Our professorial public lecture series forms a key part of our annual events programme, showcasing the expertise and research of some of Queen Mary's leading experts
Professor Christopher Phillips joined the School of Politics and International Relations in January 2012. His research focusses on the international relations of the Middle East, with his most recent projects exploring the role of external intervention in conflicts in that region. Before then, his work centered on the Syria conflict and its impact on neighbouring states and the wider Middle East.
He is author of four books, including Battleground: Ten Conflicts that explain the New Middle East (London: Yale University Press, 2024) and The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (London: Yale University Press, 2016 [3rd ed. 2020]) and co-editor of What next for Britain in the Middle East? (London: IB Tauris, 2021). He has published academic articles in International Relations, International Affairs, Third World Quarterly, Middle East Policy, Small Wars and Insurgencies, Orient, Nations and Nationalism and Mediterranean Politics and op-eds in The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Newsweek, CNN, The Huffington Post and Prospect among others.
After completing his PhD in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex, Lasse taught there for two years and then moved to the University of Limerick. He joined Queen Mary in 2007, and from 2008 to 2011 he was a García Pelayo Fellow at the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales in Madrid. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.
Daniel Kato was a brilliant scholar and teacher of US Politics and History whose life and work were tragically cut short by his untimely death in November 2019. The annual Daniel Kato Memorial Lecture celebrates Daniel’s life and showcases the contribution of Daniel’s work to our understanding of the state of US democracy today and in the past.
Previous events have featured Daniel's friends and colleagues who have spoken about the significance of Daniel’s most famous work, the book Liberalizing Lynching, and his more recent work on the carceral state and historical patterns of racialized politics in the US, as well as his contribution to the community of researchers and students here at Queen Mary.
The last twenty years have seen a large increase in the amount of academic work dealing with the ethics of war and peace, as well as the amount of direct engagement of academics with states and militaries in trying to bring moral considerations into the conduct of war.
This lecture explored different ethical traditions of thinking about war and peace and their implications for understanding and judging the present in world politics. It argued that, too often, ethical theorists neglect the messy and complex interrelation of war and peace. Because of this, their arguments either lack purchase on the world or are too easily subsumed into the legitimation narratives of powerful state actors. This suggests that ethical theorists not only need to think differently about war and peace, but also to think differently about the nature of ethical judgment.
Video
What do the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in the Ukraine, and climate change have in common? An understanding that politics, whether global, international, or planetary, are defined by struggles for survival. In each of these cases, delivering security intensely operates as the first and main objective of politics. Borders close to an unseen extend to protect human life from a global pandemic. European politics is being redefined through militarised geopolitical fears of threats to state survival. Calls for a planetary politics continue to intensify in reference to life on earth heading towards a catastrophic collapse. Security seems to truly be the baseline of contemporary political order. However tempting such a conception of politics is today, one of the defining challenges for critical engagements with security remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics serious but without making security the defining point of view of social and political life.
‘Really? Is that a major challenge? Why would you want to be critical about security in these conditions that obviously call for a profound security response? And, even if you want to, how can you gain critical leverage on security in a world that seems saturated by insecurities of such international and planetary magnitude?’ The lecture will engage with these objections by revisiting developments in Critical Security Studies (CSS) since the 1990s and propose a post-critical analytic that fractures security by foregrounding a conception of life-in-motion rather than life-unto-death. In doing so, the lecture introduces an international political sociology of insecurity that seeks to challenge the grip that founding politics in death retains in contemporary politicisations of insecurity.
Why do certain men dominate politics? Is it really because they are the most talented and qualified to do the job? To answer this question we need to consider how we define and recognise merit and qualification. Part of the problem is that the definition of the job is shaped by those who do it. This reinforces and validates the status quo of privileged men from narrow, elite backgrounds. Restricting the talent pool to these men has repercussions for the overall quality of representation, and the quasi-exclusion of many social groups from the representative process has real consequences for policy outcomes and citizen satisfaction with democracy.
So we need to rethink what it means to be a good representative, and recognise the need for and benefits of diversity. We also need to consider the demands made on politicians – the financial costs of running for office, the negative impacts on family life, the constant scrutiny from (social) media – and consider how these present particular barriers to members of certain social groups. Unless we can level the playing field by making candidate selection criteria and working conditions more inclusive, we will all continue to suffer from sub-optimal representation.
Hear from Professor Kimberly Hutchings as she explores different ethical traditions of thinking about war and peace and their implications for understanding and judging the present in world politics.