Small States and Leadership

Clever leadership can transform a state’s smallness into an asset when promoting national and international interests at home and abroad. Small states face structural disadvantages related to their size in the international community. Having a small population inherently inhibits the aggregate structural power of states and creates hurdles that need to be compensated for. A small state’s administrative capacity is more limited than the capacity in bigger states, making it more challenging to engage in decisive and independent policy making. Good leadership skills are required to be able to practice the correct prioritisation and tactical bargaining in international diplomatic surroundings. Small states need to defend their interests in their key sectors and within these sectors they need to be able to show leadership initiative, offer clever solutions to problems, while also wielding positive influence outwards. Leadership skills are imperative to make this happen and secure successful diplomacy for a small state.

This course will give you a brief introduction into small state studies and leadership studies. We explore these topics from various perspectives, including the functioning and challenges of small public administrations and public sector economics and management in small states; the characteristics of small states’ foreign and security policies; how small states perform and profile themselves on normative leadership in gender equality; and lastly, we will focus on the challenges and opportunities of small state leadership in international diplomacy.

The course is taught by an outstanding team of scholars from the Centre for Small State Studies at the University of Iceland, the University of Copenhagen, Tallinn University of Technology, Vilnius University, the University of Ljubljana and Århus University. These scholars have already run several projects together focusing on small state studies and achieved a cross-sectoral reach into for example political science, international relations, foreign and security policy and public administration.