Many governments, international organizations and private donors invest vast resources to enable developing country citizens to study in Western institutions. But while some beneficiaries later emerge as reformist democrats, others become reactionary autocrats. By educating their citizens, do Western institutions promote or preclude democracy in developing countries? This project will answer this major question through three innovative studies.

Higher Education Institutes will need to respond to expectations from students to equip them to make significant contributions towards sustainable futures. The question arises: how are educators meant to incorporate climate change education to meet student needs? Many teachers, especially those in non-STEM disciplines, feel unsure how to teach climate change or address the anxieties of students. Our innovation - EcoConnect – seeks to build a toolkit containing CCE teaching methods, workshops, and a website. Through EcoConnect, non-STEM faculty will be able to acquire skills and the tools to incorporate climate change education to support student learning.

In response to climate change (CC) countries take increasingly invasive mitigation and adaptation measures, which have serious impacts on the land rights of vulnerable people. Taking Mozambique and South Sudan as case studies, this socio-legal research aims to analyse and explain the implementation of such CC response laws and policies in developing countries with a weak rule-of-law environment. The knowledge it aims to produce is crucial to both ensure CC responses are effective and prevent them becoming another source of social injustices.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought unprecedented attention to open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers who collect and analyse publicly available information on security threats. Some observers believe easy access to online information on this war has “democratised” intelligence. The investigative group Bellingcat even claims to be an “intelligence agency for the people”. This exploratory project will move the study of intelligence beyond its narrow focus on government agencies by answering the following central research question: Who are open-source intelligence activists and how reliable are their contributions to public understanding of Russia’s war in Ukraine?

This project aims to reflect upon the human security enterprise from a critical angle, exploring human security as a terrain contested by a variety of state and non-state actors with competing approaches to securing human beings. The current scholarly literature on human security provides an important challenge to the state-centric orthodoxy of conventional international security by taking the survival and wellbeing of individuals into account. At the same time, however, it has tended to approach disputes over the meaning of human security and how it should be implemented in practice as obstacles to the development of human security as an effective field of study or policy agenda, rather than a field of political struggle that is itself in need of explanation. This project, by contrast, begins from the basic assumption is that actors in international relations ? including but not limited to international institutions, regional organisations, states, NGOs and civil societies ? conceptualise human security differently depending on their respective self-identities, and these self-identities are dynamically constructed, rather than given, evolving in specific political contexts but also shaped by historical legacies. One of the most prominent divisions in human security discourse has been between the West and East Asia. This project will accordingly focus on comparing and contrasting human security discourses in the EU and East Asia. By approaching states, international organisations and civil society actors as agents with socially constructed identities and interests, this project will contribute to a more nuanced understanding of their role in human security governance. Attention to the complexity and contestation within human security discourse and the presence of non-Western voices will also provide an opportunity for reassessing claims that the emancipatory potential of the human security agenda has been undermined through its cooption by a neocolonial, neoliberal project led by Western liberal states.