Emilian Kavalski (PhD, Loughborough University) is a lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. He has held Marie Curie research positions at Aalborg University (Denmark) and Ruhr University-Bochum (Germany), the I.W. Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta (Canada), and the Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the American Center for Indian Studies (New Delhi, India). Kavalski's current research deals with the security governance of complexity and the interactions between China, India, and the European Union in Central Asia.
Kavalski's research at the Center expanded on this experience and was intended to contribute to a manuscript tentatively titled "Global Insecurity Governance." Through his project entitled "Natural Disasters and Security Governance: Shifting from a Strategic Culture of Risk-Elimination to a Strategic Culture of Adapting to Risk," he aimed to: (i) demonstrate the paradigmatic insecurity that natural disasters cause to the strategic culture of security governance; (ii) critique the assumptions of predictability and controllability underpinning mainstream understandings of security governance; (iii) contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary approach to security governance, bringing together the insights of natural science and international relations theory; (iv) develop a more refined and critical understanding of security and its governance by exploring the usually overlooked experience of risk-management among natural/bio-physical systems; (v) undertake a detailed analysis of the security governance mechanisms of ecological communities (both immunological and species adaptation); and (vi) reveal the importance of security governance premised on the adaptation to risk rather than its elimination.