The study of war and security has a long pedigree at Sussex and has been a growing area of the department in recent years. Current work in this area covers war and political violence, broader health and environmental security issues, peace processes, the politics of Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and South Asia, and is informed by distinctive theoretical positions.
Faculty in this area include Professor Stefan Elbe, Dr. Jan Selby, Dr Anna Stavrianakis, Dr. Shane Brighton, Dr. Stefanie Ortmann, Dr. Sergio Catignani, Dr. Paul Kirby and Dr. Lara Coleman. They run a number of master's programmes in security incuding the MA in International Security, the MA in Geopolitics and Grand Strategy, and the MA in Conflict, Security and Development. The group organises a New Security Challenges Speaker Series. In addition, the group organises, together with colleagues in Anthropology and Law, an interdisciplinary Justice and Violence Research Centre, which holds fortnightly research seminars and annual symposia and encourages collaborative research.
The faculty all have substantial records of research and publication in this area.
Stefan Elbe joined the Department in 2004, after holding positions at the University of Essex, the University of Warwick, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the London School of Economics, where he also obtained his doctorate in the Department of International Relations. His research revolves around international security, the global politics of disease, and international relations theory. He is author of Strategic Implications of HIV/AIDS (2003) and
Europe: A Nietzschean Perspective (2003). Additional information about his current research, publications, working papers, teaching, and areas of doctoral supervision can be found at www.stefanelbe.com.
Jan Selby's research focuses on peace processes; environmental security; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and International Relations theory.
On peace processes, Jan's research advances a critical political economy- and geopolitics-informed account of contemporary peace processes and post-conflict peace-building. This research considers a large number of peace processes, but centres principally on the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Egyptian, Northern Ireland, India-Pakistan, Cypriot and Sudanese cases. An early stage of this research was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
On environmental security, Jan's research focuses especially on international water and climate politics. Jan is author is author of a monograph and various journal articles on Israeli-Palestinian and Middle Eastern water politics. Until very recently he was Principal Investigator on the EU Framework 7-funded project Climate Change, Hydro-Conflicts and Human Security (CLICO), undertaking research (together with Sussex colleague Clemens Hoffmann) on water-climate-conflict linkages in Cyprus, Israel-Palestine and Sudan. Together with Clemens, Jan recently convened a major international conference, Rethinking Climate Change, Conflict and Security, papers from which are forthcoming in the journal Geopolitics. Jan and Clemens are also currently working on a manuscript on water-climate-conflict issues, forthcoming with IB Tauris. Jan has served widely as a consultant and advisor on water policy issues.
While Jan has conducted field research in a number of countries, his main area focus is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is reflected in his work on both peace processes and environmental security.
Beyond these main areas of research, Jan maintains a strong interest in International Relations theory. He has published on contemporary global governance; on the use and misuse of the work of Michel Foucault in IR; on the work of Edward Said; and, together with Sussex colleague Anna Stavrianakis, on militarism and International Relations (their co-edited volume was published with Routledge in 2012).
Jan currently supervises 8 PhD students, and is interested in taking on new projects on peace processes; environmental security; and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Anna Stavrianakis joined the department in 2006 from the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on three areas: the arms trade, military globalisation and the role of coercion in world politics; the theory and practice of global civil society; and academic activism, and the ways in which academics can play a role in social change. Her publications to date are: "(Big) Business As Usual. Sustainable Development, NGOs, and the UK Arms Trade", Conflict, Security and Development, 5(1), 2005: 45-67; and "Call to Arms: The University as a Site of Militarised Capitalism and a Site of Struggle",Millennium, 35(1), 2006: 138-154. She is currently working on a manuscript on NGO activity on the arms trade.
Sergio Catignani joined the Department of International Relations in Autumn 2009 as a Lecturer in Strategic and Security Studies. His subject and research expertise and teaching interests comprise Middle East Security issues (particularly Israeli security, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Gulf Security) as well as strategic and military studies (especially irregular warfare, civil-military relations and contemporary military operations). His recent publications include /Israel and Hizbollah: An asymmetric conflict in historical and comparative perspective/ (Routledge, November 2009), co-edited with Clive Jones, and Israeli Counter-Insurgency and the Intifadas: Dilemmas of a Conventional Army (Routledge, 2008).
Stefanie Ortmann joined the Department in 2009. Her current research focuses on the evolving identity of the Russian state as Great Power and democracy in the post-Soviet period and on the concept of identity in IR. She is also interested in the state and the Westphalian system in IR more generally and in the Eurocentric nature of the discipline. She is currently engaged in a Leverhulme-funded research project which investigates elite networks between Russia and Central Asia and their implications for post-Soviet state building, the nature of "international politics" in the CIS, and the perpetuation of the post-Soviet space. Her recent publications include "Diffusion as discourse of danger: Russian self-representations and the framing of the Tulip Revolution" in Central Asian Survey, 27:3-4, 2008.
Shane Brighton joined the Department of International Relations at Sussex in 2009, having previously taught at Birkbeck College, the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, where he gained his PhD. Dr Brighton has also worked as a full-time researcher with the ESRC's programme on the Domestic Management of Terrorist Attacks, at Chatham House and the Royal United Services Institute. His current research focusses on contemporary British security and defence policy, terrorism and resilience, strategic thought and the political sociology of war. With Tarak Barkawi (LSE, IR), he is engaged in a major project assessing the historical sociology of warfare in colonial contexts. Together, they edit the Hurst/ Columbia 'Critical War Studies' book series.
Paul joined the Department of International Relations in September 2012, having previously taught at the London School of Economics, Birkbeck and Goldsmiths. His PhD concerns different ways of explaining wartime sexual violence in feminist and gender theory, with a particular emphasis on issues in the philosophy of social science and an extended case study of atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was also previously an editor at Millennium: Journal of International Studies for Volume 39 (2010-2011). His publications include “How is rape a weapon of war?: feminist international relations, modes of critical explanation and the study of wartime sexual violence” in European Journal of International Relations (2012); “Damage, unincorporated: war studies in the shadow of the information bomb” in Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 5 (3) 2011; “That obscured subject of violence” in Subjectivity, 3 (1), 2010, pp. 117-121.
Lara's research is focused around three main themes: social and political theories of dissent and resistance; the politics of knowledge and the political sociology of development and violence. She has broader underlying interests in governance, political economy, and the role of law and rights in the regulation of populations. She is currently working on a book, tentatively entitled Docile Dissent: Human Rights, Corporate Responsibility and the Colonisation of Struggle, in which she offers an account of how resistance to neoliberalisation is neutralised and contained within manageable parameters. She draws on extensive ethnographic engagement with the international trajectories of peasant and worker struggles against multinational corporations in Colombia to make a broader statement about how the violent elimination of disruptive political subjects has become increasingly blurred with the making of a terrain of docile dissent which invests and erases struggles in specific contexts.A second project, with Doerthe Rosenow (Royal Holloway), interrogates the appropriation of some of the concepts of Michel Foucault and explores the possibility of a more politicised engagement with questions of critique and resistance through the lens of actually-existing struggles.
Matthew Ford
Matthew joined the Department of International Relations in the summer of 2013. His research focuses on socio-technical change in the armed forces (particularly the United Kingdom and the United States), military effectiveness and strategy. He is especially interested in the way that military technique emerges from social processes which, in turn, both frame and are shaped by policy formulation. His recent work has explored the relationship between discourse and policy in the development of US counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan as well as the methodological tensions inherent in the intelligence models used for the precision targeting of insurgents. He is currently working on a book for Hurst & Co that uses small arms technology to explore Western military culture.