Biography

I am an Professor in International Security at the University of Portsmouth, specialising in regional security, armed conflict, violent non-state actors, and authoritarianism. I hold a PhD in International Relations from Portsmouth, funded by the ESRC, and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin and a Marie Curie Fellow at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, where I researched the evolving character of warfare.

Currently, I serve as a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Warsaw), a Fellow of the Society for Peace Studies and Practice in Nigeria, a member of the University of Lancaster's Centre for War and Diplomacy, and an Affiliated Member of the Emerging Research in International Security Group at Sant’Anna.

My interdisciplinary work addresses security challenges across West Africa, the Levant, the Gulf, and the former Soviet Union. This includes a recent British Academy-funded comparative project on armed conflicts in the Sahel and Lake Chad regions.

I teach primarily on security and strategy, war studies, authoritarianism, regionalism, insurgency and counter-insurgency, and energy security.

Additionally, I have a strong interest in artificial intelligence, particularly in the adoption of generative AI in Higher Education.

Research interests

• Authoritarianism and security
• The Changing Character of Warfare
• Regionalism and security
• Non-violent sub-state challenges
• Violent sub-state challenges
• International Security
• International Political Economy
• Eurasian, Gulf and West African Security issues
• Machine Learning-Area Studies/Political Science Interdisciplinarity
• Generative AI and Higher Education/Research