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. The title of his thesis was Rituais igualitários. Ritos dos caçadores e recolectores Atta de Kalinga-Apayao, Filipinas.
After a stint of over a decade in which he left academia for a diplomatic posting in Angola, as the first Cultural Counsellor to the Portuguese Embassy in Luanda, Marques Guedes returned to Portugal in 1990, fully re-entering academic life. In 1996 he was awarded by the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (FCSH), Universidade Nova de Lisboa a Portuguese PhD summa cum laude in Social and Cultural Anthropology. In this work he looked at the manifold links between religious ritual and politics in and among Atta nomadic camps.
After nine years as an auxiliary professor of, first, Social Anthropology and then, Theory and History of Ideas and finally, from 1995, International Relations and Political Science – all at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa – in June 2003 he became an associate professor at the newly created Law Faculty, an organic unit of the same university. In May 2005, he obtained his Agregação in Law, from the Law School of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and soon afterward gained full tenure.
Career
Academic Armando Marques Guedes has pursued a diversified career in anthropological, sociological and international, as well as national, political research and teaching. This included fieldwork in the Philippines, Cabo Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, Angola, and East Timor.
Chronologically, he first obtained fellowships at Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh, and later held a succession of faculty positions in anthropology, sociology, and political science (including political theory and international politics) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and at the Instituto de Estudos Superiores Militares (IUM – IESM). In 1994–1996, Marques Guedes was a co-founder, at the Faculdade Ciências Sociais e Humanas of Universidade Nova, of what is now known as the Departmento de Estudos Políticos; there, for four years, he served as president of its Pedagogical Council.
At the Nova School of Law, he introduced courses on Legal Anthropology and African Legal Systems, the first of their kind in Portugal.citation needed Marques Guedes has published a variety of books and articles on both of these topics.citation needed
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.
Diplomatic His professional diplomatic career has been closely followed, in terms of thematic focuses, by his intellectual and academic productions. In 1985, a couple of years upon his return from his intensive fieldwork in the Philippines, Marques Guedes was assigned as the first Cultural Attaché (later, in 1986, Cultural Counsellor) to the Portuguese Embassy in Luanda, Angola. He remained in his diplomatic post in then war-thorn Angola until December 1989. Following that, and up to 1996, he was placed at the Portuguese MFA as an advisor on African political and cultural affairs.
In 2005, he was appointed President of the Instituto Diplomático of the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 2006 was made Policy Planning Director for the Ministry, a function he kept for the following three years.
From 2009 to 2013, Marques Guedes was President of the General Assembly of the Portuguese Society of International Law (SPDI), a branch of the International Law Association (ILA). He also served as President of the Scientific Committee of the Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais e Segurança (IPRIS). He is a senior advisor for the Budapest-centred International Centre for Democratic Transition, Hungary.
A large set of similar positions, mostly in think tanks and research institutions, have been held by Marques Guedes since the beginning of the first decade of the present century. Their range is wide. For instance, from 2006 up to the present, Marques Guedes has been vice-president of the Board of the Movimento Europeu (Portugal). During the same period, he has also actively engaged in the design of the Portuguese Strategy for the Sea, in direct collaboration with the Directorate-General for Sea Policy of the national Ministry of Agriculture, Sea, Environment and Spatial Planning. From Portugal's entry into the European Union, in the mid-1980s, he has also been involved in a score of projects managed and/or financed by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, and by the European Union, at the level of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of that of National Defence, and at that of the Ministry of Education.
He worked as a consultant of both state and non-state entities in African countries such as Angola, Cabo Verde and S. Tomé e Príncipe, as well as European ones such as Slovenia, Serbia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Georgia, Croatia, and the Czech Republic, and, in Asia, East Timor.
Publications