation, I come to wonder how these understandings of "state" has shaped our perception of the presented problem

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How is the nation-state conceptualized within the presentations and the reports?

- With some presentations focusing heavily on state-centric perspectives, I wonder what perception and ideas of state are manifested. What concept of state prevails for the practioners, how is this understanding influencing their risk assesment and in what way do different organizations understand state differently? Did we bluntly copy the respective practioner's understanding or do our reports engage in a different notion of state?

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The main strategy will be to examine the immediate communicative situation - the presentations (with a focus on the pracitioners' backgrounds and their agencies' interests) and the reports and how certain ideas of the concept of state have been duplicated.

First, I want to engage in Sartori's idea of "conceptual containers" and place the idea of state within his analysis (is the state in the presentations and reports defined through negation [high-level category] or through contextual definition [low-level category]?). With Sartori's eagerness to develop a standard for comparative science, I think there will be some interesting associations for the understanding of "state".

Continuing then with Ifversen's premises that a) social reality is somehow generated by the way we think or talk about it and b) language is the prime entrance to social reality, I want to introduce a second-order analysis, removing the focus on Sartori a bit and see how concepts are challenged.

Focusing then on Skinner's idea of conceptual change through speech acts in strategic moments (in this case: the presentations), a synchronic analysis is paving the way to understand the changed concept of state within the three chosen presentations.

Important though - the pracitioners are barely talking about the essence of states per se. It is more about the implict functions of states they allocate in their problem descriptions (PET has a specific perception of state but mostly expressed through their focus on Denmark. Control Risks understands the presence in certain states as risky, but they focus on Libanon - these specific 'experience factors' should not be left out when assesing their perception of state)

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I think that especially the contrast of Haldor Topsøe (the almost transcended understanding of the expert employee visiting sites, not states), Control Risk (states as a source of risk) and PET (state as a protector of its businesses, almost paternal features)  will be found to be duplicated in our reports and, through this, will make visible what implications a diverse understanding of state as a concept has

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Corry, Olaf (2012), “Securitisation and 'Riskification': Second-order Security and the Politics of Climate Change”, Millennium - Journal of International Studies 40(2), pp. 235-258

Ifversen, Jan (2011) “About key concepts and how to study them” Contributions to the History of Concepts, 6 (1), pp. 65-88

Koselleck, Reinhart (1989) “Linguistic Change and the History of Events”, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Dec., 1989), pp. 649-666

Petersen, Karen Lund (2012) “Risk – A field within Security Studies”, European Journal of International Relations 18(4), pp. 693-717

Petersen, Karen Lund (2019) Teaching Innovation: Preparing for an uncertain future

Sartori, Giovanni (1970) “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics”, The American Political Science Review 64 (4), pp. 1033-1053

Schedler, Andreas (2011) “Concept formation”, in International Encyclopedia of Political Science, ed. by Bertrand Badie et al, Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, pp. 371-383

Skinner, Quentin (1995) "The State", in Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson (eds.), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change

Skinner, Quentin (2002) Visions of Politics: regarding method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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We are all just playing roles - not only we as students disguised as consultants but also the practitioners who are - in a way - expressing their insitutions' understanding(s) of the world. There is nothing essential to state other than what we make of it through our perfomative acts of speech