Armando Marques Guedes

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 an aristocratic pedigree, and 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-grand parents 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 was there too, with a lineage of academics, with a non-religious Jewish background implanted in Portugal, that goes back for at least six generations, up to late-Twentieth Century, his ascendants having mostly been trained, since the mid-19th century, 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 follow 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.

Marques Guedes attended the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas, University of Lisbon, where he obtained his first degree in 1975, in political 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 on 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 thesis was awarded a prize which allowed him to maintain himself after the four-year Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship he was awarded to go to London when he was done with his studies in Paris, having decided to return to his London School of Economics alma mater. 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.

In July 1980, while pursuing Ph.D research Philippines, he was awarded a MPhil. in Social Anthropology by the London School of Economics (LSE). 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, in the northernmost mountainous reaches of the Philippine archipelago, in the northeastern-most ranges of Luzon's Cordillera Central. For some 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

At the LSE, in London, Marques Guedes studied under Julian Pitt-Rivers, James Woodburn and Maurice Bloch, the later 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.

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 reentering academic life. In 1996 he was awarded a Ph.D summa cum laude in Social and Cultural Anthropology by the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (FCSH), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. In this work he looked at the manifold linkages between religious ritual and politics in and among Atta nomadic camps.

After nine years as an adjunct professor of, first, Social Anthropology and then, Theory and History of Ideas and finally, from 1995, International Politics 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 then created Law Faculty, an organic unit of the same Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

In May 2005, he obtained his Agregação in Law, from the Law School of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and soon afterward gained full tenure.

Academic

Armando Marques Guedes has pursued a varied 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.

He obtained fellowships at Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh, and a 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 important innovations insofar as Portuguese Law Schools curricula are concerned. Some of these innovations are hefty and have had some impact in domains traditionally resistant to change. Namely the first (and so far only) course on Legal Anthropology, for which he has been responsible from 1999 up to the present; and also a course on African Legal Systems - new too in Portugal’s academic panorama, where there had only been, until 1975, a discipline on “Direito Colonial” - which he ran from 2001-2002 until 2013-2014, when its lecturing was handed over to two Angolan academics, one of them one of his former doctoral students. On both topics, Marques Guedes published a variety of books and articles, as a rule new and influential in their respective fields, not only in Portuguese academic studies and those of wider lusophone countries, but also at the level of the more global academic community.

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, a volume 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 been of late 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 different countries. The scope of his academic internationalisation is wide, and in 2016 he had some of his works translated in 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 returned 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 assumed 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 until 2014, Marques Guedes has been Vice-President of the Board of the Movimento Europeu (Portugal). During the same period, he has also been 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 has also been a regular consultant of states 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, to name but a few.

Publications

Marques Guedes has published seventeen books and well over one hundred and twenty articles on subjects as varied as international politics, security, diplomacy, social anthropology, and palaeontology. Marques Guedes' publications have always been strongly multidisciplinary in nature. There are, however, perceptible changes in their thematic and geographical focuses: from Southeast Asia in the 80s and 90s to Africa in the late 90s and ever since, and from diplomacy onto foreign policy. Perhaps most significantly, his work has increasingly been centred on security issues, namely Central and "East" European, Central Asian, and, mostly, from the late 90s up until now, South Atlantic development and maritime security issues. As was earlier the case with his academic publications, his writings, conferences, and consultancy work in these latter domains have gained a growing domestic and international recognition. The handful of his publications listed below reflect those evolving preferences and their changes in focus.

Personal life

Marques Guedes is the son of Armando Manuel de Almeida Marques Guedes (1919-2012), a law professor of historical renown and the first President of the Portuguese Constitutional Court; and brother of Luís Marques Guedes, was Portugal's Minister of the Presidency and of Parliamentary Affairs between 2010 and November 2015.

He is married to Christina Robertstad Garcia Benito, a Norwegian/Spanish industrial designer trained in Italy, at the famous postgraduate Scuola Politecnica di Design, focused on project disciplines in the areas of design and visual communication. They have three children: Constanza (born 1994), Leonor (born 1995) and Francisco (born 2001). The family currently resides in Oslo, Lisbon, London and Kent.