Alan Collins - Co-Director, ISCAS
Alan Collins is co-Director of ISCAS, and joined the Political and Cultural Studies Department at Swansea University in 1999 where he is now a Professor in International Relations. Prior to this he was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth where he also completed his PhD. His specialist subjects include Strategic studies, Security studies and Southeast Asia. He has published extensively on Southeast Asian security and ASEAN in particular. He is the author of four monographs and his latest is Building a People-Oriented Security Community the ASEAN Way with Routledge. He has also published articles in Asian Survey, International Relations of the Asia Pacific, and Contemporary Southeast Asia. He is also the editor of Contemporary Security Studies, a leading textbook on international security now in its third edition published by Oxford University Press
Mike Sheehan - Co-Director, ISCAS
Mike Sheehan is Professor of International Relations at the Swansea University, the co-Director of ISCAS, and Director of the Callaghan Centre for the Study of Conflict.
He previously worked at the University of Aberdeen, where he was Director of the Scottish Centre for International Security, and at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. He joined the Department in 2004. His areas of expertise are critical security, military space, balance of power theory, NE Asian security and indigenous security issues in the European Arctic.
Dave Bewley-Taylor
David is a Professor of International Relations and Public Policy within the Department of Political and Cultural Studies. He is also Director of the Global Drug Policy Observatory, based at Swansea University. He has been researching various aspects of drug policy for over twenty years with his main areas of interest being US drug policy, the UN and international drug policy and more recently counter narcotic strategies in Afghanistan. David has published widely on many of these and other topics, has collaborated with and produced policy reports for a range of drug policy organizations beyond academia and at present is an Associate of the International Drug Policy Consortium and a Associate Fellow of the Transnational Institute’s Drugs and Democracy Programme. He is editor-in-chief of the GDPO Policy Reports, Policy Briefs and Situation Analyses.
Mark Bevir
Mark Bevir is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for British Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is also a Professor in the Graduate School of Governance, United Nations University (MERIT), and a Distinguished Research Professor in the College of Arts and Humanities, Swansea University.
Born and raised in London, Mark received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. Before moving to Berkeley, he held posts at the University of Madras, India, and the University of Newcastle, UK. He has held visiting fellowships in Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, the UK, and the US. He has done policy work for governmental and non-governmental organizations in Europe and the US as well as the United Nations.
Mark's research interests in political theory include moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the history of political thought. His work on public policy focuses on organization theory, democratic theory, and governance. His methodological interests cover philosophy of social science, history of social science, and interpretive theory.
Gerard Clarke
Gerard joined the university in 1994 while completing his PhD, and was based in the Centre for Development Studies for 16 years until its closure in 2010. He is now Associate Professor in Politics and International Development, and Head of the Department of Political and Cultural Studies at Swansea. While in CDS, Gerard worked on consultancy assignments for a range of organizations including the Department for International Development, the World Bank and the National Audit Office. Prior to that, he taught at Middlesex University and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the Philippines in Manila. Gerard completed his PhD on Non-Governmental Organisations and Philippine Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, after completing a masters degree in Comparative Government at the London School of Economics.
Emel Akcali
Emel conducts research on state, societal and urban transformations at the age of globalisation, social uprisings, forced migration, refugee governmentality and conflict transformation/s. She is especially interested in the wider Mediterranean geography but, likes to compare this region with other parts of the world, as well. More specifically, Emel works on the refinement of the concepts of subjectivity, hybridity, governmentality, resistance. She is interested in finding out what type of subjectivities and structures emerge as a result of various forms of local and global governmentalities. Emel's work has been published in Political Geography, Security Dialogue, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Antipode, Annals of the American Geographers, South European Society and Politics, Geopolitics and Asian Journal of Social Sciences.
Luca Trenta
Dr Luca Trenta is a Senior lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Political and Cultural Studies, Swansea University. He previously worked as Teaching Associate at the University of Nottingham. Dr Trenta received his PhD from Durham University in 2014. He is the holder of a 2017 British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award for his project: ‘Out of the Shadows: understanding, researching and teaching covert action.’ He previously received a British Academy Small Research grant for his project on 'Targeted killing? The recurrence of assassination is US foreign policy.' He has published a monograph on risk and presidential decision-making with Routledge. He has also published articles on US foreign policy and presidential decision-making in The European Journal of International Security, Diplomacy and Statecraft and in The Journal of Transatlantic Studies. His research interests include US foreign policy, intelligence, covert action, assassination, and the use of drones. He is a regular contributor to The Conversation, Talk Radio and BBC Radio Wales.
Stephen McVeigh
Stephen McVeigh is Associate Professor in War and Society and Director of Learning and Teaching for the College of Arts and Humanities. His areas of research are diverse and include American War and Society, 19th and 20th century American cultural history, American film, 20th century American literature and American pulp fictions. He delivers teaching in topics as diverse as Frontier mythology in 20th century American history and culture, the Spanish Civil War, total war in the modern era, international perspectives on propaganda film, American masculinities, the ‘American Way of War’, terrorism and culture, representations of war in art, literature and film and he also contributes to a number of modules in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across the College of Arts and Humanities.
Dr. McVeigh is the series editor of War, Culture and Society, a research monograph series published by Bloomsbury. He is also a member of the editorial team of the Journal of War and Culture Studies.
Krijn Peters
Krijn is Associate Professor in the department, having joined in 2010 after serving as a lecturer at the Centre for Development Studies, Swansea University since 2005. He obtained his PhD at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, undertaking an investigation into armed conflict and post-war reintegration trajectories of youthful ex-combatants in Sierra Leone, West Africa. His BSc and MSc were in rural development sociology, again at Wageningen University, for which he undertook field work in Sierra Leone and Cambodia. In 2000 Krijn worked a year for Save the Children UK evaluating their ex-child soldier reintegration project in Liberia. He has provided consultancy services for a number of international organisations, including the World Bank, Plan International, the Institute for Security Studies and the Dutch Royal Institute of the Tropics.
Martin Horton-Eddison
Martin is a Research Officer and Crypto-Drug Markets project lead with the Global Drug Policy Observatory. Martin's Ph.D. is entitled ‘Crypto-Drug Markets and the Global Drug Prohibition Regime: A Unique Threat?' The study investigates the transnational crypto-drug market phenomena and the associated challenges for drug control policy, including at the domestic and international levels. Martin's research operates within - and contributes to - international relations regime theory.He holds an MA (Distinction) in International Politics from Hull, and a BScEcon (Hons) in International Politics and Strategic Studies from Aberystwyth.
