Astor Lecture: Beyond Mere Inconvenience: United States and Civilian Harm
Astor Lecture
Friday 2 May 2025
17:00-18:30 DPIR
Manor Road Building Lecture Theatre
Lecture Title: Beyond Mere Inconvenience: United States and Civilian Harm
Register for free here.
The Astor Lecture at Oxford is a series of lectures given by distinguished academics from the United States. The lectures cover a range of topics, including history, literature, environmental issues and political science.
In 2025, DPIR will be hosting Astor Visiting Lecturer, Helen Kinsella, Professor of Political Science & Law, University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
In her 2025 Astor Lecture, Professor Kinsella will evaluate the United States military’s detailed Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response (CHMR). What are its implications for conceptualizing CHMR as a strategic and moral military imperative and assessing the preeminent role of the United States under both the Biden and Trump administrations? What are its implications for democratic accountability and for engagement with civilian casualties and civilian harm? The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and a drinks reception.
Helen is an award-winning, highly distinguished, and respected International Relations (IR) scholar with a national and international reputation as one of the leading critical and interpretive IR scholars of her generation; she is among the most creative international political theorists of armed violence working in the academy today.
Helen’s research is highly significant for current international politics, as evidence in her ongoing engagement with the pre-eminent humanitarian organisations, International Committee of the Red Cross, Air Wars and others. Beginning as a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, she has worked with the ICRC on their analysis of gender, armed violence, and international humanitarian law, e.g., completing a background paper for their legal department which informed high-level U.N. meetings and further policy development, and hosting relevant training. Currently, she is also working with the humanitarian organisation ‘Airwars’ on an analysis of the United States 2024 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Strategies and is on the working board of the U.K Beyond Compliance Consortium which was awarded £5 million by the U.K. Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office to improve civilian protection globally.
In recent years, Helen has built on her expertise in international humanitarian law, gender, and armed violence to produce a series of excellent and highly visible articles, papers, and work in progress, that has taken her work in multiple new directions. Her work is published in American Political Science Review, Review of International Studies, International Theory, Political Theory, Political Power and Social Theory, Feminist Review, among others. She is currently working on a book on sleep in war and another on the histories of the laws of war through the United States' wars against Native peoples, building on a recent article in APSR on Francis Lieber’s General Orders 100, which was the blueprint for the development of formal international laws of war. This article takes the discussion of Lieber and the laws of war in a completely new direction, foregrounding the hitherto neglected but fundamentally racialized, gendered and ethno-nationalist sentiments that shaped Lieber’s understanding of the proper operation of the law during the dispossession of Native American populations.
Kinsella produces work of great academic distinction, exhibiting deep academic integrity and focus. She contributes equally and with great distinction to the fields of international law, political theory, feminist theory, and international relations/security studies. And her work has direct implications for contemporary policy and security. We find her to be one of the most impressive scholars working in the field today.
Professor, Patricia Owens and Professor, Laura Sjoberg.