This is a worthwhile academic exercise, with a lot to get our teeth into. But it's also important in terms of our wider civic duty as academics. We have a responsibility to produce scholarship that can help civil society and the general public to scrutinise power and ensure accountability.
At #BISA2026 ? Come to our roundtable: "The British state as a source of global insecurities: critical scholarship & political accountability in a time of crisis", at 1.15pm today.
Our aim is to start a conversation about what a new critical scholarship on UK foreign relations can look like.
UK IR scholars have a potentially important role to play here, both in producing empirical scholarship on the crimes Britain is complicit in and the precise nature of that complicity, and also in developing a theorisation of British foreign relations that can help people make sense of these cases.
My review of Stephen Quick's "The Dhofar War: British covert campaigning in Arabia 1965–1975" for the journal Cold War History www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
For the past decade Britain has been an accomplice in the creation of two consecutive humanitarian catastrophes, first Yemen and then Gaza, supplying arms, intelligence and political & diplomatic cover to the perpetrators.
So far, the UK IR community has produced very little scholarship on this
I was interviewed on Novara on Friday evening, about the war's implications for the Gulf, the world economy and the UK www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bot...
I was interviewed by @owenjones.bsky.social last week: on MAGA imperialism's effect on US hegemony, and why the Trump-Starmer spat is something of a pantomime www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vc0...
Coincidentally, I wrote this almost exactly 6 years ago today. Many didn't want to hear it at the time. On a re-read, there's a few things I'd change (e.g. the tone is too polemical, I miscatagorised Starmer's politics...), but overall I think it stands up novaramedia.com/2020/05/11/t...
My review of Adam Hanieh's wonderful new book, "Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the Modern World Market", for the Journal of Development Studies www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
If that sounds interesting to you, come to Brighton Centre, room 1b, at 1.15pm. You'll hear from me, @annastavrianakis.bsky.social @jasminekgani.bsky.social @crossdale.bsky.social @jacstjohn.bsky.social & Nico Edwards on what we can all do to start generating this kind of work.