Conflict and security
Prof Christopher Phillips
Chris is Professor in International Relations. He is author of four books, including Battleground: Ten Conflicts that explain the New Middle East, and The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East.
His research focuses 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.
Prof Elke Schwarz
Elke is Professor of Political Theory. She is the author of Death Machines: The Ethics of Violent Technologies and her work on military AI and autonomous weapon systems has been widely published in a range of international publications.
Her work focuses on the nexus of ethics, technology and politics / warfare with a specific emphasis on new and emerging military technologies, including military Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous weapon systems, drones and robots.
- Full profile
- Email: e.schwarz@qmul.ac.uk
Dr Ksenia Northmore-Ball
Ksenia is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics. Her research interests span comparative politics and political behaviour particularly in the context of Eastern European new democracies as well as Russia.
Her research applies advanced statistical methods to areas including voter turnout, political and economic inequality, authoritarian legacies, and political socialization in new democracies. She has expertise in voter turnout and political socialization in the context of regime change in post-communist Eastern Europe and other new democracies, religion and politics in Eastern Europe and the perceptions of the left and right in new democracies.
Dr Clive Gabay
Clive is a Reader in International Politics. Beginning from an analysis of power and hegemony, his previous research has examined social movements, state-society relations, racial formations, utopianism, and Zionism/anti-Zionism.
Clive's current work focuses on two areas: race, racism and whiteness; and Jewishness, settler colonialism and Arab Jews. Clive is currently working on a book project which picks up the thread of articulating counter-hegemonic political positions via an extrapolation out of his family archive of Arab Jews.
- Full profile
- Email: c.gabay@qmul.ac.uk
Dr James Eastwood
James is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations and author of Ethics as a Weapon of War: Militarism and Morality in Israel. His research has explored the connections between practices of ethics, war, and militarism in global politics, with a particular focus on the case of Israel.
James’s research has concentrated on Israeli politics and society, previously with a focus on ethics and militarism, and more recently with a focus on the removal of Middle Eastern Jewish children from their families in the early years of the State.
Dr Sharri Plonski
Sharri is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics. She is a product of multiple transgenerational colonialities that link the practices of conquest, empire, settlement and migration in Eastern Europe, Palestine, Canada and the UK.
Her work, which is concerned with settler colonial relations, anti-colonial struggles, border dynamics and material infrastructures, is primarily anchored in the case of Palestine/Israel and its regional and global relations. She is currently working on a project that investigates the colonial and capitalist entanglements of Israel’s trade and transit infrastructures and the materials that undergird Israel’s ‘normalisation’ project.
- Full profile
- Email: s.plonski@qmul.ac.uk
Prof Jef Huysmans
Jef is a Professor of International Politics. He is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity, the securitisation of migration, critical methods in security studies and international relations, and International Political Sociology.
Jef's research focuses on the social and political processes that securitise issues and their consequences. Much of his work has focused on the securitisation of migration, asylum and refuge in Europe, the relation between citizenship and security and implications for democratic politics of the diffusion of insecurities.
Dr Mirko Palestrino
Mirko is a Lecturer in Sociology. His research sits within the fields of Critical War Studies and International Political Sociology. He investigates the sociologies and politics of time and temporality, experiences and narratives of war, theories and practices of military victory, and the embodied politics of military training and deployment.
His current research focuses on two areas: the neglected social practices implicated in the construction of military victory – including tattooing, videogaming, history teaching, and the erection of monumental complexes – and institutionally enforced practices of temporal regulation and their reception among military personnel.
Dr James Strong
James Strong is a Reader in British Politics and Foreign Policy. He is author of Public Opinion, Legitimacy and Tony Blair’s War in Iraq, which discussed the relationship between public opinion, parliament, the press and the Blair government during the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
James studies the domestic politics of British foreign policy and is an expert on the powers of the UK Parliament, foreign, defence and security policy, and the British constitution. His work has examined the role of the House of Commons in military deployment decisions and parliamentary war powers in the UK.
- Full profile
- Email: j.strong@qmul.ac.uk
Dr Katharine Hall
Katharine is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations. Her research focuses on questions related to modern war and security, military and surveillance technologies, and the longer historical and racialized geographies of militarization and practices of state violence.
- Full profile
- Email: k.hall@qmul.ac.uk
Prof Sophie Harman
Sophie is Professor of International Politics with a specific interest in global health, African agency, film and visual methods, and gender politics. She is author of eight books including Sick of It: The Global Fight for Women's Health.
Sophie has expertise on: global health governance; the politics of COVID-19; the 2014/15 Ebola outbreak; HIV/AIDS; film-making as method; African agency and the Tanzanian state, and women and gender in global health. Sophie’s research draws on her extensive fieldwork experience in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Zambia, and the global health and international political economy hubs of Geneva, Washington DC and New York.
- Full profile
- Email: s.harman@qmul.ac.uk
Professor Kimberly Hutchings
Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations. Her publications include Kant, Critique and Politics (1996); International Political Theory (1998); Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (2003); Time and World Politics (2008); Global Ethics: an introduction (2nd edition, 2018); Violence and Political Theory (with Elizabeth Frazer) (2020); and Women’s International Thought: towards a new canon (Co-Editor with Patricia Owens, Katharina Rietzler and Sarah Dunstan) (2022). In 2023 she was awarded the Isaiah Berlin prize for an outstanding lifetime professional contribution to Political Studies.
Kimberly works in the area of political and international theory and philosophy. Her recent work has focused on international ethics, in particular the ethics of war and pacifism; concepts of politics and violence in the work of political thinkers; women in the history of international political thought; feminist and postcolonial interpretations of Hegel’s ethical and political thought.