The Transatlantic relationship is changing and in some cases expanding in the countries that it encompasses: from northern Canada to southern Brazil and from Norway all along Africa’s Atlantic coast.  The agenda is also becoming increasingly diverse with cyber-security, maritime security, asymmetric warfare and energy as a few of the new security challenges facing this relationship.  It is often said that relations between North Atlantic countries are taken for granted which is unwelcome in a world which requires greater not lesser solidarity.  Energy, and energy matters particularly where security concerns are raised,  provides a landscape as diverse, and sometimes as contentious, as addressing conflict resolution or peace keeping in far flung regions of the world where individual states do not see their national interests directly confronted and therefore opt out of involvement and engagement.

Against this backdrop, the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Energy Security will focus on transatlantic energy security with the framework of this evolving global security environment. The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, publisher of the JES, is supporting an International Congress on Energy Security scheduled to be held in Geneva over 4-5 April 2012.  This focused issue of the JES on Transatlantic Energy Security, and individual paper contributions, will be made available to the 600 delegates expected to participate in the conference’s proceedings as well as to all of our regular readers and subscribers online.    
 
Contributions should address and consider present and future transatlantic energy security within the changing dynamics of the global security system.  Subject categories could address inter alia  the future of nuclear power in Europe and North America, the role of renewable energy technologies and future innovations capable of changing the region’s energy mix, the geopolitics of oil and gas dependence and how to break these cycles, the future of unconventional oil and gas and development and its impact on national or regional energy security, the impact of the international debt crisis on commodity prices, energy markets, and investment, competing visions of energy security in Europe, Africa and the Americas, et al.       
 
Potential contributors should submit an initial abstract to: editor@iags.org no later than 15 January for consideration.  Contributors will be contacted shortly thereafter.  Publication will take place in March 2012 in advance of the Geneva conference to ensure wide distribution.