Can legal empowerment support forcibly displaced people when they face high levels of violence and exploitation and few incentives to report? We study demand for and impact of legal empowerment through a randomized control trial with 1,707 displaced people in Greece. Using an encouragement design, we explore variation in information seeking behavior and the impact of information. At baseline, nearly half of the study participants were unaware of how to seek help after experiencing violence.

[joint work with: Vera E. Troeger (Uni Hamburg) and Philip Manow (Uni Siegen)]

(book project with Spencer Goidel, Auburn University and Paul M. Kellstedt, Texas A&M)

Ukraine, without a recognisable Navy at the start of Russia’s 2022 full scale invasion, has achieved some remarkable successes in the Black Sea, but has it demonstrated revolution, or evolution and if so, what can it tell Naval planners about possible future trends of warfare at sea?

Commander Walton is the 2024-25 Royal Navy Hudson Fellow at St Antony’s College and a visiting research fellow at SST-CCW. He commissioned into the Royal Navy in 1992 from Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth and holds a Masters in Applied Security Strategy from the University of Exeter.

The African continent is marred by conflict. Although there is much attention to matters of war and peace in Africa, the underlying doctrines of African rebels and revolutionaries are usually overlooked. Rather than imposing Western theory on African developments, this presentation considers the contribution of African military thought to the changing global order. It does so by focusing on national liberation movements, which spearheaded the struggle for independence during the twentieth century.

Hybrid warfare in and around Ukraine has confronted Europe with a paradigm shift regarding security and defense since at least 2014. It began to dawn on Europe, that in an extreme case, existing military defense- and deterrence-postures might even be bypassed through hybrid strategies in a ‘downward or horizontal escalation mode’. With Russia's large-scale military invasion of Ukraine, the war entered a new, militarily escalating but no less hybrid phase. European countries in support of Ukraine incrementally came under hybrid attack.

At a time when we face unparalleled security dilemmas and technology is evolving at a pace where we are challenged to keep up, Defence has been struggling with how to innovate successfully and deliver novel technologies into the hands of the end user at scale.  This seminar will examine from both a theoretical and practical perspective, how that might be achieved, taking lessons from recent conflict and the civilian sector.