I’m Dr. Katharine Millar,
I'm an Assistant Professor of International Relations
in the International Relations Department at the London School of Economics
and I specialise in Gender and International Politics.
Hi, my name's Martin Bayly,
I'm an Assistant Professor in International Relations
at the London School of Economics,
and I work on Historical International Relations Empire and South Asia.
My research is broadly involved with the study of death and destruction
and how we might think about that differently.
In a more theoretical sense, what I do is I look at the ways
in which different forms of social relations and social order
relate to violence and how violence, in turn,
informs social relations and social order and I have a specific interest
in social relations and orders relating to gender,
sexuality, race, class, ability, and so forth.
One of my current projects,
the book manuscript that I'm currently working on
is looking at the politics of supporting the troops
in the United States and the United Kingdom
during the early years of what is often referred to
as the global war on terror, and I'm interested in the ways in which
moral and ethical understandings of citizenship
are informed by moral and ethical understandings of masculinity,
so what it means to be a good man.
What a good man, what a good citizen, what a good person should do in wartime,
and how that informs and affect emotional and political relations
that civilians and society have towards the armed forces in wartime.
I'm taking a pretty critical look at the ways
which these forms of support and solidarity as they get entangled
with gender norms about manliness, masculinity,
what it means to be a good person in wartime
can have inadvertent effects in terms of what that means
for viable democratic debate and descent again in the context of war.
I'm interested in empire and how it operates or operated
as a political form
and how that varied across time and space.
I'm particularly interested in what you might call frontier spaces,
so those spaces on the peripheries of imperial rule,
and the reason for this, I think is the empire or the way we think
about empire within international relations
is often challenged when we look at these frontier areas.
They are often sites of territorial ambiguity
and of sovereign ambiguity.
They often exhibited various forms of governing practices
and contestation over those practices,
and they also generated a vast amount of knowledge
that tells us something about the worldview of empires.
If we look at the space nowadays occupied by Pakistan and Afghanistan
which is an area that I've looked at in my past research,
historically, this was seen by the British Empire as a site of danger
or of uncertainty and also an area of risk.
Frontier spaces changed the way
that we think about empire as a powerful entity,
instead, we see empire as a very unstable and in some ways anxious entity.
One that was only ever
slightly in grasp of what it was doing on the ground if you like.
More recently my research has taken a new direction.
I'm interested in how this knowledge that was generated
by those colonised by empire was reacted to.
How did those subjects to imperial rule
generate their own knowledge or react against imperial knowledge forms?
This is important because it allows us to think about how world orders
were not simply based on European or imperial forms of knowledge
but were contested across different spaces.
I've spent some time looking at Indian
or South Asian-based scholars, organisations, and activists
and how they reacted against imperial forms of knowledge
and conjured up their own understandings of world order
and how world order should change.
In terms of the impact I see or hope to see
coming out of my broad academic research
there's at least two audiences or two lanes.
The first in terms of thinking really critically
about the military and civil-military relations
and how gender relations and norms relate
to what we think of as a good citizen and citizenship duties,
I hope to help us to think more critically and fairly broad sense
about the role of the military and addressing foreign policy
in democratic societies.
This involves working with non-governmental organisations,
can involve working with students, with my own students,
with students also at the secondary school level
and also with politicians who are engaged
in processes of democratic oversight relating to the armed forces.
The second branch of my impact and outreach activities
actually relates much more directly to the armed forces themselves.
Under the ambit of my broader expertise in gender relations
and the armed forces as well as more and more generally,
I also work directly with armed forces.
I do that in two ways.
One is to come in as an outside academic lecturer
to officer training courses
to discuss academic theories and understandings
of how gender roles and relations relate to conflict,
the ways in which military operations play out,
and how they inform what we tend to think of is normal and natural
in military settings
so helping the military itself actually think more critically about what it does.
The second track within that is that I also work
as what is sometimes referred to as a gender trainer
which is a funny term for people in the armed forces
to go in and help them think in a very practical and applied way
about how gender and gendered inequality
relates to their day-to-day lives and their day-to-day activities
as members of the military.
That's both in terms of thinking about promoting gender equality,
inclusivity, and belonging within their own armed forces
and thinking about reducing dynamics that could be exclusionary
in terms of gender, race, sexuality, and so forth.
It's also about thinking through gendered needs, vulnerabilities,
and capabilities of people, members of the armed forces might encounter
in a conflict zone upon deployment or on a peacekeeping mission
and helping them think through the practical skills
as well as their legal and operational obligations
to think through how they might protect and also reduce harm to men,
boys, women, girls, and non-binary people
in the context of ongoing conflict or a peacekeeping setting.
My research will be relevant to those interested
in the history of world politics more broadly,
and particularly those interested in histories
of international order from beyond Europe.
In the past, my work on frontiers and on Afghanistan,
and on knowledge formations has been useful for those organisations
including foreign ministries and military organisations
who are seeking to understand various parts of the world.
Something I contribute here is thinking about
how knowledge is ordered and systematised
and how that is in fact, shaping the way that they see the world.
More recently my work on non-western international thought from India
is useful for those who are seeking to understand
the lineages of contemporary world order.
We live in a world of what I refer to as rising powers including India
and it's now important that we understand
world order from their perspective and the perspectives
and the histories of world order thinking.
Very often the histories that I am looking at
from the Indian perspective have been hidden or submerged
or overlooked, and it's important that we pay closer attention
to these histories in order to understand
South Asia's current position in world politics today.
The theory area history cluster is a theoretically pluralist venue
for the inquiry into a variety of theoretical and empirical problems
in world politics,
and so my research background is more shaped
by historical international relations
and pointing theory towards questions of how we understand change over time,
the change in polities and forms of knowledge.
The cluster provides a forum for having conversations
about my own research
as well as the research of others in the department
and PhD students, faculty, and invited speakers.
We’re actually not incredibly concerned with nailing down the exact meaning
of these words really directly or prescriptively,
but instead we're interested in providing a space in which people
who have works that falls under this rubric
could fall under this rubric are invited to come and discuss and share.
The cluster reflects where the discipline of international relations
is today in the sense that it's not so shaped
by the idea of theory as different traditions
or what isn't for example.
In fact, maybe the discipline has never been that way.
We tend to think eclectically about theory
that theory comes from many different sources
and when you look at theory within the tradition
actually we see a confluence or an assemblage
and many different ways of thinking about the world
that comes from many different thinkers.
I guess we think across theory broadly conceived
and in a sense, everyone in international relations discipline
is doing theory of some kind.
I guess the cluster is there to
really inquire into the multiple ways that we might theorise the world.
The cluster provides a space where people
with ostensibly different research interests and skills
to come together to discuss things and to work together.
I'm thinking now, for instance you and I along with our colleague, Dr. Yuna Hahn,
and two PhD students Katharina Kuhn and Irene Morlino
just finished a collaborative project looking at the politics of unfortunately,
death and grief and social order
in relation to this emerging COVID-19 crisis.
Because one of the things we also do is try to use theory
to help us think about really pressing social and political problems.
That's right and the forum the cluster provides a great venue for that research
because that was a project that involved a variety of theoretical influences.
There were ideas taken from transitional justice,
as well as more of your work on social scripts and grief.
Then from my perspective,
being able to contribute historical case study empirics
on the Spanish flu pandemic, the so-called Spanish flu pandemic
in the UK in 1918
in order to show how theory can be used to historical cases
or applied to historical cases to show the enduring logics
and social logics of pandemics.
Interestingly, how those social logics are forgotten and not memorialised
which I think is quite important.
One of the quite important findings from the project.
Yes, definitely and I think the project really illustrates the benefit of bringing
in eclectic theoretical approaches and ideas
that don't immediately seem to go together
because they provide I think like a much more nuanced
and sophisticated lens on like mass death in the complex context of COVID-19
is a really difficult and complex problem to understand and to talk about.
I think it gave us just a much better sense
of both from your research on the project historical lessons learned
and from my research and Dr. Hahn's research
at things we should be nervous about or looking to do
going forwards to help produce solidaristic
and inclusive COVID-19 recovery and commemoration which definitely--
In that way, this theoretical innovation fed into
in ways I hope were productive into policy briefs and reports
that we wrote moving forward for politicians, policy makers,
people working in the non-governmental sector,
as well as this project that LSE library did that
it was such a privilege for us to be involved in.
In the primary school children and helping them to think of how
working with grief and loss either in their own lives
or the lives of their friends and families in the context of COVID.
It's tragic but that's necessary,
but it's amazing to be able to help
support that type of publicly oriented and socially impactful work.