Armando Marques Guedes

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

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-renowned 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. One of his illustrious great-grandparents 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 intellectual pattern is there too, with a lineage of academics with a Portuguese Sephardic Jewish background, that goes back for at least six generations since the mid-19th (his family having returned to Portugal in the first decade of that century, after almost three centuries in exile) up to late-20th century, his ascendants having mostly been trained at the Universidade de Coimbra.

Marques Guedes was primarily 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 boarding school near Toulon, in southern France's L’Institution Saint Joseph – La Navarre, before returning to Portugal to conclude his high-school and pre-university training. For a year he dabbled in a specially selected twenty student national team of mathematics (entitled "Turmas experimentais de 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. However, he soon changed his mind and decided to read Humanities instead. He nevertheless maintained an unflinching passion for cosmological subjects, adding to it another one: Ordovician palaeontology, an area in which he occasionally engages in published peer reviewed academic work for over two decades.

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

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

From London he moved 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 dissertation was awarded a prize that allowed him to maintain himself after the four-year Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship he received to go to both London and Paris. The prize was proposed and voted on by French historian Fernand Braudel and French anthropologist Maurice Godelier and formally handed to Marques Guedes by British historian Eric Hobsbawm, and it allowed him to return to his London School of Economics (LSE) alma mater.

At the LSE, Marques Guedes studied under Julian Pitt-Rivers, James Woodburn and Maurice Bloch, the latter two as his academic advisers. 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 the famous poet and literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith.

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 maîtres-penseurs, albeit they developed very different theoretical and methodological takes, were to exert a strong influence on Marques Guedes's theoretical leanings and preferences, the imprints of which are still clearly felt in his contemporary academic productions.

In July 1980, while pursuing PhD research in the Philippines, he was awarded a MPhil. in Social Anthropology by the London School of Economics. He was at the time carrying out two and a half years of participant observation field research among the Atta, hunter-gatherer groups roaming the thick primary tropical rain-forests of Kalinga-Apayao, a province in the northernmost mountainous reaches of the Philippine archipelago, in the northeasternmost ranges of Luzon's Cordillera Central. During his thirty two months there he collected detailed ethnographic data on the religious and political aspects of the social life of the hitherto unstudied Atta pygmy Negrito nomads. Marques Guedes has published a variety of books and articles on both of these topics.

Marques Guedes also innovated in other domains. At the Diplomatische Academie of Wien, in Austria, he published a monograph in 2008 that was effectively the first global analytical overview of diplomatic training. The volume was prefaced by Czech Jiří Gruša, a poet laureate who presided over PEN Club International, a Minister of Education in Prague after being one of the signers of Charter 77, then Prague's Ambassador to Vienna, and who finally 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 may be seen below from his publications, Marques Guedes’ attention to security and defence matters, as well as geopolitics, have since become a focal point of many of his writings and conferences. This is perhaps the area in which both his academic and institutional efforts have, of late, 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 well over forty countries. The scope of his academic internationalisation is wide, and by mid-2017 he had some of his works translated into twelve languages and published in fifteen countries.

In 2011 he was made an honorary professor of the Department of History at the University of Bucharest, Romania. 2016 – "Breves Reflexões sobre o Poder e o Ciberespaço", com Lino Santos, Revista de Direito e Segurança, no. 6, pp. 189–210, NOVA Law School/NOVA Direito, UNL, Lisboa. 2015 – "Liaisons dangereuses: reading and riding the winds of security risks in the Atlantic south", in 2014 – "Le Droit de Mer et les côtes et les rimlands de l’Europe du sud-ouest et de l’Afrique du nord-ouest: quelques insuffisances du cadre juridique face aux enjeux géopolitiques présents", in Revista de Direito e Segurança 2013 – "De novo o repertório político performativo e as águas revoltas do semi-presidencialismo Timorense – mas agora redux", in Rui Graça Feijó (org), O Semipresidencialismo Timorense: História, Politica e Desenho Institucional, Coimbra, Almedina/CES. 2012 – "Geopolitical shifts in the Wider Atlantic past, present and future", in (org.) John Richardson, The Fractured Ocean. Report on current changes on Maritime Policy in the Wider Atlantic: 11–59, German Marshall Fund of the United States, Washington DC, http://www.ocppc.ma/sites/default/files/FracturedOcean.pdf 2012 – "European Energy Security: The Geopolitics of Natural Gas Projects", in Ruxandra Ivan (org.), New Regionalism or No Regionalism? Emerging Regionalism in the Black Sea Area: pp. 69–94, with Radu Dudau, Ashgate, London. 2011 – "Clusters of Diplomatic Training in the Central European Initiative Countries against a Comparative Background", Centre for Advanced Academic Studies and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Diplomatic Academy Proceedings, vol. 8, no. 1: 21–39, Dubrovnik and Zagreb, Croatia. 2010 – "Кавказский меловой круг: "укрепление России в южной части постсоветского пространства - эпохальное событие", in Russian [The Caucasian Chalk Circle: "The strengthening of Russia in the southern part of the post-Soviet space – a watershed event"], in Caucasus Times, with questions from Sergey Markedonov, 26 December 2010, in https://web.archive.org/web/20140903113056/http://www.caucasustimes.com/article.asp?id=20691, Prague and Moscow. 2010 – "La lusofonia nella partita del Sud-Atlantico", Limes 5-2010: 55–67, Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica, numero speciale, Il Portogallo è grande, Roma. 2010 – Controlos Remotos. Dimensões Externas da Segurança Interna em Portugal. The study has, as a co-author, Luís Elias, Instituto Superior de Ciências Policiais e Segurança Interna e Almedina, Lisboa e Coimbra. 2010 – "President and Prime Minister. Twinning up and switching down", Magazine. Jornal Oficial da Presidência da República Democrática de Timor-Leste, vol 1, no. 1: 12–13. High-resolution pdf available for download at , Dili, East-Timor. 2010 – "Geopolitica del Ciberspazio", Quaderni Speciali di Limes. Rivista Italiana di Geopolitica: 187–199, Roma. 2010 – '"Power-sharing in the Tropics and the ubiquitous ‘Presidential drift’: the mechanics and dynamics of unstable equilibrium in the semi-presidentialism of East Timor'", in (ed.) Michael Leach et al., Understanding Timor-Leste: 131-139, Hawthorn, Swinburne Press, Australia. 2010 – "The Regional Aftermath of the ‘Five Day War". Political, economic, and security overheads of the conflict in Georgia, Boletim do Instituto de Estudos Superiores Militares 7: 165-211, Ministério da Defesa, Portugal, with Radu Dudau. 2009 – A Guerra dos Cinco Dias. A Invasão da Geórgia pela Federação Russa, Instituto de Estudos Superiores Militares e Prefácio, Ministério da Defesa, Lisboa [preface by Admiral Álvaro Sabino Guerreiro] [reviewed in Relações Internacionais 25: 147–150, by Luís Tomé 2009 – '"The Unpredictability of Contemporary Global Conflicts'", 43. Jahrbuch 2007/08, Diplomatiche Akademie Wien: 224–246, Vienna, Austria. 2009 – "Serbia, the EU, NATO and the hope of a bulk accession into the Union of the Western Balkans. Reflections around the Ljubljana Agenda for the New Phase in the Stabilization and Association Process", in The Ljubljana Agenda for the New Phase in the Stabilization and Association Process, Evroski Pokret u Srbji & Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Berlin, Germany and Belgrade, Serbia [the paper is available at https://web.archive.org/web/20131122004832/http://www.emins.org/ljagenda/index.html]. 2008 – '"Is there a global al-Qaeda? Some thoughts on the organizational limits of contemporary transnational terrorist groups'", Public Lectures 2008: 47–58, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sofia, Bulgaria [publié, aussi, en version française: "Existe-t-il une al-Qaida Mondiale? Quelques réfléxions sur les limites organizationelles des mouvements terroristes transnationaux contemporains"]. 2008 – "Queen Elizabeth's visit to Portugal, 1957'", in the 2008 Annual Report of the British Historical Society, pp. 13–30. 2008 – Raising Diplomats. Political, genealogical and administrative constraints in training for diplomacy, Favorita Series, Diplomatiche Akademie, Vienna, Austria [prefaced by Jiří Gruša]. 2007 – Ligações Perigosas. Conectividade, Coordenação e Aprendizagem em Redes Terroristas, Almedina, Coimbra [reviewed by Major-General J.M. Freire Nogueira, Segurança e Defesa 7]. 2007 – "A ‘Linha da Frente’. Do Sudoeste dos Balcãs à Ásia Central", Geopolítica, 1: 19–77, Centro Português de Geopolítica, Lisboa [also available for download at https://web.archive.org/web/20130515060652/http://www.cepen.org/2010/03/a-%e2%80%9clinha-da-frente%e2%80%9d-do-sudoeste-dos-balcas-a-asia-central/, Brasil]. 2006 – Trei Conferente, a collection of three essays published by the Institutul Diplomatic Roman, Bucuresti, Romania [prefaced by Vlad Nistor]. 2005 – Entre Factos e Razões. Contextos e Enquadramentos da Antropologia Jurídica. Almedina, Coimbra. 2005 – Sociedade Civil e Estado em Angola. O Estado e a Sociedade Civil sobreviverão um ao outro? Almedina, Coimbra. 2004 – "Sobre a União Europeia e a NATO", Nação e Defesa 106: 33–76, Instituto de Defesa Nacional, Ministério da Defesa, Lisboa, http://www.idn.gov.pt/publicacoes/nacaodefesa/textointegral/NeD106.pdf 2004 – O Estudo dos Sistemas Jurídicos Africanos. Estado, Sociedade, Direito e Poder, Almedina, Coimbra. 2003 – Pluralismo e Legitimação. A edificação jurídica pós-colonial de Angola, Almedina. This monographic study has as co-authors Carlos Feijó, Carlos de Freitas, N’gunu Tiny, Francisco Pereira Coutinho, Raquel Barradas de Freitas, Ravi Afonso Pereira and Ricardo do Nascimento Ferreira. 2003 – Litígios e Pluralismo. Estado, sociedade civil e Direito em São Tomé e Príncipe, Almedina, Coimbra. This monographic study has as co-authors N’gunu Tiny, Ravi Afonso Pereira, Margarida Damião Ferreira and Diogo Girão. 2002 – '"Wanders and wonders: musing over nationalism and identity in the state of East Timor"', in Nationbuilding in East Timor, Pearson Peacekeeping Institute, Canada. 2002 – "Thinking East Timor, Indonesia and Southeast Asia", Lusotopies, Karthala, Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. 2002 – Litígios e pluralismo em Cabo Verde. A organização judiciária e os meios alternativos, a monographic study with, as co-authors, Maria José Lopes, Yara Miranda, João Dono and Patrícia Monteiro, Direito e Cidadania 14: 305–364, Praia, Cabo Verde.

Personal life Marques Guedes is the son of Armando Manuel de Almeida Marques Guedes (1919–2012), a public law professor of historical renown and the first President of the Portuguese Constitutional Court; and elder brother of Luís Marques Guedes, Portugal's Minister of the Presidency and of Parliamentary Affairs between 2010 and November 2015.

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