Security and International Relations
The Security and International Relations Programme (SIRP) was established in Spring 2010 to bring together, and provide an external focus for, the extensive research undertaken within the Department of Politics and International Relations in the area of security studies and International Relations.
Research within SIRP is divided into four main strands; Borders and Identities; Intervention and Statebuilding; Security Discourses and Just War; Security and Resilience. Current research projects include the China-India border dispute, energy security (with a particular emphasis on Russia, biopolitics and statebuilding, just war theory, EU immigration policy and the efficacy of the Responsibility to Protect.
In addition to our extensive academic publications SIRP members regularly engage with policymakers and the media and host a wide range of conferences, workshops and seminars (please see our events listings below). Members have been invited to speak at a variety of conferences, think tanks and government offices including the UK Foreign Office, Chatham House, and the Asia Centre, Harvard University. Our staff have also been granted research funding by a number of external bodies including the ESRC, the British Academy, the EU and the Nuffield Foundation.
All staff are engaged in PhD supervision and are interested in applications from prospective students seeking to undertake PhDs in the broad area of security studies. We teach security-related modules at the MA level and currently run three MA programmes; International Relations; Security and International Relations; and International Relations and Global Change. Additionally, members teach a variety of undergraduate modules and we offer BA degrees in International Relations and International Relations and European Politics.
For more information please see our
Members
Dr Aidan Hehir (Programme Director)
Senior Lecturer in International Relations
Dr Dibyesh Anand
Reader in International Relations
Professor David Chandler
Professor of International Relations
Professor Roland Dannreuther
Professor of International Relations
Dr Patricia Hogwood
Reader in European Politics
Dr Thomas Moore
Senior Lecturer in International Relations
Dr Frands Pedersen
Senior Lecturer in International Relations
Contact Us
All staff are based on the Fifth Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London, W1T3UW.
Please contact Dr Aidan Hehir or telephone Suzy Robson on 020 7911 5138
Research Strands
Borders and Identities
Borders and Identities are key to the way communities and states organise politics. Points of interest for researchers in IR and politics include the fluidity and fixity of borders; borderlands as zones of exchange as well as conflict; the challenges of multi-border governance; and borderlands as spaces of tension between identities and legal frameworks. DPIR members are currently working on projects on immigration and multi-border governance in Europe; diaspora; Muslim identities in Russia; and majority-minority relations in India and China, including the issue of Tibet and the Sino-Indian Himalayan border dispute.
Intervention and State Building
In the post-Cold War era humanitarian intervention and statebuilding have become two of the most prominent and controversial issues in international relations. The research focus of this strand includes critically analysing the empirical record of both intervention and statebuilding and assessing the implications of the current discourses and policies for international law and international order. SIRP is host to the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding a cross-disciplinary journal devoted to academic and practitioner analysis of international intervention.
For a special online edition of Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 'The Future of Statebuilding: Ethics, Power and Responsibility in International Relations' please click here.
Security Discourses and Just War
Research in this area is concerned with how security discourses are operationalised through just war theory. This work engages with the political dimensions of just war theory, especially as it relates to the connection between critical geopolitics and normative claims about the use of violence within international relations. The focus is on establishing a dialogue between just war theorists and critical security scholars to understand ‘states of exception’ within contemporary foreign policy, state practice and comparative security strategy.
Security and Resilience
This strand comprises two themes;
Energy Security and Resilience: How resilient are current social and political institutions in a world of growing energy scarcity? How are we to conceptualise the sources of conflict, and the potential for cooperation, over access to key energy resources such as oil and gas? These research questions are the focus of the research project entitled ‘Policy over Natural Resources’ (POLINARES) that Roland Dannreuther and Visiting Fellow Wojciech Ostrowski are undertaking as part of a €2.7 million EU FP7 project and where the University of Westminster, under the leadership of Roland Dannreuther, is the lead coordinator for the initial analytical and theoretical framing of the project. For further details see www.polinares.eu
Theorizing Resilience: Resilience is increasingly becoming a key concern in international security discourses on a wide range of themes from international terrorism to the impact of global warming. Members of the research cluster are keen to engage in the investigation of the politics of resilience and its links to neoliberal, neo-institutionalist, behaviouralist, therapeutic and biopolitical framings of the political sphere. Resilience and its inculcation in ‘at risk’ communities both at home and abroad assumes, constructs and reproduces a particular understanding of how we organise to deal with security threats - resilience posits that the sphere of intervention is ourselves (our understandings and choice-making capacities) rather than the external world and in this respect reflects and institutionalises changes in both the domain and the practices of security.
Current Projects
Policy for Natural Resources (Polinares)
This is an EU Framework 7 project which involves eleven institutions from across Europe and which is examining the sources of conflict, collaboration and competition over access to oil, gas and minerals up until 2040. Roland Dannreuther is the lead coordinator for the first part of the project (workpackage 1) which provides the initial historically-informed theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics of conflict and cooperation over access to oil, gas and minerals. For further details, see www.polinares.eu
The Politics of Resilience
In collaboration with the University of Lapland this long-term project seeks to develop a critical understanding of discourses of resilience with a particular focus on the assumptions of the human subject underlining them. In relation to the grounding ontological claims of resilience concerning insecurity, vulnerability, knowledge, risk and adaptive capabilities, the project seeks to engage genealogically, highlighting resilience’s reliance on neoliberal, post-liberal, therapeutic, neo-institutionalist, behaviouralist and biological framings of the political subject. Along with a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and externally-funded research outcomes, a co-authored book will be published in 2012.
Has the Emergence of the “Responsibility To Protect” Necessitated the Establishment of a Standing UN Force?
The project will advance the debate on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) by addressing the issue which has consistently been cited as the concept’s primary weakness; can R2P be enforced when force is required to halt mass atrocities? While the incorporation of R2P into international political and legal discourse has been a major achievement, questions remain as to whether the concept can, or indeed will, be enforced without significant reform of international law and in particular, the military capacity of the United Nations (UN). On the basis of this ongoing debate, this project is inspired by the following questions;
• Is the efficacy of R2P ultimately predicated on the establishment of a standing UN force?
• What are the structural, constitutional and strategic implications of adapting existing proposals for a UN peacekeeping force to include coercive military intervention?
This project does not seek to advance a proposal for the establishment of a UN standing force capable of undertaking R2P-type interventions; rather the intention is to evaluate the theoretical rationale for such an innovation and to establish the logistical and operational requirements involved.
China, Oil and Global Politics
This project is a joint one with Philip Andrews-Speed at Chatham House and explores the internal and external drivers of China’s international strategy and how this is influencing China’s foreign policy and its rise as a great power. A jointly authored book will be published in Spring 2011.
Institutional Strategies for the Securitisation of Immigration in Europe
The securitisation of immigration in Europe’s political discourse and policy circles is eroding the boundaries between internal and external security and between policies for policing, immigration and anti-terrorism. This project evaluates the EU’s institutional strategies for sustainable immigration into Europe. It addresses the agents, sites, characteristics and impacts of institutionalisation on border control. Case studies include the border agency FRONTEX and the EU’s attempts to ‘export’ border control through institutional frameworks such as the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).
The Responsibility to Protect and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention
In 2001 the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty published the report The Responsibility to Protect. The term ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) has since dominated debate on humanitarian intervention becoming a seemingly obligatory reference point for all researchers in this field. As the ten-year anniversary of the ICISS report approaches this project seeks to critically assess the achievements of R2P and assess its likely future impact on humanitarian intervention and international relations more broadly
Critiquing the Liberal Peace
Criticism of international intervention and peacebuilding policy-frameworks is often couched in terms of the problems of ‘liberal peace’ perspectives, held to result from liberal frameworks of universality and progress, leading to essentialist and hierarchical understandings of the non-Western Other and ‘one-size-fits-all’ exportations of the market and democracy. This project reflects on how the critique of liberalism is articulated within statebuilding and peacebuilding discourses and how this relates to, reflects and informs policy practices. It is run jointly with colleagues from Tufts and the LSE. Along with a number of peer-reviewed journal articles, a co-edited book will be published in 2011.
Immigration and Internal Security in Germany
Founded in the aftermath of the National Socialist regime and as a part-state in ideological conflict with the ‘other’ Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) has always been intensely preoccupied with internal security. This project evaluates Germany’s response to the challenges posed by mass immigration for internal security. Key interests include the constitutional tradition of 'combative democracy' which justifies a proactive internal security and surveillance policy; and the more recent explicit linkage of immigration with anti-terrorism policy.
Handbook of International Statebuilding
Commissioned by Routledge, this jointly run project with the University of Denver will create an academic guide covering the background and development of international statebuilding as a policy area, considering some of the key methodological debates, giving in-depth focus to key policy areas – such as security, development, democracy and human rights - and giving a full exploration of the problems of policy implementation. Along with a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and externally-funded research outcomes, the guide will be published in 2012.
Representing China's Tibet
A British Academy funded research that seeks to identify and critically analyse the China's main strategies of public diplomacy around Tibet. The project will contribute to a monograph ‘Tibet: Competing Histories and Futures’ which will analyse, for the first time, competing Chinese, Tibetan, Western and Indian perspectives.
From Contact Zone to Conflict Zone: Geopolitics and Boundary Making in China-India Relations
The project analyses the Sino-Indian border conflict through a historical understanding of boundary making. It examines the introduction, imposition, and appropriation of a modernist idea of boundary – a clearly identifiable, mappable line that demarcates rather than brings together – and territoriality in the Himalayan region through the aegis of British India and then postcolonial India and China. http://chinaindiaborderdispute.wordpress.com is the project website, launched after a major international conference ‘Revisiting China-India Border Dispute’ in June 2010.
Events
SIRP hosts a number of events including conferences, workshops and seminar series. Currently we run three regular lecture series; the Intervention and Statebuliding Seminar Series, Bring Global Politics to Westminster; and the Westminster IR Forum. We will additionally be organising a number of conferences and workshops including the workshop on Just and Unjust Security. Full details can be found here.
Publications
Click here for a list of books and journal articles published by our members since 2008; for a full list of staff publications please visit our individual homepages.
'The Future of Statebuilding' special issue of the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding (edited by Phillip Cunliffe) with a selection of papers from the international conference 'The Future of Statebuilding: Ethics, Power and Responsibility in International Relations', organised by the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, 9-10 October 2009.
Find out more about the special issue here.
