RA 5: Global Order and Security

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RA 5

RA 6

Uncovering power, resistance, and inequality in global politics through critical perspectives on security, conflict, and transnational justice. 

RA 5 Leads

KCL

Dr Jenna Marshall

E: jenna.marshall@kcl.ac.uk 

QMUL

Dr Sharri Plonski

E: s.plonski@qmul.ac.uk 

ICL

Dr William Proud

E: w.proud@imperial.ac.uk 

About this Research Area

This Research Area examines the dynamics of conflict, violence, and insecurity in the contemporary world, adopting an interdisciplinary and multi-scalar perspective. Central to its focus is a critical engagement with the structures of empire, colonialism, and racial capitalism that underpin global relations, as well as the ways in which these structures are resisted, reworked, and challenged. Research pays particular attention to voices and communities that are often marginalised in conventional accounts of global politics, including migrants, indigenous peoples, racialised groups, women, queer and trans communities, and working-class or rural populations. By foregrounding these perspectives, the area highlights the lived experiences and struggles that are central to the making and unmaking of global order.

Harnessing diverse data to understand conflict, power, and the changing dynamics of global security.

International Development, Conflict & Human Security

Methodologically, this Research Area is committed to approaches that “disrupt the present,” uncovering the material, discursive, and institutional systems that sustain violence while also exploring forms of care, solidarity, and resistance. Themes include critical security studies, international development, policing and border regimes, and transnational movements for liberation and justice. Students and researchers are encouraged to connect global frameworks to grounded empirical inquiry, thereby linking abstract structures to everyday experiences. The area ultimately seeks to advance more inclusive and ethically engaged understandings of global order and security.

Data Statement

RA5 approaches data as embedded in systems of power, including imperial, colonial, racial, and gendered structures. While projects in this area may draw on both quantitative and qualitative sources (e.g., conflict databases, demographic and economic indicators, policy archives, interviews, ethnographic fieldwork), this RA emphasises complexity, interconnection, and the situated nature of evidence. Data are understood as relational and contingent, shaped by power dynamics, and projects are expected to reflect critically on these conditions.

Quantitative and qualitative methods may both be used, but RA5 often prioritises inductive, in-depth, and evolving engagements with data, especially ethnographic approaches that capture lived experiences of violence, exclusion, and resistance. Data may be encountered, experienced, analysed, and curated as fragments or patchworks, with smaller and constantly shifting datasets recognised as valuable sites for interpretation. Researchers are also encouraged to innovate by reframing materials, spaces, or practices not traditionally considered data, thereby challenging dominant assumptions about what counts as knowledge.

Research Students

Doctoral projects in RA5 are expected to interrogate how power relations shape the production and use of data, and to reflect on the ethical and political implications of methodological choices. This approach supports research that not only generates empirical insights but also unsettles conventional modes of knowledge, contributing to more reflexive and just social science.

To find out more about our students and their research projects in this Research Area, please go to our Funded Students page and filter by Research Area.

You can find research project details on each student profile, where most students work on projects that they generate themselves.

View student profiles

Other Research Areas

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