What Faculty do you work in?
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
What is your main area of research?
Generally speaking, I work on security and threat perception: how do states, society, and institutions perceive groups, movements, and social changes as dangerous? How do they react to these threats – with policy? Material change? Coercive force?
While I have previously looked at this in the context of genocide studies, and continue to do so, I’m increasingly looking at this with reference to climate securitisation and displacement.
Why is your research important?
I’m particularly concerned with climate maladaptation. In an increasingly inhospitable world, reactionary movements will be (and in some cases, are already) increasingly tempted by the ‘ethics of the armed lifeboat’ – responding to climate change with xenophobia, militarised borders, and direct and structural violence to protect their ingroup across the 21st century.
This is a particularly pernicious and dangerous form of ‘sustainability politics;’ pernicious because it feeds violent, unjust, and exclusionary politics (especially towards those displaced by climate change, or seeking migration or asylum more broadly), and dangerous because such politics is incapable of addressing the planet-scale, systemic nature of climatic and other crises.
What SDG is your research most closely aligned with?
SDG 16: Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
What do you hope to accomplish with your research?
I hope to highlight the risks and dangers of ‘armed lifeboat’ policies – how they develop across the world, and how they fail to address the human and ecological demands of the climate crisis. I intend for this to be a useful resource for activists, policymakers, and those displaced by climate, and a corrective against climate maldaptation.
Is there a cross-disciplinary element to your research? If so, who else at the University is involved?
Yes! There are close and obvious links with human geography (since border securitisation is about the relationship of populations and territory), but the field extends to management and organisational psychology (how do major organisations conceptualise and respond to risk?), law (what formal regulations govern their behaviour), and even engineering (what is the role of surveillance, drone, and AI technology in border militarisation)? Together with colleagues in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and International Relations, we have been building connections across the University.
Are there any external collaborators involved?
I work extensively with the Reactionary Politics Research Network (https://reacpol.net), based at the University of Bath.
What is next for your research?
I’m currently working with a variety of colleagues at Swansea, including Dawn Bolger and Caner Sayan, to put together a research project examining climate security policy at Frontex, the EU’s border force. This is the nucleus of a broader research programme, examining the securitisation of climate displacement across states in the Global North.