Tuesday 19 November 2024, 6-7pm
Peston Lecture Theatre, Mile End campus

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.

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.

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.

“I sure miss George W. Bush:” Deconstruction, Post-Truth and Trump

Wednesday 26 March 2025, 6-7.30pm
Maths Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End campus

How do we respond to post-truth and populist demagogy? It is common to think of deconstruction as a postmodernist precursor to post-truth. In this talk, Professor Lasse Thomassen will argue that deconstruction is in fact a very serious way to respond to post-truth discourse. Deconstruction is nothing but the unconditional search for truth. To show this, Thomassen enlists Jacques Derrida, Stephen Colbert and Donald Trump.

Lasse Thomassen is Professor of Politics. 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. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen.