Armando Marques Guedes

Armando Marques Guedes
Born September 9, 1952
Lisbon, Portugal
Residence Lisbon, Portugal
Nationality Portuguese
Fields International relations
Political science
Institutions NOVA School of Law

Armando Manuel de Barros Serra Marques Guedes (born in Lisbon, Portugal, on September 9, 1952) is a political scientist, anthropologist and a former diplomat with expertise in international relations, political theory and philosophy, diplomacy, security and defence, and geopolitics. He is a professor of law and international politics at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa,[1][2] as well as a professor of geopolitics at the Instituto de Estudos Superiores Militares (IESM, the Portuguese Joint Higher Command and Staff College).[3]

Early Life and Education

Marques Guedes was born in Lisbon, Portugal, the son of Clara (née Vaz Serra) and Armando Manuel Marques Guedes, a notable Portuguese Constitutional Law Professor who was the first President of the country’s Constitutional Court. Born into a socially well-established family with strong academic roots, Marques Guedes was also first grandson to Armando Marques Guedes, a Professor of Economics and the last Minister of Finance of Portugal’s (1910-1926) First Republic. Among his great-grand parents was José de Almeida e Silva, a famous painter as well as a professor at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, and one of the founders of the Instituto Etnológico da Beira. On his maternal side, this pattern was there too, with a lineage of academics implanted in Portugal that goes back for at least five generations, mostly trained at the Universidade de Coimbra, since the mid-19th century. Marques Guedes was educated in an English school in Estoril, and then at Escola Salesiana, also in Estoril; when he was nine years old, he was sent to begin his secondary school in a French college near Toulon, in southern France, at L’Institution Saint Joseph - La Navarre, before returning to Portugal to conclude his high school and pre-universitary training. For a year he dabbled in a specially selected twenty student national team of mathematics (entitled "Experimental Teams of 'Matemáticas Modernas'", a New Mathematics project spearheaded by José Sebastião e Silva) as he intended to become an astrophysicist and study at the Université de Louvain, in Belgium, but he soon changed his mind and decided to choose Humanities instead.

Marques Guedes attended the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, University of Lisbon, where he took his first degree in political administration, in 1975.[4]

In 1976, he obtained a B.Sc. (Honours) in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

From London he moved on to France, and two years later, in 1978, he received a Diplôme en Anthropologie Sociale from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the EHESS, in Paris, with a thesis on Thai, Malaysian, Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese hunter-gatherers entitled La Ceinture Indochinoise de Chasseurs-Cueilleurs. His thesis received a prize was allowed him to maintain himself after the four-year Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship he was awarded to go to London and then Paris ended, and he decided to return to his London School of Economics alma mater; the prize was awarded by French historian Fernand Braudel and French anthropologist Maurice Godelier and formally handed to Marques Guedes by British historian Eric Hobsbawm.

In July 1980, while pursuing Ph.D research there, he was awarded a MPhil. in Social Anthropology by the London School of Economics, the LSE. He was then carrying out two and a half years of participant observation field research among the Atta, hunter-gatherer groups roaming the primary tropical rain-forests of Kalinga-Apayao, in the northernmost reaches of the Philippines, in the northeastern-most ranges of Luzon's Cordillera Central.

At the LSE, in London, Marques Guedes studied under Julian Pitt-Rivers, James Woodburn and Maurice Bloch. At the EHESS, in Paris, he carried out research with Georges Condominas and Maurice Godelier. While in Paris, he regularly attended the Collége de France mid to late 1970s weekly seminars of Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss. All these, albeit they embodied very different takes, were to exert a strong influence on Marques Guedes’s theoretical leanings and preferences, the imprints of which are still felt in his contemporary academic productions.

His student colleagues at the LSE included noted South-African born David Lan, playwright, filmmaker, theatre director, now at the helm of London’s Young Vic Theater and of the Word Trade Centre arts hub in New York, and also Charlotte Seymour-Smith, daughter of poet and literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith.

After a stint of over a decade in which he left academia for a diplomatic posting in Angola, as the first Cultural Counsellor to the Portuguese Embassy in Luanda, Marques Guedes returned to Portugal in 1990, fully reentering academic life, and in 1996 he was awarded a Ph.D summa cum laude in Social and Cultural Anthropology by the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (FCSH), Universidade Nova de Lisboa.[1] The title of his thesis was Rituais igualitários. Ritos dos caçadores e recolectores Atta de Kalinga-Apayao, Filipinas; in this work he looked at the manifold linkages between religious ritual and politics among the Atta.

After nine years as an auxiliary professor of, first, Social Anthropology and then, Theory and History of Ideas, both at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, in June 2003 he became an associate professor at the then created Law Faculty, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

In May 2005, he obtained his Agregação in Law, from the Law Faculty, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and soon afterward gained tenure.

Career

Academic

Armando Marques Guedes has pursued a varied career in anthropological, sociological and international political research and teaching,[4] including fieldwork in the Philippines, Cabo Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, Angola, and East Timor.

He obtained fellowships at Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh, and a held a succession of faculty positions in anthropology, sociology, and political science (including political theory and international politics) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

In 1994-1996, Marques Guedes was a co-founder, at the Faculdade Ciências Sociais e Humanas of Universidade Nova, of what is now known as the Departmento de Estudos Políticos; there, for four years, he served as president of its Pedagogical Council. At the Nova School of Law he introduced important innovations as far as Portuguese Law Schools curricula are concerned. Some of these innovations are hefty and have had some impact in domains traditionally resistant to change. Namely the first (and so far only) course on Legal Anthropology, for which he has been responsible from 1999 up to now; and also a course on African Legal Systems, new too in Portugal’s academic panorama, where there had only been, until 1975, a discipline on “Direito Colonial”, which he ran from 2001-2002 until 2013-2014, when its lecturing was handed over to two Angolan academics, one of them one of his former doctoral students. On both topics, Marques Guedes published a variety of books and articles, as a rule new and influential in their respective fields, not only for Portuguese academic studies and those of wider lusophone countries, but also for the more global academic community.

At the Diplomatische Academie of Wien Marques Guedes published in 2008, as a monograph, what amounted to the first global analytical overview of diplomatic training, in a volume prefaced by Czech Jiří Gruša, a poet laureate who presided over PEN Club International, was a Minister of Education in Prague after being one of the signers of Charter 77, was Prague's Ambassador to Vienna, and served as the Academy’s its Director between 2005 and 2009. Marques Guedes’s monograph, titled Raising Diplomats. Political, genealogical and administrative constraints in training for diplomacy, was launched by Ambassador Gruša and Collége d'Europe Rector Paul Demaret at the College of Europe in Bruges.

As detailed below, Marques Guedes’ attention to security and defence matters, as well as geopolitics, have since become a focal point on many of his writings and conferences. This is perhaps the area in which both his academic and institutional efforts have been more influential, in his country as well as abroad. Marques Guedes is a regular speaker in a variety of Portuguese and international venues, having given talks and organised courses in over forty different countries. The scope of his academic internationalisation is wide, as he has works translated in eleven languages and has been published in fourteen countries.

In 2011 he was made an honorary professor of the Department of History of the University of Bucharest, Romania.

Diplomatic

His career is closely followed, in terms of thematic focuses, by his intellectual and academic productions. In 1985, Marques Guedes was assigned as the first Cultural Attaché (later, in 1986, Cultural Counsellor) to the Portuguese Embassy in Luanda, Angola. He remained in that diplomatic post in then war-thorn Angola until December 1989. Until 1996, he was placed at the Portuguese MFA as an advisor on African political and cultural affairs.

In 2005, he was appointed President of the Diplomatic Institute of the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 2006 was named Policy Planning Director for the Ministry.

From 2009 to 2013, Marques Guedes was President of the General Assembly of the Portuguese Society of International Law (SPDI), a branch of the International Law Association (ILA); since then he was made President of its Scientific Board. He also served as President of the Scientific Committee of the Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais e Segurança (IPRIS). He is also a Senior Advisor for the Budapest-centered International Centre for Democratic Transition, Hungary.

A large set of similar positions, mostly in think tanks and research institutions, have been held by him since the beginning of the first decade of the present century. Their range is wide. For instance, from 2006 until now, Marques Guedes has been Vice-President of the Board of the Movimento Europeu, Portugal. During the same period, he has also been actively engaged in the design of the Portuguese Strategy for the Sea, in direct collaboration with the Directorate-General for Sea Policy of the national Ministry of Agriculture, Sea, Environment and Spatial Planning. From Portugal's entry into the European Union, in the mid-1980s, he has also been involved in a score of projects managed and/or financed by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, and by the European Union, at the level of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of that of National Defence, and of that of the Ministry of Education.

He has also been a regular consultant of state entities in African countries such as Angola, Cabo Verde and S. Tomé e Príncipe, as well as European ones such as Slovenia, Serbia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and the Czech Republic, and, in Asia, East Timor, to name but a few.

Publications

Marques Guedes has published seventeen books and well over one hundred articles on the subjects of international politics, security, diplomacy, and anthropology. Marques Guedes' publications have always been multidisciplinary in nature. There are, however, perceptible changes in their thematic and geographical focuses: from Southeast Asia in the 80s and 90s to Africa in the late 90s and ever since, and from diplomacy onto foreign policy. Perhaps most significantly, his work has increasingly centered on security issues, namely Central and "East" European, Central Asian, and, mostly, from the late 90s up until now, South Atlantic development and maritime security ones. As was earlier the case with his academic publications, his writings, conferences, and consultancy work in these latter domains have make themselves felt. The handful of his publications listed below reflect those evolving preferences and their changes in focus.[4][5]

Family connections

Marques Guedes is the son of Armando Manuel de Almeida Marques Guedes (1919-2012), a law professor of historical renown and the first President of the Portuguese Constitutional Court;[8] and brother of Luís Marques Guedes, the current Portuguese Minister of the Presidency and of Parliamentary Affairs.

He is married to Christina Robertstad Garcia Benito, a Norwegian/Spanish industrial designer trained in Italy, at the famous postgraduate training institution focused on project disciplines in the areas of design and visual communication Scuola Politecnica di Design. They have three children: Constanza (born 1994), Leonor (born 1995) and Francisco (born 2001). The family currently resides in Oslo and Lisbon.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Dudau, Radu. "Armando Marques Guedes: Text of speech praising Marques Guedes on the occasion of his honorary professorship" (PDF). Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculty of Law. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  2. ↑ "Armando Marques Guedes, faculty profile". Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  3. ↑ "Professor Doutor Armando Manuel de Barros Serra Marques Guedes". Instituto de Estudos Superiores Militares. Retrieved 13 June 2013.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Marques Guedes, Armando. "Curriculum vitae". Retrieved 23 August 2014.
  5. ↑ For access to many of Marques Guedes' downloadable publications (almost two hundred of them), see https://unl-pt.academia.edu/ArmandoMarquesGuedes
  6. ↑ For the published book, see: http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2014/dark-networks-in-the-atlantic-basin
  7. ↑ Revista de Direito e Segurança, ano II, no. 3, pp. 37-53, Instituto de Direito e Segurança, Lisboa.
  8. ↑ Staff (30 September 2012). "Morreu Armando Marques Guedes" [Death of Armando Marques Guedes]. Expresso.