Biography
Rik Coolsaet is Professor of International Relations at Ghent University (Belgium). He is Chair of the Department of Political Science at Ghent University. He is senior associate fellow at the Egmont Institute (Royal Institute for International Relations) in Brussels and member of the European Network of Experts on Radicalisation (ENER).
From 2002 to 2009 he served as Director of the ‘Security&Global Governance’ Program at Egmont–Royal Institute for International Relations (Brussels). He has held several high–ranking official positions, such as deputy chief of the Cabinet of the Belgian Minister of Defence (1988–1992) and deputy chief of the Cabinet of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (1992–1995). On the issue of terrorism he has been coordinating research on jihadi terrorism, that resulted in several publications. In October 2011 his edited volume Jihadi Terrorism and the Radicalisation Challenge. European and American Experiences was published at Ashgate. This edition was launched at an international conference in Brussels (www.egmontinstitute.be/conf-10oct.html).
He also published the first comprehensive study on the history of Belgian foreign policy (Belgium and its foreign policy 1830–2000, 4rd revised edition, 2003, in Dutch and partly in French). He also researched the evolution of diplomacy (The Transformation of Diplomacy at the Threshold of the New Millennium, in: Jönsson, C., Langhorne, R., Diplomacy. London, Sage, 2004, Vol. III). He writes and comments extensively on international relations and Belgian foreign policy. His latest publication is A History of Tomorrow’s World (De geschiedenis van de wereld van morgen (2008, in Dutch), that attempts to analyse the long–term change patterns in international relations and the dynamics behind today’s world order. Upon publication in February 2008 this book appeared on the Belgian bookshops’ bestseller list for several months.
He is also involved in several ongoing studies on the diplomatic history of Belgium. Together with Vincent Dujardin and Claude Roosens, he is writing the history of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from the early days of the Kingdom of Belgium until today. Together with Dutch and Belgian colleagues he is involved in a major study on Belgian-Dutch relations since 1945. The former will be published in the Autumn of 2012, while the latter was presented to the Belgian and Dutch Ministers of Foeign Affairs on December 1, 2011.
