Conflict

The conflict group is a multi-disciplinary team of academics working toward improving the understanding of decision making in conflict scenarios. Providing evidence based research into how military units, emergency services and other conflict involved individuals behave and why.

Soldier Systems 

Using the ‘system of systems’ approach we study the lethality, mobility, and survivability of the individual in armed conflict. This covers the military units and emergency services involved in protecting both the nation state and its citizens. Through direct quantification and data engineering we are uncovering hidden patterns of behaviour in both permissive and non-permissive environments.

All of this activity contributes to our understanding of how to ensure proportionality in the use of lethal force to conform to accepted (inter)national norms enshrined in International Humanitarian Law and the European Convention on Human Rights. A particular focus of this work is human augmentation and impact of emerging technologies on defensive behaviour in life threatening situations. 

Hybrid Warfare 

Human conflict is a spectrum with war at one end and peace at the other. What goes on across that spectrum remains to be determined. Influence operations or psychological warfare are cost effective tools to achieve strategic aims. Using adversarial thinking it is possible to understand hybrid threats and develop mitigation. Central to this mitigation is a focus on identity and morality. Often these concepts are surfaced in discussions of so called ‘culture wars’ and associated behaviour, such as ‘cancel culture’.

Psychologists often find themselves dealing with the topics at the core of many sociopolitical problems, such as gender identity, with little to no protection other than academic freedom. A particular focus of this work is how the discipline of Psychology comes to terms with researching and teaching contested knowledge.