Lydie Cabane is senior Assistant Professor at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs. Her main interests include crises, governance, public policy, states, expertise, European Union and global politics.

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Lydie Cabane is Senior Assistant Professor at the Institute for Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University. Her research sits at the intersection of crisis management, public policy, and comparative politics.

Her research asks what the broad diffusion of crisis management reveals about the transformation of the contemporary state. Her current theoretical work examines how crises function as policy problems, how how crisis management institutions are shaped by existing policies and in turn generate policy feedback, and what kind of state the ‘crisis management state’ actually is. She has in particular examined the expansion of multi-level crisis management in the EU, including how member states and European institutions coordinate responses to transboundary crises — from financial shocks to pandemics — and what this reveals about the dynamics of European integration.

Currently, she contributes to two major empirical projects. The first, PROTECCT (funded by the French National Research Agency), is a large-scale comparative study of protection policies against environmental risks — floods, droughts, heatwaves, coastal erosion — across European countries. The project develops the concept of ‘environmental risk regimes’ to explain variation in how states adapt to climate change. The second, WELRISCC (funded through the NORFACE/CHANSE network), examines welfare state responses to the social risks generated by climate change, combining institutional analysis with new comparative datasets. In line with her earlier research, both projects seek to demonstrate that disasters sit at the intersection of welfare and security, and that welfare is a core dimension of security.
Her PhD research traced these questions through disaster management in South Africa — the subject of her book The Government of Disasters: State Formation and Disaster Management in South Africa (Palgrave, 2023).

Lydie is an Associate Editor of the International Review of Public Policy and the European Journal of Security Research. She is an associate member of the Crisis Lab at Sciences Po Paris and the Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation. Before joining Leiden, she held positions at the London School of Economics and visiting fellowships at Harvard University (STS Program), Stockholm University, and the University of Cape Town. She holds a PhD from Sciences Po Paris (2012).

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