Chapter 5 Teaching Staff

Introduction

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

5.1 Jack McDonald

Dr Jack McDonald is a senior 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.

5.2 Mark Condos

Dr 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.

5.3 David Bicknell

Dr David Bicknell is a visiting research fellow in the Department of War Studies. He recently completed his PhD in January 2021. He has a professional background as a commercial lawyer at a leading City law firm in London from 1992-2015, specializing in international finance. His thesis, A penumbra of war: The use of lethal force in British military operations in internal armed conflicts used a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing international law, history and strategy to investigate the legal basis adopted by the British Army for the use of lethal force in internal armed conflicts from the Jamaica Rebellion in 1865 to the Iraq War, 2004-09.

5.4 Anna Plunkett

Dr Anna Plunkett is a lecturer in international relations in the Department of War Studies. Her research focuses on the role of local elites as mediators and obstacles within nationally led regime transitions. She is interested in how the presence of such alternative authority structures impact and create subnational variation within regime transitions. Her primary interests include conflict and democracy at the sub-national level, understanding how various political orders are impacted by transitions at the sub-national level.

Anna’s main area of focus is Myanmar’s ethnic borderlands and ongoing conflicts in the region. She has previously worked as a human rights researcher focusing on military impunity and its impact on the community in Myanmar. Over the past few years, she has worked on several large research projects and has conducted field research evaluating Bosnia’s post-war recovery twenty years after the Dayton Peace Accords. She works as a strategic consultant and trainer with NGOs and CSOs in South East Asia building capacity and sustainability within small organisations.

Anna is currently the Editor in Chief of Strife, the academic blog of the Department of War Studies, and have founded the Women in Writing and BA Internships Programme.