how some clusters of scholars within King's are conceptualizing and tackling these types of problems and how each of us are bringing different disciplinary approaches to bear upon them. I will be doing some interesting spotlights on some key areas of research, how those have changed over time and looking ahead into the 21st century. So it's my great honor to convene a panel of distinguished colleagues. These are the directors and senior members of several of the school's world leading research centers and groups. And in each of these cutting-edge research is happening on different strands of national and international security questions, and these are producing really interesting, exciting and important new perspectives and new approaches to tackling these major, some of these even existential questions, these sort of problems without passport type questions. So the centers that are represented today are the Cyber Security Research Groups, the SRG, which is represented by Dr. Tim Stevens. He is the head of the King's Cyber Security Research Group and a senior lecturer in global security in the Department of War Studies. Representing the Center for Defense Studies, we have Professor John Gerson, who's Professor of National Security Studies, again in the Department of War Studies. John is director of the Center for Defense Studies, but also the director of the Freeman Air and Space Institute. Representing the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, we have Dr. Gina Vail, who's a senior research fellow. And from the King's Intelligence and Security Research Group, KSIG, we'll try not to use too many acronyms. We have Dr. Hugh Dillon, who's a senior lecturer in Intelligence and International Security, and may I just add as heroically standing in for our head of department, Professor Mike Goodman, who has been called away at the last minute. So thank you, Hugh. And finally, representing the Center for Brand Strategy, CGS, that's myself. And as I mentioned, I'm a senior lecturer in history and brand strategy and the co-director of the Center. So before I hand over to my colleagues, I just say that within each of these centers, we have these diverse groups of academics, researchers and affiliates, you know, everything from students in early career researchers to professors working together and producing pioneering research on many of the most consequential and significant security-related issues that the world faces. And that, you know, the topics that these centers cover and that we can touch upon today include things like violent extremism, global nuclear risk, cyber attacks on network systems, the return of great power politics, the return of interstate war in the European continent, obviously a very live issue. And these questions around future world order and especially in places like the Indo-Pacific and other major strategic theaters and other things, many other topics besides. So the structure of today's panel will be essentially around table. Each of our panel members will give a short account of the key focus of their center and the colleagues that they're collaborating with. We'll give some thoughts about their field and subfields have evolved looking back, looking at the present and looking ahead to some of these future puzzles. And we'll talk a bit about some of the defining questions that have shaped that field and continue to shape it. We should have plenty of time for questions and discussions. So please, you know, as you're listening, please think of these questions, think about what you'd like to draw out in the conversation, and please use the chat to ask your questions. One final thing I would say just from a housekeeping perspective, this session is recorded. So please be aware of that. The order that we're going to speak today in, in no particular order, draw random, we'll have Tim Stevens and John Gerson, Gina Vail, Hugh Dillon and then myself. Okay, well that's all from me and I'll pass over to Tim. Great, thanks Maeve for your introduction. So yeah, as Maeve says, I'm director of the Kings Cyber Security Research Group. And when we think about cyber, half the people who hear that term run a mile because it sounds like something very technical, it's about computers for sure. But if we think of it cyber and cybersecurity and so on, more in terms of digital transformation, then it's actually a lot easier to get a grasp on. And it's a digital transformation in multiple sectors, society, economy, production and consumption, labor, political mobilization, and of course, international affairs. And international affairs covers a whole range of dynamics from trade, political economy, geopolitics, diplomacy, and war. And the digital networks and systems, computers, and so on the internet, the digital technologies are affecting all those areas. And there's various pitfalls and possibilities. And in war studies, we always pride ourselves on being able to distinguish between the various dynamics of change and continuity. And of course, that's something we have to do as well when we're thinking about the effects of digital technologies on war conflict, international affairs, diplomacy, and so on. And to reflect that, we have a diversity of colleagues working on these issues from PhDs and early career researchers through to mid career scholars and visiting professors and research fellows and so on, right through to establish professors in their field, looking at various aspects of this digital transformation. In the past, thinking about, you know, from the perspective of international relations, security studies, strategic studies, we've spent quite a long time arguing about definitions of some of these things like cyber war, classically, and thinking about whether these speculative scenarios of things like cyber war or cyber terrorism are going to come about. But also a whole range of thinking about how cyber threats, if you like threats to society, economy, the state to militaries and intelligence agencies were constructed or in the jargon securitized. But the point about that is, is that a lot of those conversations occurred in the relative absence of good data. We could begin to see, if you like, the contours of future events and processes, but we lacked good empirical evidence. And so a lot of those conversations were abstract and theoretical, but that's changed. Whether it's about preparing for or fighting wars in cyberspace, or the political economies of cyber risk and cyber resilience, or the global challenges of transnational cyber security surely was one of those problems with that passports that Kofi and Anne alluded to two decades ago. We now have a good evidence base through which to revisit old questions and actually to pose new ones about the repercussions of this digital transformation. Now some of those questions are very practical once and of course. How do we do X in pursuit of Y? So classically, how do we secure, if you like, the machineries of digital transformation so as to reap its benefits? Essentially, how do we secure systems like the internet to make sure we can use them properly and in productive fashion, rather than them being crippled by flaws and by criminality and so on? Or there are other practical questions that we look at in our group. How do we leverage cyber, so digital networks and systems to generate military strategic effect? And of course doing so within ethical frameworks and with respect to international law. And from that perspective, how do we prevent or deter adversaries from doing the same? Those are the types of questions that really occupy people working in this field. So there's some practical questions, but they also have ethical, legal ramifications. And there are some other more theoretical questions that have practical significance as well. So how do these transnational digital infrastructures confound or problematize conventional understandings of concepts like territory, or governance, or sovereignty? And we'd like to think about some of these big ticket questions as well. And whilst over the years, as I was saying, we've looked at those issues in a rather more abstract sense, we're beginning to be able to conduct more empirical work that addresses those issues too. So we've done a lot of work in these areas, but there's an awful lot of a long way to go. And one of the things that's very encouraging at a place like King's is that there's a lot of very good young scholars coming through in this field, both at undergraduate and at postgraduate level. And of course we'd love to develop more at King's, including through attracting postgraduate research students to this field as well. So I'm very much looking forward to Q&A, but I'll leave it there for now. Thanks, Maeve. Okay. Thank you very much, Tim. And seamlessly, we'll hand over to John Gerson. Thanks, Maeve. So perhaps a little bit differently. I thought about what we've been doing, what colleagues have been doing to summarise academic defence work and thinking in the policy realm is a pretty broad subject. My own perspective is that much of the defence and security debate in Britain, but also other countries, has focused for the last two decades, to a large extent, on limited operations, wars of choice, if you will, and confronting the challenge of long-state actors. Now, alongside this, countries like Britain, but other countries too, have faced a regular rotation of major operations or major operational deployments from medium-sized powers anyway, such as the First and Second Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, Iraq, and then continuing operations in Iraq. Interspersed with what used to be our big focus in the 1990s, of course, of peace support operations as they were then called. So it's not surprising that a lot of research effort focused on activities like Iraq, the global war on terrorism, and then, of course, for the British, what we regarded as a very important deployment and a long deployment in Afghanistan. But in the background, we're continuing debates and focus on the rapidity of technological change in military affairs, what used to be called the Revolutionary Military Affairs, and perhaps, you know, I'll throw a question out at Tim, the extent to which we are actually facing exponential multiplication of change just, well, I say over the horizon, just a few years away, certainly in defence, which most defence thinkers and analysts and practitioners just are not prepared for. So as far as academic research has been concerned, many of us at King's have still continued to try to get the policy community and the practitioners to still think about deterrents. It's back in vogue this month, but it wasn't five months ago, and certainly not five years ago. For centres like defence studies, there's been a lot of interest in how professional militaries adapt themselves to national security approaches. How do you create what in Britain we call a whole force that is aligning reserves and regulars and the civil components in the delivery of defence capability. And that's fed quite neatly into an area that we in the department and in school have developed in terms of national security thinking about defence and security, which has grown in importance. But I wouldn't say that it has actually, other than acceptance of the need for thinking about it, actually convinced decision makers yet of the need for top to bottom change. And I think our research focus in the coming years should be about supporting meaningful change beyond the top level structures which have started to change, such as in Britain the National Security Council as well. Technology and procurement continue to be traditional areas for focus. But again, in Britain and in a number of European countries, it's events and campaigns that really have led to some of the interesting research. Now, for me, the armed forces were quite slow to adapt their doctrine, but even their defence thinking more generally to the policy challenges of the post Cold War world, but were even slower to respond to the growth of non state actors as a source of defence and security challenges. And so national security studies as an outgrowth of this attempted to understand how states were going to adapt those existing structures to deliver joined up solutions to the cross cutting issues that I mentioned. But the challenge is shown by the fact that even Britain, which was relatively ready for some of these changes in thinking, took 16 years to adopt a coherence and workable policy for military support to civil authorities, despite long term research and very important impactful research pointing to just such a need 17 years is a long time in Britain. More than a decade of research effort was spent trying to unpick the Iraq operation, most famously with the long running Iraq inquiry, which many of our, which for many of us included our mentor, Sir Lawrence Friedman, who was a panel member of it. But it's been striking how far the lessons of such research and the efforts of us all really frankly, didn't seem to feed through into better decision making and thinking as we moved into Afghanistan and the focus on Helmand, which preoccupied the army and our Navy and Air Force were left to focus on their platform priorities as traditionally was the case. And it was the intervention in Iraq, Libya, which showed how little had been learned about being clear about objectives when intervening and clear about what could and could not be achieved even as part of a coalition. So for me, whilst we have had interesting accounts of how various armed forces performed in these wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq with the ignominious withdrawal last summer from Afghanistan, it's difficult to see whether there's going to be much appetite or funding for work on the on these topics in the short term. However, in the longer term, I think the absence of official histories for much defense activity over the last 30 to 40 years will be opening up opportunities for researchers to fill the histiography gap, so to speak, and releases in our archives and foreign archives covering the war on terror are imminent, although it is questionable whether, given what we learned from the Iraqi inquiry, whether we will gain that much. It's interesting to note that an official history of the Northern Ireland troubles has now been announced as something that the government plans to commission, and we'll see how long stories which most think have long been understood may still provide fertile ground for research. Now, while today, as I look forward, it's all about peer competitive challenges, which frankly were already identified in the run up to the integrated review in the UK. It's still striking to me how little research effort was devoted to European defense thinking, other than a fairly sterile debate and repetition of NATO versus European defense identities versus and the soft power giant of the EU. Now, for me, post Ukraine, the question is whether the important work that needs to be done on delivering security broadly defined in Europe and beyond the NATO members will actually take place. Resilience of supply is just one of those areas where we seem to have fallen back. So the last 100 days may have returned defense and security studies back to a focus on traditional state on state competition and the territorial defense of NATO allies. And again, some discussion of deterrence, which is good, as I mentioned earlier. It's the technological challenge or let's say the role of technology, which has been assumed to sit with Russia, perhaps balanced by weapon deliveries from Western states, still raises interesting questions about centrality of certain procurement projects in most Western and other countries policies in light of what's occurred in Ukraine. And I think there will be a lot to learn from this. It's interesting finally to me to see how quickly Ukraine has been applied to thinking about the Indo-Pacific peer competitor and how far it provides quote lessons for outsiders, interested parties, let's say in the South China Sea and the Indo-Pacific more broadly, as the topic of the moment. Orcus and a burgeoning cottage industry of just what these trends mean is developing. I think the question that I'd like to put to this assembly is how far defense academics can help direct this research in a useful way. Thanks very much. Oh, thank you. That's a really, that's a great call to action. I'm really enjoying that and I'm going to spend some time thinking about how to respond. So I'm going to hand over to Gina Vale, Dr. Vale, please. Thanks very much. So as Maeve mentioned earlier, I'm Dr. Gina Vale. I'm a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study Radicalization. I'm also a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of War Studies. And my work at ICSR is part of a diverse and interdisciplinary team. We draw from war studies, criminology, IR theory, political science, history, to really grapple with some of the issues around violent extremism, extremist violence and terrorism. So I'm going to speak a little bit about the past, present and future of the field and particularly through my own lens as a researcher that focuses on gender and other axes of social difference and how this feeds into both our understandings of terrorism as a phenomenon, the actors involved and also the shape of the field itself and scholarship. So starting with the past, particularly around the 1970s, the field was very much a single and narrow profile focused on male terrorists and extremists, very narrowly defined and a gender neutral term. Men were expected to be the default extremist within various organizations that were most often localized or at least national in their bounds. Women were often viewed as supporters at best in auxiliaries and likely identified in their connection to adult males. Women were not considered to be terrorists in their own right. So as I say, defined through their relations to men, but their involvement in extremist movements at all was considered exceptional. And as such women were considered irrational. At this time, the field was also very male led. Most individuals publishing on terrorism at this point in time were men and particularly within the global north. Fast forward to the present and certainly the discipline and the phenomenon has shifted. We're seeing larger transnational movements both within jihadism as well as right wing extremism that is facing a considerable domestic but interconnected threat across Europe and North America. And the understanding of women's roles and identities within these phenomena have changed. The idea of looking at gender, not specifically at women, but understanding norms that are facing men as men, women as women and how this plays out in the drivers to extremist violence to drawing people into an ideal of worldview, a milieu. And so within my own work, looking both at masculinities and extremism, that plays into looking at adults as well as children, how we understand gender across age bounds and therefore intersectionality has become a real part of our field. And this goes beyond just and gender experts, looking at how right wing extremism is seen to connect with our society. And this is really where the future is coming in. So recognizing that extremism is extreme, but it's not disconnected from the mainstream. It's not disconnected from the reality that most of us live in every day. Recognizing the norms and ideals of that mainstream and connecting them back into political rhetoric, education, for example, deprivation and social welfare. This is where we can understand how, for example, future or present and moving into future movements, such as involuntary celibates, mass shooters, as well as those who subscribe to misogynistic views are drawing power from mainstream ideals, but operationalizing them through violence. So this is really the future of terrorism studies. And this is certainly an area that we are focusing on at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, both myself looking at youth within extremism. I have colleagues focusing on misogyny, incels, right wing movements, anti trans sentiment within right wing movements, as well as looking at how gender and other axes of difference are operationalized among jihadist groups, their rhetoric, their governance, their recruitment, and also how we deal with them, both from a societal perspective, a judicial perspective, as well as a governmental and policy perspective. And this is the focus of an upcoming conference that we have at ICSR on detainees affiliated with Islamic State. This will be happening next week. Our aim at the Center is really to drill down into the lessons that we can learn from studying these phenomena in isolation and in connection, both from a historical perspective and looking at other patterns and movements. And therefore, together, holistically, we are able to provide recommendations to practitioners and to policymakers to better respond holistically and inclusively to these issues. So I'm going to leave it there, but thank you very much. Thank you very much, Gina. And we'll pass over now to Hugh. I mean, thanks, Maeve. Hi, everybody. It's lovely to be here speaking to you. And it's great to be talking with our colleagues and listening to the great work that goes on here. It's always a point of great fascination in such a big department to get a sense of the diversity of the work that we do here and I look forward to drawing that out in the Q&A. I'm here representing the KISG, the King's Intelligence Security Research Group. And I've been asked to talk about what we do and where that's come from and where we're going. And it's a really exciting time to be studying intelligence and studying statecraft in King's. I think, to a significant degree, we are at the cutting edge of research in this field and of pushing its boundaries out of time when it's expanding really quite quickly in a really quite exciting way. You're bringing together a whole new cohort of international research students and colleagues from all over the UK and beyond. You're working not just from an academic background, but also from a professional background as well. So the field, I think, will only broaden and it's very important that it does so because, as all of you will know us, but intelligence and the growth in intelligence and the potential intrusiveness of intelligence, particularly in the digital realm, really has implications for all of our citizens in their democratic society and questions of oversight, questions of ethics, questions of consent are becoming increasingly difficult and increasingly important conversations we had about these issues and the conversations that we like having here. But I'm going to ask to reflect just on where we came from, where we are and where we're going. And I suppose the point to start with is that intelligence studies was really quite narrow, not that long ago. It was considered big issues, no doubt, and issues that are becoming increasingly relevant again. But it was quite narrow. It kind of grew out of diplomatic history and military history. Or I suppose the realization that this activity at the second oldest profession, espionage, an activity which has been going on since time immemorial and which by the mid 20th century occupied the time and resources of big government bureaucracies and not an insignificant chunk of money, probably far more than were spent on diplomacy at that time. This practice was largely absent from the historic record, certainly from the mainstream or the big serious weighty terms on diplomatic and military history. And so the field and we grew out of trying to fill this gap of kind of correcting this problem, this dissonance. And it started supposed to be concerned with big issues of war, big issues of peace, big issues of diplomacy. So we were centred around the Second World War, ultra-intelligence in the Cold War and so on. Bletchley Park, the big heavy hitting stuff and very much concerned with ideas of traditional security and statecraft, looking back to Machiavelli and on into the insights of people like Sherman Kent and his foundational textbook I suppose from 1949, Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, big issues but narrow issues. But since then and really from the mid 90s onwards, it's diversified hugely. It's very, very different and even in my relatively short time here at Kings, this shift from the traditional security issues of war, peace, war, diplomacy has been complemented by a huge variety of stuff that we're concerned with particularly here at the KISG. Don't get me wrong, we're still very much concerned with traditional issues and high on the list all of these and an issue that will remain high on the list is of course the matter of failure. And the salience I think of intelligence in our popular and political discourse is very much related to threat and failure. So after Iraq, after 9-11, after 7-7, after Bataclan, etc., the question the worst gets asked, why did the intelligence services not warn of this or why did the warning not get through or why is it that we were unable to translate this into action, etc., etc. And in the wake of this, you have a spillover of studies of investigations of recommendations of solutions of panels of questions asked and given. And the preoccupation with failure is I think quite improper and will continue to be so because intelligence in democratic society is obviously here for the protection of the state and for the protection of the citizens. But broadening out from this issue, we've seen and we continue to see several bigger thematic issues being integrated into the conversational failure. And this I suppose was started by, in some ways, by one of our visiting values. You started to think about the role of intelligence and the role of the state in a slightly different way, characterising the state as shifting from the secret state of the Cold War to the protective state of today where the role of the state and the role of intelligence agencies therefore is to enable the citizen to get on with their day-to-day life with minimal risk to their safety.  It was not really concerned as such primarily with understanding what was going on in foreign places, but with understanding what people in this country and abroad were planning to do and trying to get inside their loop to prevent that from happening. And that of course meant that the intelligence services, the state had to become much more intrusive into the life of the citizen. And with that came a spill over into issues of privacy, into issues of digital surveillance, into issues of accountability, into issues of profiling, into issues of which partners you work with and so on and so forth. And it's out of these spaces that the field of intelligence studies has diversified massively and become linked to a much wider range of broader subject areas than would have been the case traditionally. The diplomatic studies, your military history have been supplemented with sociology, psychology, surveillance studies, digital studies and so on and so forth. And it's blossoming from there further still. So today the KISG is both looking backwards and there's an interesting conversation to be had about how the old debates about strategic intelligence have now once again particularly in the context of Russia and Ukraine come to the fore. So you were again talking about strategic intelligence, we're again talking about warning and indicators, we're again talking about strategic deception, we're talking quite interestingly about the role of intelligence in a public conversation and how states are using it as part of their war of narratives. But we're also looking forward and you're just casting a look at the syllabus for our Intelligence MA here. You see the range of issues that are supplemented, the traditional, we consider statecraft, we consider failure, we consider success, deception, but added to that there's issues of terrorism, accountability, digitalization, covert action, ethics, the agenda and so much more. All questions that intelligence agencies but also society has to grapple with more broadly as we try and come up with functional and reasonable answers to issues of well what are these powerful agencies for and what do we want them to do in this very, very fraught and dangerous global environment that we currently live in. And with that I shall pause. Thank you very much Dr Dillon. Okay so it falls to me to wrap up this section very as briefly as I can to give us plenty of time for questions. Keeping an eye on the chat though and I see that you're all been very shy so please do feel free to come forward with your questions and pop those in there and we will get to those as soon as possible. So I'll just wrap up with a few brief comments really on the field of brand strategy on the field of statecraft and on the work of the Center for Brand Strategy. So thinking about where grand strategy as a particular strand of academic study and some national security debates has come from. In essence, grand strategy means the sense in which that I'm using it means essentially big picture long-term thinking and I would argue my colleagues and I would argue that this is the highest form of statecraft most difficult. Its core emphasis is about securing the long-term security peace and prosperity of a nation and you know if done well when done well would argue that it doesn't get particularly bogged down in theory and micro management and so on but really is about bringing back to the conversation these questions of how do we get to this point and what direction should we go in the future and how to craft a purposeful coherent approach to international politics had to implement it and what sources of knowledge and experience we can look to and one of the things that one of my modules is the second year module on grand strategy and Hugh I'm very pleased to hear that in your talk just now at Machiavelli gets a shout out from us too. So we are going right back to sources of knowledge looking back through kind of intellectual history to see what we can draw on to help inform our understanding of grand strategy and argues that grand strategy includes several key thematic elements histories of big one and strategy statecraft international relations diplomacy and so on but it's not about hard and soft power but the key thing to understand is about how it all comes together to serve to serve the long-term goal of a nation or a group of nations. There are a lot of different definitions brand strategy and I'm kind of avoiding again I think picking up on what a few people have said but particularly Tim you know this is a field of similarity characterized by a huge much definitional debate and Hal Brands is someone I would point to he's written quite an influential book on grand strategy and finds it in that simple way as that highest form of statecraft and an intellectual architecture that gives form and structure to foreign policy so kind of a space for discussion and debate. Others have argued that it's much more in the space of blueprints or plans but essentially the key thing to think about is doing grand strategy is not about reacting to events or handling things on a case-by-case basis but it's about that purposeful and coherent set of ideas about how to navigate complex international environment centrally focused on what the nation seeks to accomplish and then the pathway to get there. So the question is you know this is all very well in theory the question is how effectively is this done in practice and so many would argue I think in recent decades that in the UK this has not been done very well and part of the reason that we set up the Center for Grand Strategies is about five years ago my co-director John Bue and I sat down with a piece of paper and thought well what would a Center for Grand Strategy do what should it do and one of our core fundamental purposes was to try to bring back a greater sense of particularly historical expertise and understandings and mindsets and approaches to problems to re-indect this into statecraft diplomacy and foreign policy in the UK in the present day particularly that was sort of a particular focus. We were also seeking to try to create a kind of European UK counterweight to the USA I mean you know the grand strategy is a term and this concept was born in the UK and has been quite heavily dominated in recent decades by US perspectives and US concerns and you know we google the term grand strategy you'll see an absolute library of books written about articles and opinion pieces about you know concerns related to the US and we just felt that there was a much richer research agenda much richer field that could be developed looking to the UK and looking to Europe but also thinking about global perspectives non-western perspectives thinking about world order in that slightly bigger and more expansive way. So the flavor of grand strategy that we were seeking to bring was one of the particularly historical emphasis and framing that really in terms of you know what that has to offer in present debates. There's still no definitional convergence in this field it's one of the major issues with the field of grand strategy there was a recent book came out I think last year the Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy and I think it's something like 700 pages long there is no agreement by any of these authors about what grand strategy actually is and some really interesting debate about it. I personally think it's quite a good thing I think having no consensus is quite interesting and it's quite helpful I think it creates a really interesting space for discussion but there are many who disagree and feel that you know something that is an aspirational thing whether grand strategy can or can't be real really matters and perhaps it's a waste of everybody's time I would argue and some of my colleagues would argue too that this kind of aspirational space for considering some of these principles even if it never results in a blueprint or plan and never survives contact with reality that the endeavor and the pursuit is interesting and important and it can help to shape and to inform better decision and better decision-making in the real world and this is something that we've sought to test in recent years so we've sort of tried to step outside of just our academic space to try to engage with various different policy communities and I can say a bit more in the questions about how we've done that but I would point to my co-director at John View who is an answer convent and government at the moment essentially involved in the drafting of the UK's most recent grand strategic document the integrated review and I would say that there is something that historians can offer in the making of grand strategy but there are lots of questions about who actually does it who should do it and what voices are important and relevant and that's a real issue again that defines the field in the present day. There's lots more I want to say about this I will keep my remarks short because I know we want to get to some of these questions just looking ahead very quickly to some future research puzzles I would say looking ahead that the field will continue to be racked by quite feisty definitional debates I would say it will continue to be quite heavily in terms of publication outputs I think a lot of the discussion will be centered on the US I'm seeking of course to expand that and we're very open and welcoming research community so please do join and follow us on Twitter it's a small plug but we were very interested in expanding that and expanding the frame of this field and especially bringing in non-western perspectives to those discussions. I think though there will be a number of puzzles I think that will shape this field two that I would point to in particular the consequences of the war in Ukraine I think like many of my other colleagues you know we've observed this major strategic shock and speaking from a UK perspective I think it has been a major strategic shock and you know what that means you know for you know this most recent grand strategic principles document which is how I would categorise the integrated review you know what that means for the implementation of that what that means for British strategy going forward I mean I would argue I think that most of the principles of the integrated review pulled up quite well but lots of details need to be considered and fresh like like for example how we're thinking about the relationship between the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific looking ahead and how we're thinking about various other different elements of those strategic pillars. The US I think like us is having a pretty major grand strategic rethink in the aftermath of the of the invasion of Ukraine I think you know for example the national security strategy I think is being rewritten as we speak. So it's one of the major things I think that in terms of how the field tries to apply itself in the real world and tries to have impact. The other area where the field is not I think engaging anywhere near as much as we should and I think it will become a much much bigger issue is in the area of climate change because I would say that you know if you want to point to big grand strategic challenges this is this is it this is the big one you know it's probably the biggest grand strategic challenge I think we could say maybe humanity is faced and any attempt to resolve this will require not just really well integrated national efforts but really well integrated international efforts and we've I think you know in modern but I think ever we've never really done anything like this and so trying to undertake this and thinking about how the field might support and help to shape the thinking required for that I think is a really important question it's something that I've been giving some thought to and my colleagues too very very early stages but I think it needs more and so I think that's a really important question if you know if the if the field is not very ready or not in a position to help you know statecraft in the present day to adapt to this to this problem to adapt perhaps to a new set of circumstances created by rising average global temperatures then we really need to think about why that is and I'm interested in the question I think my colleagues are too kind of grand strategic approaches help to get to better places get to better processes to help us to think about world order in particular in ways that will help prepare us to adapt to perhaps or even mitigate some of the effects of that so there's a lot in that and I will stop there um so um we have now got about half an hour for questions and I I'm just yes I think my colleagues are rejoining excellent um let me see okay we've got Q&A box and we've got chat pops okay excellent right so we've got lots of things to pick up on um as as everybody is just gathering their thoughts um can I just abuse my chair's prerogative for a minute and ask the first question which John you threw down a really interesting question to us and it was about the kinds of real impact that we can make you know what the kinds of changes that can be affected in the real world by the research that we do um I've just framed a major major challenge around climate change um there are others too um you know are you optimistic about this and what do you think you know in terms of opportunities that we may have missed um to have a greater impact how can we correct this going forward it's a question for John but please anybody else jump into thanks Maeve I'm I'm pleased you didn't ask me to answer my question that was the uh that was what I was hoping we'd come from my colleagues um well I mean I think look as you know I'm sure you're talking about in in grand strategy and of course the important thing about this event is that we talk to each other and we should talk to each other more uh across the the research centers which is one of the things I certainly am going to be encouraging um when I become head of school in a few weeks um because I don't want us to be in silos and I guess that applies to the answer to your question which is first of all we should be which is not a very easy position for academics to be in we should be part of that process of trying to break down the barriers between policy and subject areas rather than uh reinforce them okay and I because I think much of what we do complements we talk about interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches by defense studies but in our research centers you know we don't always easily find ways to know what we're all doing because we're busy and because our researchers are busy and they're working on their work so I think first of all promoting interdisciplinary and interdepartmental solutions I think on something like you know uh Asia-Pacific orcus at the moment the policy community is running around saying you know academics commentators give us something we can populate this with I mean that's the truth of of of the reality you know there's been an announcement and now there is a bit of a vacuum I think it is a difficult question for academics how far we want to be part of that process uh in responding to that unless we have been doing research which is relevant and I think that is the challenge that a department like law studies um and defense studies is how the whole school always faces do we adapt our research because there's a demand or do we uh bring things that we are doing because they're worth doing and of course the answer is it's a mixture of both um I would say that um you know grand strategy is what you need when you think about orcus uh it is a grand strategic move but I've been a bit surprised to hear quite a few of the let's say the policy focused uh academics that I've spoken to on both sides of the Atlantic uh emphasizing what they call the military technical aspects in orcus whereas to me it's a geopolitical construct rather than a than than a military technical one but I'd be interested to know what you know what Tim thinks about about some of those those developments and also on you know intelligence sharing which is already there in the relationship through Five Eyes so how that goes it to me we we cannot be relevant unless we're talking about the most relevant region in the world in some respects and yet if I just cut back to something you said at the beginning of your your piece mate um it has shocked me I suppose I mean this is all relevant to the other centers as well you know I've just spent 20 years focusing on non-state actors as as as as actors in in defense and security as I argued um it has shocked me though to find very experienced military officers but also defense officials saying to me that this is the single most important event in their careers uh you know whereas I would have expected there to be the sort of skepticism that we saw in the early uh well the first years after the 9-11 attacks when people were saying to us don't exaggerate it you know this is not really strategic and you know we mustn't throw away our playbook it seems to me that big challenges that certainly in Europe um the the defense and security establishment believe everything is changed by this and then they're applying it to Asia-Pacific so I suppose there's two long answer apologies I suppose what academics should do is remind them that you can't just look at Asia-Pacific to the prism of a European crisis you've got you've got to ask yourself whether anything happening in this European crisis is relevant to Asia-Pacific and vice versa whereas the tendency is to say you know we're now assuming that China will act in the way that Putin acts because you know there's an example we were caught napping deterrents failed uh etc etc and that's understandable but but we have to be capable of of bringing you know expert researchers and expert commentary into that debate so I'm sort of answering my question a little bit um but I haven't got the answer to the earlier question I said which is do we adapt our research to the situation that we face or do we try to stay a little bit more inside our ivory towers being pure? No I mean I think so one of the things we run in the Center for Ground Strategy is an applied history project program and you know we spent a lot of time thinking about what does applied history mean and what shouldn't it mean and one of the things it shouldn't mean is you know the lazy reach for analogies off the shelf to help explain a complex situation that is in many respects unique that you know at best that just doesn't get you to a good place and at worst it gets you to some really actively bad places so um yeah so it's a very welcome point that you make you know to think about the ways in which that we can be you know learning and perhaps like learning in more collaborative way. Tim can I bring you in on this one of the things I was thinking about as you were speaking is um in your field how um how much kind of in national security communities over the last say 10 or 15 years the questions around cyber digital you know how much there's been a sort of siloing of conversations about the significance of certain types of development more in the digital space because generalists and you know people who don't come from a kind of a digital you know specialist background who don't have understandings of some of these technologies think about science and technology is literally that sort of science and technology is kind of over there separate to the conversations that we have about things like politics and geopolitics and so on and in that sense are you seeing things like orcus the conversations that you're aware of happening about orcus as an example are they siloed in that way where they got the military technical and got them sort of geopolitical and so on. Yeah I'm always I'm always like John I'm always staggered to hear people think about orcus from a military technological perspective it's geopolitics and almost purely so um so I may return to that I may not but I mean you do identify um what is probably the single most from a policy or decision-making aspect probably the fundamental obstacle in making any sense out of digital and translating into policy or let alone strategy um military or grand but um it is very very tricky because I think I've opened my few minutes of comments by saying you know when people hear this cyber thing they tend to run a mile they go oh that's one for the technologist and the irony of that is that we have you know what at least a million and a half years now dealing with technology and it's been shot through with politics from day one about who has access to resources what you do with tools how do you instrumentalize a lump of stone to get what you want I mean it's the roots of war and conflict as well so it always staggers me when people think the technology is somehow divorced from you know dirty everyday politics it's completely not but that doesn't mean there isn't a challenge in getting policy makers to accept that and you know there have had to be champions if you like within institutions and organizations and administrations who have just banged in on the doors of policy makers saying look you do realize the technical computer security is really important because if you don't do it and allocate resources to it your water won't flow your transport and logistics will break down your militaries will be unable to function all the data you've been collecting upon which you base public policies essentially open to thefts from foreign countries and so on and so forth these are political issues but actually translating that into something that policy makers can can understand is has perhaps been more of a challenge than most people thought it would the other challenge of course is the willing or the relative willingness or unwillingness sometimes of technical communities to do that translation work precisely because it's their stovepipe and it's their little domain and perhaps they don't want other people trespassing on it so I think from an institutional sociological angle it's really interesting how we get to that space and I think in the UK we actually now have a relatively mature understanding of the kind of socio-technical nature of something like cyber security which allows us to actually allocate appropriate resources develop lines of efforts think about a national level policy strategy and also about the alliances and so on whether they're with Australia, France or the United States or whoever that have a cyber component but it's a lot more to be said on that but I'll leave it there for now and I would like to pick up a little bit more on this because I know Tim and John you both have interests in space as well and so we're not just talking about the the terrestrial here but I might just bring in Gina and Hugh just I guess your reflections on this question of you know the extent to which researchers in your fields and the contributions of your research communities can and do have impact on these real-world questions I mean what would you consider really good and what were the best practice examples that you've encountered and what are the aspirations what how high should we be aiming basically I can kick off if you want oh unfortunately there aren't a huge amount of good practices that we can take where policymakers have really listened to us I think the problem that we have is almost shouting into an abyss and we're seeing that at the moment with the latest leaked review report on prevent in the UK the prevent strategy and how the way in which society is now dealing with its own members its own citizens and how that is reflecting upon how we as institutions as societies and communities view extremism those who are marked as extremists those who have extreme views that go beyond the mainstream certainly there are opportunities to engage this is something that myself and colleagues do regularly and there are fantastic partnerships that we have had but when it comes to change on a mass scale this is where we are often working against the machine and drawing upon my own research within northeastern Syria when we're dealing with the issues of Islamic State affiliated persons this is a global issue we have over 50 000 persons that joined Islamic State from over 80 countries worldwide one in four of those persons was a woman and a child most of those women and children are being held in camps in northeastern Syria and most of men and adolescent boys are being held in prisons up until this point repatriation is still very piecemeal at best and certain countries such as the UK almost an entirely brick wall has been established to repatriation no matter advocacy the fact that research is showing that if we fail to intervene now we will continue cycles of violence cycles of grievance cycles of humiliation and emasculation in particular and this goes beyond the local context this is once again if we think in post-colonial terms this is the western interventions or in this case now failure to intervene failure to take responsibility for the actions of our citizens in a foreign conflict zone so these are some of the issues that we and my colleagues are grappling with at the moment but unfortunately there's only so far we can push we can provide all of that evidence but if those with the big red button or the powers that we do not want to listen we it's very easy to shut us out unfortunately so I suppose the call to action is try and listen to the research that's coming out and is that a specific barrier created by just you know like is that about the you know the cultures and you know organizational cultures within governments that need it needs to be better relationship building or are there other more structural factors that we need to think about? Certainly structural if we look at the way in which citizenship race and ethnicity are now playing a role in who we define as being an extremist as being part of our communities the case of Shamima Begum is a fantastic example we have a British teenage girl who travelled to Syria who now wants to return now there have been cases in in the UK recently where white female underage girls have been acquitted of terrorism offences on the grounds of human trafficking now the same defence has been posed for the case of Shamima Begum and it was dismissed at the moment she has been stripped of her British citizenship and she remains in northeast and Syria technically status a stateless so we need to look at our own communities and look at how our citizenship laws how our nationality act from 1971 is applied to our citizens and what it means to be British nowadays is really having an impact in counterterrorism policy. Thank you very much Hugh I'll just bring you in on this question too this question around you know impact and the ways in which your research community can can help to tackle some of these problems without passwords I'll just mention that a question in the Q&A has been asked about how what kind of scope there is for the centres represented here to collaborate in a multidisciplinary way so it's a question from Hugo is taken by the synergies across potential research on things like sustainability contribution on non-state actors allies and adversaries and the role and impact of technology generally so do you have any thoughts on this question around you know how to generate meaningful impact actually make the difference and also how we could do that more collaboratively big question sorry yeah it is a big question I mean if I could take it in two halves I guess intelligence is almost biased nature interdisciplinary intelligence is generally a supplement to operations to strategy to digital operations to plans and so on and so forth so the potential for collaboration is as varied as you know as our range of subject matter expertise and I think I think the most pressing one is you know with Tim's group and the cyber security element of the business where the involvement and the potential problems and challenges ethical operational governance and so on and so forth but that the development of and the power of intelligence agencies in cyberspace poses it is just immense so I think there's huge opportunities to cross over there and I think more broadly that the space perhaps where most impact has been generated by the work that we do is in the assessment side of the intelligence business where you see much of the fallout from some great failures that we've seen you know not allowed in Iraq key cases in point and a real push in government for more to be done to to systematize professional lies and really kind of academicize the process of intelligence assessment and to bring many of the tools and give the insights from the study of the past in a kind of applied history way but also from disciplines of psychology and so on into the the work of training the next generation of intelligent analysts and that of course is interdisciplinary as well by spirit nature thank you very much okay so we have a question in the chat about the importance in the Middle East and the Gulf regions in defense and war studies has decreased in recent years researchers tend to focus on China USA Russia and Europe how would you describe this trend anybody want to take this one on it's partly something briefly yes it hasn't decreased in my field um in fact it's probably increased and there's a couple reasons for that one is the emergence of Iran as a very effective state act of both regionally and international internationally it sees cyber as a way of projecting national pursuing national interest projecting national power both in the local area and also against you know primarily against the United States and his allies and the second is that when we think about surveillance and there's quite a crossover here I would suggest with with huge work well not the intel the intel groups work at least is around surveillance and of course some of the Gulf states Saudi Arabia are highly active in that space and it also points to the political economy of surveillance tech because some of the you know the company selling into those markets are a little bit closer to home than we might expect and there's great you know young academics like James Shires who have written extensively about cyber security in Gulf in the Middle East and also there's a load of emerging work around Iran too so I think geopolitically maybe the question has a point but just from my own perspective it's a region of a diverse region that remains a direct political and economic relevance thank you John well I'll just be cheeky and say it isn't irrelevant because it's part of the Indo-Pacific region and and so we are thinking in in in those terms but we're not thinking of the Middle East is as you call it the Gulf as a separate security entity and of course through this transition to sustainability taking up Mabe's point about you know a grand strategic challenge you know the Middle East is going to remain central as is Russia and the United States to taking us to a well not carbon neutral but but let's say a more carbon balanced global economy so I think these things are a bit too simplest simple to to dismiss great power intervention with with with large militaries that that's a different question I suppose but I guess in the Indo-Pacific research area everyone is talking about bases extension of influence great powers by which I include India and China expanding west and east as well as north and south and so I you know I think the Middle East will be part of that and a very important part of course as we move forward yeah I mean I think you know looking at the the transformation over the last year or so at least there is an argument to say that you know the 20-year experiment have failed security paradigm you know focus on the focus on central Asia has now shifted more to the Indo-Pacific space and I think if my colleague our colleague Professor Alessio Patelano was here he would be making a case about the shift to maritime and you know that this sort of transformation is kind of an epochal shift in some way and it's a whole new way of thinking or at least a whole new way of prioritizing some of these security questions and you know I think I think as you as you both rightly said these aren't it's it's perhaps a bit more of a matter of perception it's not about entirely things going out of fashion so much as maybe a a sense of the emphasis or you know what that kind of what the bulk of stuff that's making its way through and seeming to be most popular or something to be getting the most funding there are there there are trends and fashions I think in academic study and there are things that you know come to the fore and less so while remaining I think being you know studied quite consistently in the background and I think Alessio is a really good example of this I think he's been studying and thinking about the Indo-Pacific for 15 years and suddenly it's fashionable and he's finally getting to talk about things that people are most people are you know finally on this page and understanding it and so there's a question in the chat about grant about coherent grand strategy which kind of links from this point too right as the sense in which states are thinking about and strategizing and the sense in which the focus is moving or shifting for example to the Indo-Pacific is for lots of countries about a kind of grand strategic certainly the the the American the British example but you know across across most European powers we've seen this proliferation of Indo-Pacific strategies for example in the last few years I think actually the UK's Indo-Pacific tilt was quite late to the game in that sense and so the question of like what countries actually develop you know demonstrate a coherent grand strategy it is a really important and really live one and I'm going to do that really annoying academic thing of saying it depends what you mean my coherent and it depends what you mean by successful when you ask that question because you know there are lots of things to take into consideration it's one of the reasons this this field is so so much more about sort of the discussion than arriving at a final conclusion I think because you know when you compare different states and their grand strategic approach to the world or you know they're bringing grand strategies and some are much more ambitious than others you know when you look at a great power like the United States and you compare it to a very small power and of which I think if Hillary Briflow was here she will be she will be making the case put forcibly that you know small states do have grand strategies I think there's an interesting way of thinking about this that you know these quite small states of which in the you know I think over a hundred that are that qualify as being small and have yes they have as much a much narrower range of movement and a much smaller set of ambitions in terms of shaping the international space to suit their own interests but a lot there's also a lot more at stake I think it could argue that large some some big great powers and large medium-sized powers have a little bit more room to fail whereas smaller states maybe don't I mean that that's one of the debates going on in the grand strategy field at the moment so it really depends on like what's the scale of the ambition of the grand strategy and how do you kind of adjust for that there's also the question of you know states that are operating in more or less favorable circumstances to others so it is the grand strategy successful or coherent for the conditions in which it's being applied but there's also the much more fundamental question of how do you actually identify a state's grand strategy you know there and part of the definitional confusion debate within the field is whether when you talk about grand strategy it has to be something that's written down and codified and coherent or whether it's something that can be it's much more about identifying it retrospectively or identify kind of reading the team names as it were and the British tradition we don't have many written grand strategic texts that we can look back on especially you go back kind of in the early 20th century and back into the 19th century where some of us have argued you can discern grand strategy is set of behaviors and mindsets but not these written manifestos of blueprints and so you know you're kind of reading it and evaluating and judging it compared to some other states that actually set about trying to write down the grand strategy so again it's it's not quite the answer to your question that I would say a point to a number of countries that engage in a coherent set of activities towards it and recognize the importance of it and gain gain value from having those conversations gain value from the pursuit of something like a coherent set of intellectual kind of architectures to shape and direct the direction into the country but I would say nobody does it perfectly and I don't think anything like a really coherent grand strategy exists in the present so much as perhaps more or less coherent endeavors in that direction I hope that was useful does anybody have any further questions I don't see anything else in the chat so please gather your thoughts we have a few minutes for final questions if not then um I suppose I would just pick up on some of the um the one of one of the one of the themes that's been touched upon a few times in this conversation is the question of Ukraine and the extent to which Ukraine has changed things or not changed things um I think and you know many of your remarks you mentioned how um how traditional considerations or or or principles or or themes within your field continue to shape understandings in the present day and I've been struck in a lot of the debate and discussion about you know at the beginning of the war in Ukraine there was an expectation that we were going to see this extremely 21st century war this you know novel thing um and so much of the discussion seems to be pointing to the ways in which it's really a very traditional war um being won and lost in some very 20th century um for 20th century reasons so I guess one of my questions for you um is uh for you all actually as a panel is the ways in which your field helps you to think about the future I mean in some ways I'm looking at you Tim because I know you've written a lot about future um the ways in which you think the field um needs to change or adapt to uh really quite novel things that are happening as a result whether it's technological change or whether it's normative shifts or or whatever it is whether it's you know um you know other transnational factors some of these problems without passports are there things that are happening in your field that really are transforming or undermining some of those more traditional pillars upon which the field has stood or do you think that looking ahead into the next few decades of the field you'll continue to basically continue to be teaching um texts from the 20th century or before that and thinking about some of these issues through the lens of these traditional approaches as much as you are thinking in the present about more kind of um more recent things um Tim can I come to you on that one and you've got about eight phd's answering this question okay it um it's a set of really massive kind of propositions and questions there I mean you mentioned ukraine and one of the things that when I mentioned empirics earlier one of the things ukraine has allowed us to do is to test some of the propositions that um the field has been coming up with over the last few years about the role of cyber in war and warfare um and it roughly falls into a couple of campuses ukraine has changed everything where ukraine looks much how we expected to fortunately the media seems to think that it's changed every or the media seems to think that the field said that everything was going to change with ukraine but it's not what the field said at all uh you know we published stuff 11-12 years ago that that make russia look the the invasion Ukraine pretty much how we expected it to be which was cyber as an adjunct to main military operations and to conventional operations um and that's roughly how it's panned out but one of the interesting things that we've noted and this speaks to come with some of the earlier points that you're talking about around the role of the researcher and engagement and outreach and so on was actually during the first two weeks of so late february into early march people working in cyber were being bombarded with media requests um and those of us you know i'm used to doing media it doesn't bother me at all i pick and choose but a lot of young researchers were being thrust into the position of suddenly being experts in a way that they hadn't previously um been used to and therefore considering their own kind of what we call an academic jargon their positionality um and the requirements and obligations put upon them as researchers in public facing universities and it caused a lot of soul searching you know what am i for what am i doing here do i have to answer the call to provide publicly relevant information in the public domain that's somehow going to shed some lights on on what's happening a but also be perhaps to kind of influence people working in this space or whose job it is to make policy and direct strategy um and and i think that generally applies to to you know those people were being asked to do something much earlier than career perhaps they've they've been used to but it does speak to what we're for and i would encourage a university to allow people not to have to engage publicly like that don't feel pressured to do it if it's not what you want to do um and traditionally that's between you know some pure researchism applied researchers and i think we need both um but i do think it needs to be a matter of choice for the individual research in as much as um you know that they're allowed to make that choice so ukraine's been really interesting in that respect for any number of uh different reasons thank you hugh do you have any thoughts on the impact of ukraine and how it's changing the forward trajectory of your field well i mean i think i pretend to be people can take what i want from it really i mean i i think there's you know a number of things which confirm you know what we already knew about the the importance of intelligence in in war in that in that there's not necessarily a any way um a substitute for raw power um that you know surprise can't be guaranteed that deception is is thought and so on and so forth um so you know so in in in many ways uh it's sort of old wine in in new bottles but what has has been interesting in particular and which um might point to a kind of wave for the future or at least a wave cresting it at some point further down the line has been this um public dimension to it which we've seen in the past in several examples you know going back to 1927 not which um has really gathered pace and has amounted to more or less a consistent sort of commentary by official western intelligence sources particularly di in the uk and various bits of the united states machinery about what is going on from a you know a western intelligence perspective and um and the offering more or less a consistent debunking or in some cases pre-bunking of russian claims and russian operations and as i said although we've seen this in in the past like you know iraq is an example here um mh17 might be another one that the pace and scale of it is i think a bit new and a bit interesting uh and brings with it i think some issues are going to have to be thought about very carefully um particularly around risk and whether or not doing this sort of removes people from kind of being players because of adjunct players on the sidelines or spectating on the issues to being construed much more definitively as active participants in a conflict because you know you know dropping something once in a blue moon is one thing but offering a daily tweet update that is leading to russian forces being targeted by you know western supplied weapons is another thing you know as is kind of having some of your people gloating about how their intelligence help target the muskver or kill russian general x or whatever so um your intelligence has always been you know related to you know issues of violence as opposed to war but in in this case the public aspect of it brings with it i think new and potentially you know unprecedented risks um but that will be an interesting point to debate in the foreseeable future great thank you um we're pretty much at time and we have a question in the q and a which is about how our study feels um uh reflections for our own study feels on how migration waves affect and challenge security policies um war of famine natural disaster push people to defy borders it's a really interesting question and you know it's it's it's a good one to end on i think in the sense that this is a panel that's been thinking about transnational challenges i would say we probably all have reflections upon migration waves as you know from different perspectives in our fields and the ways in which our fields um you know excuse me choking the ways in which our fields help us to reflect upon this i mentioned in my remarks about climate change as kind of the you know the big grand strategic challenge that's going to be um properly defining the coming decades and within that i consider migration waves to be just a major factor for talking about you know transformation of kind of habit habitable zones and in large-scale movements of people the question of how you you know prepare for and adapt to that is obviously an absolutely major one um you know we saw from from over the last decade the ways in which relatively small numbers of um of people arriving into the european continent seeking seeking asylum and refuge transformed european politics arguably was still feeling those effects quite quite profoundly to to this day does anybody want have any final thoughts or remarks about migration specifically and how um how your field helps you think about migration waves as security challenge uh john well i'll just say that uh it's obvious that uh grand strategically uh policymakers do not connect uh actions as foreign policy with what is generally regarded as internal security so migration is seen as an internal security challenge uh interior ministry um and it's depressing to see how little connection there seems to have been in the thinking about that but we have short memories don't we because we did have an EU migration crisis in the Mediterranean which we don't talk about that much in britain we talk about the relatively small numbers compared to southern european states uh crossing the channel um and you know if there isn't it's a great cross cutting question what why people are crossing the channel from what we all regard as a wonderful country france uh in in most cases which has you know policy implications uh all across but but to me yes it is it is striking how far um areas that we have intervened in other source of migration um so there are consequences to our actions absolutely um Gina like on you for the last word brilliant yes i'm i'm really pleased that Hugh mentioned several times ethics and um and also content online and and this also brings into what Tim was discussing about uh not just young researchers but researchers in general engaging publicly with these areas of research and certainly this is a considerable risk when working within terrorism studies and certainly as a female researcher too myself and colleagues face significant risks in publishing our research in engaging publicly um certainly my colleagues working on misogynistic extremism and incels have faced threats online directed against them personally um and the vicarious trauma that researchers can face by looking at extremist content particularly those that are now being more accessible uh through live streaming and obviously being shared on social media quite openly um this is a serious concern but it's also an area of increasing focus within the field so this is um a concern and also an opportunity for the field to change and adapt and look at itself to rid some of uh its past as being quite a masculinist field that does not accept vicarious trauma or researcher trauma but understanding our own um sensitivities and uh expectations and um vulnerabilities when researching in this field and there is continued discussion about ethics as I said not just about the research populations that we study but also ourselves and self-care and putting that and putting mental health support for ourselves as researchers into grant applications into the way in which we conduct our studies and how the field operates and so I think this is a really exciting important and much needed development within the field of terrorism studies and I don't know whether this is something that um my colleagues can engage with within their own areas but certainly this is um an opportunistic and positive aspect for us in terrorism studies. Thank you very much and I can certainly echo that even though as a historian most of the people I encounter in my research haven't been gone for a long time um it's not so it's not a kind of a direct um it's an interaction in that sense colleagues who work in the areas that I've looked in it's a history of empire history of slavery and so on have talked about exactly this and some of the questions around the searcher trauma so we should pick this up again I could pick up about well all of the strands that we've discussed on this call today with all of you and I'm sure we could do this for another three hours um but I think we don't have to wrap up now thank you all very much thank you very much the panellists thank you to Lizzie from the school who's hosted us here and thank you all to um to all the attendees thank you for your great questions


Things narcissists do when you discard them. When a person decides to discard the narcissist, it's because they've had enough. They've had enough of the constant insults and put-downs. They've had enough of the narcissist using them for money or sex. The narcissist ran amok on you. They behaved in an uncontrollable way. They were very disruptive. They were very inconsiderate. And they had no intentions of changing their behavior. Because they held you responsible for everything they did. They made you believe that you were the one who was supposed to change or do better.  You've realized the truth of what you're dealing with. You understand that if there's anything you need to change, you need to stop giving so much of yourself to someone who doesn't appreciate it. If there's anything you need to do better, it's enforcing your boundaries. And the more you try to do this, the more it should confirm to you that you need to get rid of them. Because they're never going to change. They're never going to respect you. A major part of the disorder is that they think they don't need to change. They think everything is your fault. And when you realize this, you accept that your only option is to discard them. That's the only way that you can deal with these types of people. Because they're never going to hear anything you say. They're never going to try to understand where you're coming from. They're just going to see it as though you're trying to manipulate them. Because that's what they did to you.  But they already know that the situation is not good for you. Which is why they have to target your self-esteem to keep you down. To make you lose confidence. To keep you thinking you're not good enough for anything else. So that you don't have the strength to leave them. When you finally decide to discard the narcissist, it's because you realize that it's not your fault. You're not responsible for the way that they behave it. You're not responsible to fix anything. Because you realize that your dealing with someone who has a mental illness. The reason why it was so difficult for you to leave. Is because you had hope that they could change. And you held yourself responsible for making them change. As though you just had to do better or do more. And then finally they would be okay. Dead was ever good enough for them. Because they have these insatiable desires that can never be fulfilled. Make themselves happy. Yet they held you to that expectation. Of something that they couldn't even fulfill for themselves. They are very delusional entitled people. And when you fail to fulfill their impossible expectations. They will become very resentful towards you. They will want revenge. Which is why I decided to create this video. So that you can prepare yourself. For what the narcissist might do when you discard them. They will stalk and harass you. When the narcissist does this. It's because they're refusing to accept that you want nothing to do with them. Or they just don't care about what you want. Because they're only concerned with their own feelings and needs. They are self-absorbed and they lack empathy. So it's not like a normal relationship. Where the other person understands that you're not happy. The narcissist is only concerned with what they want. And they expect you to remain around them regardless of how you feel. Your feelings and needs are not important to the narcissist. They always have to be the priority. Because they believe that they're special. They believe they're superior to you. So you're just supposed to submit to them and meet their demands. Regardless of what you want. The narcissist sees everything in black and white.  And if you discard them. They see it as though you have won. And they see it as though they have lost. And they have very sore losers. They cannot deal with losing. They set everything up in an attempt to avoid ever having to deal with losing. When you discard them. They see it as though you have got one over on them. As though you have abandoned them without help or support. It causes a narcissistic injury. It bruises their fragile egos. And in their minds you have no right to do that. Because there's nothing wrong with them. They haven't done anything wrong. In their minds they're perfect. Which is why they cannot accept it when you try to move on. This is why they stalk and harass you. This is why they cannot leave you alone. Because in their minds you're at fault. You're to blame for everything. To triangulation. When you discard the narcissist. They will bring a third person into the relationship. So that they can remain in control. The communication between you and the third person will be through the narcissist. Or if you refuse to talk to the narcissist. The third person will communicate with you directly. They will use this third person to bring you under their control again. The third person may also be the narcissist new relationship partner. The narcissist may act like they are happy with this new person. It's designed to make you question yourself. To make you wonder if you made the wrong decision. They will try to make you jealous. They will try to make you want to return to them. When there's really nothing to return to. It's just another part of their manipulation. They're deceiving you. But if they know that you're no longer susceptible to their manipulation. They will only triangulate you with one of their flying monkeys. With someone who they have manipulated into thinking that something is wrong with you. This person will be used to manipulate you into returning back to the narcissist. Whether they are aware of it or not. Three. They will play the victim. They will act like you did them wrong. So now you have to make things right. They will act like you abandoned your duty or responsibility for them. And now you have to return to what they have assigned you to do. Because they know that you don't want to be seen as a bad person. They know that you just want to do what's right. And they take advantage of your desire to be a good person. They take advantage of your desire to do what's right. They guilt trip you. They try to make you feel bad. Because they want you to give them another chance. But if you do give them another chance. Nothing is going to change. They're just going to go back to what they were doing before. And it's just going to make it easier for them to blame you the next time. They push you over the edge. Smear campaign. If you don't fall for their attempts to get you back. They will talk to people about you. And portray it as though you are the narcissist. As though you did all of these horrible things to them. And then you just left them without any help or support. Because they want to get people on their side.  So that you're left without any support. Because they don't want to see you moving on with anything. If you leave them. They want to see you in a worse situation. They don't want you to feel like you're better off without them. Because then that makes them feel small. It makes them feel like they're not good for anything.  And now you're paying for the consequences of that decision. They can't let you think that you did the right thing. Because of how that would reflect on them. So they play the victim. And they try to make people think you've done something wrong. So that they can gain people sympathy and ruin your reputation. It gives them supply. It supports the illusion. This is what happens when you discard the narcissist. They will stalk and harass you. They will triangulate you with a third person. They will play the victim. And they will start a smear campaign against you. I hope that this video can help you to protect yourself. If you do decide to discard the narcissist. Thank you for watching. Please like, comment, share and subscribe. If you would like to donate my PayPal link, it's in the video description. Coaching queries. You can email me at coaching.announceviver.uk. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.