We live in a fast-changing and insecure world where new challenges to our freedoms arise daily. Security and Social Justice research captures and deploys the work of Sussex researchers to help us to understand these challenges and create responses that will protect our rights.
Our approach is multifaceted. Science colleagues are developing new technological options to help resolve the issues arising from the proliferation of technology in our everyday lives in areas such as identity theft, cyber crime, money laundering and terrorist activity. Together with Arts and Humanities colleagues, research focuses on the common interest in social, legal, ethical and political implications of scientific advances in, for example, surveillance, biometrics and biosecurity.
Threats to human security are no longer confined within national boundaries or narrow past conceptions that focus on armed conflict. The new agenda extends to issues like the environment, growing social and economic inequality, and governance. Increasingly, threats are focused on the individual and their community rather than state-centric. Our social scientists and historians have much to offer policy makers and NGOs as they seek to construct new international architecture that will help to resolve conflict and secure human rights across the globe.
On the domestic front our research seeks to develop an idea of citizenship that is adaptive, resilient, and responsive to threats to our security while protecting our liberties. Sussex, with its tradition of responsible political and social engagement, can assist NGOs, government departments and educationalists in developing understanding of the principles, values and institutions that protect equality, rights and justice and the ways we can preserve and protect them.