A lively community of energetic minds examining how power operates and how it affects the people it touches. Voted top Political Studies school in the National Student Survey.
Following a violent conflict, casualty figures are often calculated to measure the various costs of the conflict, to defend or condemn a military intervention, to assess the costs of humanitarian assistance or even to decide whether war crimes have been committed. But what is the definition of a casualty? How should they be counted, and when? How do factors such as gender, age and profession affect the identification of casualties?
Questions such as these are fraught with political, cultural, methodological and even philosophical challenges, but Professor Marie Breen-Smyth has nevertheless sought to address them throughout her career. She has worked with local populations in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, South Africa and the Balkans, not merely to count casualties but to help them find a voice with which to speak about their experiences, to have their say in the reconciliation process, and to call attention to their specific support needs beyond physical rehabilitation.
Professor Breen-Smyth (Chair in International Relations at the School of Politics and Associate Dean International for the Faculty of Arts and Human Sciences) is a prominent figure in the study of political violence and a respected voice on international intervention. As a founding editor of the journal Critical Terrorism Studies and the editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to Political Violence, she is an advocate for the application of a critical approach in the field of terrorism studies.
How do political leaders from different countries sell multilateral ‘War On Terror’ policies to their own voters?
Using computerised discourse-analysis techniques, Dr Jack Holland (lecturer in International Relations) has researched the way George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard each tailored their message to local ears when trying to win popular approval for the joint invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
President Bush, for example, made repeated appeals to the American love of freedom, whereas Prime Minister Blair leaned more heavily on British common sense and pragmatism. Prime Minister Howard, meanwhile, cited good old Aussie mateship and sacrifice.
For each leader, the aim was the same - to build popular support for their Coalition of the Willing - but each felt the need to adopt language that appealed to their own country's sense of national identity.
In his new edited book, Obama's Foreign Policy: Ending the War on Terror, Dr Holland argues that the reaction to terrorist threats that shaped American and British foreign-policy strategy under Bush and Blair has continued to dominate under Obama and Cameron, albeit pursued through different tactics and rhetoric.
What drives the international community to intervene (or not) in a country’s internal situation? Does intervention cause more harm than good? What about the voices of those in the midst of crisis?
These are some of the questions the Centre for International Intervention (cii) is addressing. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach to the study of interventions, cii bridges theory and practice to challenge prevailing definitions.
The Centre provides a forum for debating the key challenges facing the international community. In so doing, it is prompting hard analysis of the dominant approaches to intervention and opening a space where those on the receiving end can be heard.
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