Nijat Eldarov

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Nijat Eldarov is a Ph.D. fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His research interests lie at the intersection of critical security studies, science and technology studies, and cultural political economy. More specifically, he studies how security governance in technocapitalism comes to increasingly embrace dynamic, network-based, more-than-human rationalities of systems-cybernetic approach, beyond modernist discourse of population management. 

Prior to joining the University of Copenhagen, Nijat Eldarov studied International Relations at the Academy of Public Administration (BA) in Azerbaijan (2013-2017), and European Affairs (MSc) at Lund University in Sweden (2017-2019). Nijat also completed a fellowship programme (2022) in a University of Jena project JENA-CAUC (Resilience in the South Caucasus: prospects and challenges of a new EU foreign policy concept).

Office hours: Tuesday 14-15

Primary fields of research

• Critical security studies
• Science and technology studies
• Cultural political economy
• Materialist philosophy
• EU's migration policy
• Post-Fordism
• Emerging technologies
• Uncertainty management

Current research

Nijat Eldarov's Ph.D. project investigates how emerging technologies, such as AI, biotechnologies, and nanotechnologies are produced at the EU's borders, in countering networked threats, such as migrant smuggling and drug trafficking. It advances a discussion on the understanding of border security innovation as preemption, which embraces speculative, ecological, holistic and networked models of risk management. The dissertation also explores the possibility of critique in such a security ecosystem characterized by uncertainty. 

Nijat's Ph.D. project is supervised by Maja Zehfuss (primary supervisor) and Jonathan Austin (co-supervisor).

Teaching

I design and teach the elective course "Security, Uncertainty, and Politics of Complexity" (15 ECTS) for the 2024 spring semester. The course provokes discussions on the turbulent scientific paradigms, such as complex systems thinking, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, and other cybernetic paradigms, and how they inform forward-looking security rationalities characterized by uncertainty, connectivity, and contingency. Forward-looking security rationalities are explored across different security sectors, such as military security, counter-terrorism, migration management, surveillance and policing, critical infrastructure protection, climate change and disaster risk management, and health security. The course also raises philosophical questions about the ambivalence of turbulent scientific paradigms, which on the one hand inspire security and law-enforcement organizations in responding to emergencies, and on the other hand, inform the development of postmodern branches of critical theory.