Global Security Seminars (2022–2025): A Structured Dataset on Regional and International Security Dialogue

Global Security Seminars (2022–2025): A Structured Dataset on Regional and International Security Dialogue

This dataset provides a structured, longitudinal record of the Global Security Seminars organised by the Near East Institute, a policy-oriented research institute within Near East University, between 2022 and 2025. The Institute is dedicated to research and informed dialogue on regional and international affairs, with particular attention to conflict, geopolitics, and security dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Global Security Seminars are a flagship series of expert discussions and webinars featuring invited academics, policymakers, and practitioners addressing contemporary security challenges across different regions and issue areas. This dataset transforms these qualitative event records into a systematically coded and machine-readable format, enabling comparative, thematic, and longitudinal analysis.

Each seminar is treated as a single entry and coded according to a set of analytical variables, including thematic focus, sub-themes, speaker profiles, regional focus, key topics, and policy relevance. These variables capture both the substantive content of each seminar and its broader relevance to regional and international security debates.

The purpose of structuring the dataset in this way is to move from descriptive event documentation to a research-ready resource that allows for systematic analysis. This includes identifying changes in thematic focus over time, tracking the evolution of regional security debates, and examining shifts in policy-relevant discourse.

In this framework, seminars are understood as structured sites of expert discourse production rather than isolated events. Each seminar contributes analyzable content, including problem framings, key issues, actor references, and policy perspectives. When aggregated over time, these elements form a coherent dataset of curated expert security discourse.

When analysed collectively, the dataset allows for the identification of recurring and changing patterns in security discussions. This includes shifts in thematic emphasis—for example, between traditional military-security concerns and emerging issues such as energy, migration, and hybrid threats—as well as changes in how regions and actors are framed within expert debates.

The dataset also supports a structured analysis of agenda formation by identifying which issues are consistently emphasised, which emerge or decline over time, and how different policy areas intersect. This enables a more systematic understanding of how security priorities are constructed within a curated expert forum, as well as how they relate to broader regional and international developments.

Finally, the dataset allows for the mapping of epistemic patterns across the seminar series. This refers to recurring speakers, institutional affiliations, and thematic linkages over time. Rather than treating participants as isolated contributors, the dataset makes it possible to observe how expertise circulates and how knowledge on regional security issues is co-produced through repeated interaction between academic, policy, and practitioner communities.

Overall, this dataset constitutes an institutional archive of the Near East Institute’s public-facing research activities. It reframes the seminar series as a structured and evolving corpus of expert discourse through which changes in security framings, policy attention, and epistemic networks can be systematically observed and analysed over time.

Note on methodology

The dataset was developed through a process of manual coding based on systematic content analysis of seminar recordings. Each recorded seminar was reviewed and coded according to a consistent set of predefined categories, including thematic focus, sub-themes, speaker type, regional focus, key topics, and policy relevance.

The coding process was guided by an iterative but standardised framework designed to ensure internal consistency across entries while allowing for the capture of substantive variation between seminars. Categories were developed inductively from the seminar series itself and refined through repeated application to ensure comparability across time.