International Relations and Security Research Areas
British Foreign Policy before and after Iraq
- Professor Jason Ralph currently holds a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to examine British Centre-Left Foreign Policies after Iraq.
Foreign Policy Attitudes and Support for War
- Dr Graeme Davies is currently conducting an ESRC funded project examining British public attitudes towards the use of international force.
Europe and the Cold War
- Professor Christoph Bluth holds an AHRC Fellowship for his research project 'Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions and Conventional Forces in Europe during the Cold War'.
US Foreign Policy: The American Exception
- Professor Jason Ralph is conducting a set of three research projects, partly funded by the ESRC entitled ‘The American Exception’. These examine how the United States and its liberal allies have reacted to a growing cosmopolitan consciousness across world society.
Research expertise on Korea
- Professor Christoph Bluth currently holds a British Academcy Small Grant for his research project on South Korea: 'The South Korean National Security Policy and the US-ROK Alliance'.
South East Asia specialists
- Professor Duncan McCargo has conducted an ESRC-sponsored project on political violence in South East Asia, focusing, in particular, on South Thailand. His ESRC-funded ninth book, Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell University Press 2008) won the Asia Society's inaugural Bernard Schwartz Book Prize for 2009.
- Professor McCargo currrently holds a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship where he is researching Judicialization and Politics in Thailand: The New Extraconstitutionalism.
- Dr Adam Tyson's current research includes social compliance and censorship in Southeast Asia, formative trauma and political violence, and political Islam in the Malay world.
Leading experts on Middle East and Israel
- Professor Clive Jones has co-authored an internationally recognised study on Israel that examines the complex relationship between ethnicity, religion and security, and its impact on the process of democratic governance in Israel.
- Dr Alan Craig, Pears Lecturer in Middle East Studies focuses his research on the dynamic relationship between Israel’s construction of international humanitarian law (IHL), the conduct of it's military operations and Israel’s state legitimacy.
Research focus on civil war: Africa
- Professor Alice Hills has conducted research on urban operations for the British Academy, but her recent ESRC-funded projects focus on security governance in West Africa.
- Professor Hills was appointed the civilian policing expert responsible for assessing the United Nations Development Programme's Rule of Law programme in Somalia. This required her to evaluate the policing project currently being implemented in the three recognised regions of Somalia, and to make recommendations for future approaches to supporting rule of law and security programming in the country.
Political Violence expertise
- Dr Brad Evans is the Founder and Director of the 'Histories of Violence' project which provides an open access resource centre which critically explores the wider problematic of violence in the context of theory, film, art, literature, theatre and personal testimonies.
Environmental security challenges
- Dr Hugh Dyer has worked on how environmental security challenges notions of citizenship and normative theory.
International relations and security at POLIS employs a number of regional specialists who give great depth to our research into new security challenges.
Staff profiles