Chapter 4 Teaching Staff

Introduction

The course will be taught by Dr Jack McDonald, and Dr Mark Condos. Dr McDonald is the course convener, and therefore should be your first point of contact for questions about the course. Dr Condos will be running one of the seminar series this year, and any questions about the content of that series (difficulty with texts, suggested further readings, etc) should be communicated to him.

4.1 Mark Condos

Mark Condos is a historian interested in the intersections between violence, race, and law within the British and French empires, with a particular focus on India and Algeria.

His previous research has examined the relationship between militarism, violence, and state-building in colonial Punjab and along the North-West Frontier of British India. This work explored how colonial anxieties, fears, and vulnerabilities played an important role in determining the authoritarian and often violent practices of the British colonial state.

Mark has also written extensively on the phenomenon of ‘fanaticism’ along the North-West Frontier of British India, tracing the colonial origins of some of the key legal and discursive tropes in contemporary engagements with terrorist violence.

He is currently working on two different projects. The first examines how various forms of legal and extrajudicial violence were incorporated by the British and French empires in their attempts to police different frontier regions, with particular emphasis on the ways that Indian revolutionaries used the tangled legal geography of British and French India to carry out their activities in the early 20th century. The second project looks at how concepts of prestige, dignity, and honour informed imperial practices of retributive violence, and the ways that imperial powers attempted to justify these within legal, moral, and other normative frameworks.

4.2 Jack McDonald

Jack McDonald is a lecturer in war studies at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is the author of two books examining the relationship between the law and ethics of war, and emerging technology. His first book, Ethics, Law and Justifying Targeted Killings (Routledge), examined American justifications for drone strikes and targeted killings during the Obama administration. His second book, Enemies Known and Unknown (OUP/Hurst), analysed the relationship between law, technology, and strategy in America’s “transnational armed conflict” with al-Qaeda and demonstrated the key role law plays in the constitution of war.

Dr McDonald’s research examines the relationship between ethics, law, technology, and war. He takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of war and warfare, and is primarily interested in the philosophical questions underlying the regulation of warfare both in the present and the past. He is currently researching the role of ICTs in the generation of ethical debates, working towards a book project on data ethics in armed conflict. This is part of a wider research project on power and political violence in digital societies, and the role of tradition in Anglo-American warfare.