News

LusoGlobe will host an international workshop titled “Brazil and Portugal: Special Topics on Security and Defense in Times of Geopolitical Tension”.
The event is organized within the Master’s Programme in Diplomacy and International Relations and the undergraduate in Political Science and International Relations,

The workshop featured two guest speakers from the ECEME (Brazil), bringing Brazilian strategic and defense perspectives into dialogue with Portuguese and European contexts. The invited experts are:

• Colonel and Professor Dr. Carlos Eduardo de Franciscis, ECEME (Brazil)

• Professor Dr. Hélio Farias, ECEME (Brazil)

The two sessions explored current challenges in South Atlantic security, cooperation frameworks between Brazil and Portugal, and the evolving defense landscape shaped by global geopolitical tensions.

As a result, one episode of the LusoGlobe Talks podcast!

Nélson Ramalho, lecturer at the Social Work Institute of Universidade Lusófona, has recently published a research study in collaboration with Sónia Ribeiro (Instituto Superior Miguel Torga) and Helena Teles (Centre for Public Administration and Public Policies) in the European Public & Social Innovation Review (Q3).

The study examines the impact of political dynamics on stress and engagement levels among social workers in Portugal, highlighting that political and institutional conditions significantly influence their professional well-being.

The findings reveal that, despite the strong resilience demonstrated by social workers, there are increasing risks of emotional exhaustion, associated with the demands and pressures of organisational contexts and the public policies that shape their professional practice.

The research therefore underscores the importance of developing and implementing policies that promote improved working conditions, recognising the central role of social workers in advancing human rights, social justice, and community cohesion.

https://epsir.net/index.php/epsir/article/view/2140

Sabrina Medeiros, researcher at the Lusófona Centre on Global Challenges and Professor of International Relations at Universidade Lusófona, participated as a member of the panel “From Source to Shore: How Cocaine Travels from Latin American Ports to Europe’s Gateways” at the 24-hour Conference on Global Organized Crime (OC24), one of the world’s leading events dedicated to the study of transnational illicit economies.

https://oc24.heysummit.com/talks/from-source-to-shore-how-cocaine-travels-from-latin-american-ports-to-europes-gateways/

The panel, part of OC24’s 2025 edition, brought together specialists analyzing the maritime “pipeline” that moves cocaine from Latin American departure ports through transshipment hubs and into European gateways. Sabrina Medeiros contributed with research on maritime security, customs governance, and inter-agency coordination, drawing on empirical findings from port-level studies and broader Atlantic security dynamics.

The session examined how consignments are inserted upstream into logistics chains at origin ports, how they are repositioned midstream across Caribbean, Atlantic, and West African hubs, and how they enter Europe downstream through both major and secondary ports. Sabrina’s contribution emphasized the critical need to integrate customs security, maritime domain awareness, and naval operations to counter the logistical sophistication of trafficking networks.

She highlighted how insider facilitation, low scanning capacity, fragmented jurisdiction, weak data-sharing protocols, and inconsistent security standards create vulnerabilities across the maritime corridor. Her intervention aligned port-level evidence from Brazil with comparative insights from other Atlantic and European ports, demonstrating that trafficking resilience is driven not by geography alone but by governance gaps and institutional fragmentation.

OC24 is recognized internationally as a central forum bringing together academics, practitioners, law-enforcement experts, and policy-makers to discuss emerging trends in organized crime. The conference’s unique format — 24 continuous hours of global panels — enables cross-regional dialogue and real-time exchange of expertise.

Debate-conversation on the role of Psychology within the disciplinary field of Religious Studies, as well as epistemological, critical, and clinical questions that relate Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality in contemporary society and the world.

On 24 October 2025, at 10:03, the Universidade Lusófona hosted a webinar entitled “Game-Politics: Wargames with the U.S. Army”, featuring the presentation by Dr Aggie Hirst, Associate Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

Dr Hirst has been researching since 2017 the resurgence of wargames in the U.S. armed forces, examining how games and simulations are used as tools for training, planning, and cognitive development. Based on over 100 hours of interviews with practitioners, her study reveals how the act of playing can serve both as a learning instrument and as a behavioural conditioning mechanism. 

According to Dr Hirst, “what matters is not what we play, but how we play.” She encourages a critical reflection on the use of games in military training processes, raising ethical and political questions about transforming a playful activity into a means of cultivating force and discipline. 

The Social Work Institute (ISS – FCSEA) marks the opening of the 2025/26 academic year with an exhibition that recalls and pays tribute to women distinguished with the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded by the European Union to those who stand out for their exceptional contribution to the defense of human rights, freedom of thought, and other fundamental freedoms.