Awarded the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions International Fellowship to work on a project entitled 'Non-Western Powers and the Changing Character of Warfare'
While Western countries regularly intervene militarily abroad, recent years have seen increasing levels of military activity by non-Western states in the EU periphery, often in response to non-state challengers. Non-Western foreign interventions and domestic military operations have a profound impact on security and stability. Despite this, the patterns and character of resulting conflicts are ill-understood, especially compared to recent conflicts involving Western states (on which much of the recent conflict literature is based).
This project conducts a comparative analysis of four conflicts (in Ukraine, Yemen, the Lake Chad region and Iraq/Syria) that have seen the involvement of some of the most militarily active non-Western states (Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Iran and Turkey). In particular, the fellowship advances knowledge of: 1) how the character of conflicts involving non-Western military powers differs from existing conceptualizations of contemporary warfare (and each other); and, 2) how the character of these conflicts is comprehended conceptually both by actors involved, and by Western security actors (and how these conceptualisations differ).