Contact Details

• Tel: +44 (0)116 252 2795
• Fax: +44 (0)116 252 5082
• Email: tm155@leicester.ac.uk

Research Interests

My research focuses on security (theory and practices), sovereignty, agency, and intervention after the Cold War. I am also interested in the changing theorisation of war and conflict in the developing world and the Yugoslav break-up and wars.

Before joining the University of Leicester I taught European and comparative politics and international relations at the University of Westminster and Brunel University.

Current Research

My current research is engaged with developing an understanding of the expansion of security and post-Cold War security practices that is grounded in the contemporary social and political context (domestic and international). Although I do not begin from a post-modernist position, I believe that post-modernist theorists have descriptively identified an important shift in society away from ‘meta-narratives’, or, to put it in another way, the ability to give meaning to society and to engage in future orientated projects. This has a major impact both in terms of how individual agency is understood and experienced but also importantly for collective agency and the relationship between the state and citizens. Security policies, for example, were traditionally premised upon a defence of the national interest (however understood), which in turn was premised upon a specific set of social, political and economic arrangements and a clear relationship between the government and the governed. I argue that it is the absence of this that provides the particular dynamic behind many policies today.

Recent Research Activities

I regularly present papers at BISA, ISA, the ECPR and other working groups.

Teaching

• International Security Studies (postgraduate campus based and distance learning)
• Human rights, Ethics and War in the Post-Cold War Order (postgraduate campus based and distance learning)
• International Security Studies (undergraduate second year)
• The Changing Character of War (undergraduate final year)

Most Recent Publications

Books

(2009) Critique, Security and Power. The Political Limits to Critical and Emancipatory Approaches (London, Routledge).

Journal Articles

• (2011) Human Security and the Separation of Security and Development,  Conflict Security and Development, volume 11,  number 2, pp 235 - 260.
• (2011) The Domestic Limits to American International Leadership After Bush, International Politics, volume 48, issue 2, pp 188 - 206.

• (2010) The Responsibility to Protect and the End of the Western Century, The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, volume 4, issue 1, pp 69 – 82.
• (2009) Critical Security Studies, Arena Journal, number 32 2009, pp 139 - 151.
• (2008) Power and Agency in the Human Security Framework, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, volume 1, issue 21, pp113 – 128.
• (2008) Review Article - Whose Wars are New? New Wars, Old Wars and the New Western Way of War, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, volume 2, Number 3, pp 392 – 398.
• (2007) C.A.S.E Collective, ‘Europe, Knowledge, Politics — Engaging with the Limits: The C.A.S.E. Collective Responds’, Security Dialogue, 2007 38: 559-576
• (2006) C.A.S.E Collective, ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe, A Networked Manifesto’, Security Dialogue, vol 37, No 4 pp 443 - 487.

I also write non-academic articles and reviews for the online political magazine, spiked-online and culturewars.org and am a member of the Battle of Ideas committee.

Chapters

• (2011) From Ethical Foreign Policy to National Security Strategy: Exporting Domestic Incoherence in Daddow, O and Gaskarth, J, Eds,  British Foreign Policy: The New Labour Years (Palgrave).
• (2010) Power and agency in the Human Security Framework in Hynek, N and Chandler, D, Eds, Re-Thinking Human Security (Routledge).
• (2010) The R2P and the End of the Western Century? in Cunliffe, P, Ed, Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine (Lexington).
• (2007) From the State of War to the State of Nature, Human Security and Sovereignty, chapter in Bickerton C, Cunliffe P, & Gourevitch A, Eds, Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of Contemporary International Relations (UCL Press).