 Rhaid i'n meddwl i'n meddwl. Rhaid i'n meddwl i'n meddwl eich hun. Rhaid i'n meddwl i wit ar y taeth, ac mae'n meddwl i fi i maes addysg ar yr ei ddweud am y dyfod ac rydwb am ymddi. Rhaid i'n meddwl i'w meddwl i'r meddwl i ffyrdd arynt. Mae hynny'n ei gwneud â'ch cychwynild? favourite track in Pyrofon, the grant is go to be the first of a reoccurring annual session during which we look into showcase, just we had our access to possible some of the great research by some grants equipment also by some of our students as well and I'm very glad to see some from outside things here today which very much plays飼 I think to a core strategic priority of kings to be a civic university at the heart of London. So the topic we selected today for this first security studies event was understanding complex conflicts. As you may know both war and defence studies, the departments have a long and accomplished track record of policy relevant scholarship that has generated new knowledge and understanding of war and complex conflicts more broadly. So I bow how it into Lawrence Freeman and the two most notable colleagues in this respect. But they have paved the way for multiple scholars to take forward the scholarly traditions that they set in process. The kings way if you will. Research ledge education that seeks to bring knowledge and understanding to bear on real world policy challenges. So serving to shape and transform if you will. So we chose the two panels today as I said to showcase some of the best research that we have. The first panel is more historical in focus obviously and then the second panel is more focused on a contemporary issue or set of issues. So our first panel looks at the First World War and this is the last year of the centenary commemoration. I think we all agree that the First World War was an incredibly complex affair politically and also in terms of its prosecution militarily with significant innovation multiple domains by multiple actors across those four years. We're very fortunate today to have Jenny Waldman CBE as the chair for this session. Jenny is currently directing the First World War centenary cultural programme and among many many other things. Jenny was previously the creative producer of the London 2012 Festival, the finale of a cultural Olympiad for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympid Games. The 2012 Festival ran for 12 weeks and involved hundreds of events over the across the UK and attracted 19.8 million attendances, which is pretty astonishing. So many thanks to Jenny for participating today. On Jenny's panel we have two colleagues from Defence Studies and one from War Studies and perhaps I'll let you introduce them shortly. So we're also very lucky to have a second panel on Syria later on shared by Emil Hockhian. Emil is going to be joining us in about three o'clock and Emil is the Senior Fellow for Middle East Security at International Institute for Strategic Studies, where he specialises in political and conflict analysis including awards in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Again, thanks to Emil when he comes for participating. On that panel we have one academic from Defence Studies and then three colleagues from the Department of War Studies and I'll let him be introduced later on. Syria is clearly one of the most complex conflicts in history. Strawn in multiple actors, both state actors and non-state actors, seen some horrific abuses of human rights and sparked a humanitarian disaster of vast proportions and with reverberations, reverberating effects, if you will, much further afield. We won't be able to do justice, I don't think, to the complexity of Syria but we'll have a good go at illuminating some of the important aspects of that. As you have seen, we are also running a concurrent poster session which takes us beyond the first world war, takes us beyond Syria, although some of the voters do touch on Syria, I guess, but examining other aspects of conflict and security. Many thanks indeed to our poster contributors, particularly our students who stood up and accepted the challenge of putting their ideas on display, which is an uncomfortable thing for academics, I think, for students to do. And we have prizes for the best student poster and the runners-up, which Franz Berkut, our executive dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy, will present at the end of the afternoon. So that's enough of an introduction from me. I hope you enjoyed the afternoon. Come and chat if you want. I'll be here all afternoon and I'd like to hand over to Jenny now for our first panel. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here, not least because at the First World War Centenary Programme now given a slightly snappier title of 1480 now, we invite artists from around the world and across a range of art forms to reflect on the first world war and on its impact to our world today. And as part of the research and development of each of those projects, the artists we introduced to a range of academics and historians and the archive of the Imperial War Museum and many others, so that they can really be inspired by both the events of the period and the current historical analysis of those events in order to draw their own conclusions and create new artworks that are seen by people all around the UK. So I'm delighted to be here and I'm delighted to introduce our first panel who have a number of different perspectives on the First World War. We have here Dr Amy Fox, lecturer in defence studies at King's College since 2016 and before that a teaching fellow at Birmingham University. Her primary research interest focuses on the British Army in the First World War and last year she published a book Learning to Fight Military Innovation and Change in the British Army 1914-18. And she'll be talking to us about military innovation and the politics of command in the British Army in 1914-18. Dr Helen McCartney in the middle is reader in defence studies having joined the defence studies department here at King's in 2000. She's part of a group looking at the commemorations of the First World War during this centenary and I first came across Helen when she was adviser to the AHA team under BBC World War One at Home project in 2014. Helen's project The British Soldier and Myths of the Great War looks at the British soldier and how he's been represented both during the war and in its aftermath. She also touched on our programme again more recently when she wrote the contextual essay for the now exhibition of Chloe Dew Matthews' photographs shot at dawn. She'll be talking to us about commemoration and the First World War in Britain. Further to my left, I have to look at them to make sure that you're on my left rather than my right. I'm useless at that. Further to my left Professor Bill Philpott. Bill joined the department of war studies in September of 2001 as a lecturer in military history and became professor of history at war there in 2011. He's published extensively in the fields of the First World War history and in 20th century Anglo-French relations. Most recently he's published more of a tradition fighting the First World War and he'll be talking to us about the complex security challenge of resolving the First World War. No better time to be doing that than now as we look toward the whole period in the centenary of our vistas and with the Take Britain exhibition at the moment aftermath which I would only recommend to all of you. So what we'll be doing over the next hour is inviting each of our speakers to give their papers and then inviting questions to each of them and indeed to all of them after that. So first of all I'd like to invite Dr Amy Fox. Thank you. He went for inviting me to speak at what is a really important conference I think. Hopefully you'll get something out of my paper. What I try to do here is kind of blend the historical analysis of the First World War with a few contemporary resonances. In his lecture to the Royal United Services Institute in 2017 the now former chief of the defense staff Stuart Peach reached back to the experience of armed forces during the First World War and was a highlight the importance of innovation to the military. I'm struck by just how much innovation there was 100 years ago in here remarked. When you read the detail of the Battle of Cambride it was very much about innovation on the battlefields and achieved a remarkable effect. The First World War also resonated in General Sinic Carter's lecture on dynamic security threats earlier this year. For Carter then chief of the general staff and now the new chief of the defense staff. The First World War gives us a great chance to actually think out what the next war might look like. The Army here in March has a project underway that looks at mobilisation plans for the future force in the event of conflict on mainland Europe. It's called Project Henry Wilson in reference to the British Army's Director of Military Operations in 1940 who was largely responsible for the mobilisation plan that led to the deployment of the British Expeditionary Force to the west of the front. Indeed in many respects the First World War and the experience of the British forces who fought in it is proving a rich source of lessons for the British military today. Whether that's in terms of mass mobilisation, the reconstitution or regeneration of the force, sustainment but also war fighting not just in mass but also at scale against a pier or near pier enemy. But each encounter, the threats facing UK defence, whether they're state or non-state based, require certain interventions and responses and this isn't just an increase in spending new UK capabilities. Many of these responses are intrinsic to the military organisation itself, a higher appetite for risk taking for example, an increased premium placed on adaptability, investment in junior leaders and a command philosophy that enables and encourages initiative. But fundamentally there is a simple need and that's to innovate. For Peach innovation should not be a process or a slogan, it's the way we respond to the new threat environment. If we do not change with the threats that we face we risk being overmatched. Now the need for militaries to innovate is nothing new of course, whether we look in time of peace or time of war, whether we look at today or a hundred years ago. The need to innovate to retain a competitive advantage or military edge is param. Much of this need I think relies on a culture that provides for that enables innovation and it's perhaps no surprise then that the heart of the MOD's 2016 defence innovation initiative is the vision of empowering a culture that is innovative by instinct. Now I put to you that for the army of the First World War innovative by instinct is actually a fundamental tenet of its organisational culture in that in many respects it's a military organisation capable of proactive innovation and change. Now of course my contention doesn't necessarily chime with the popular perception of the army of the First World War. It's not quite in line with our Black Hatter goes forth view of the army. But even today in the last year of the centenary it's still an organisation that's largely viewed as conservative, was out of touch, led by unthinking callous generals. It's certainly not viewed as an agile organisation either conceptually or physically, nor is it viewed as particularly flexible or creative. Even contemporary commentates at the time held the same view. Dave Lloyd George, Britain's wartime Prime Minister believed that there was a rigidity, a restrictiveness about the methods employed by the army which allowed no play for initiative, imagination and inventiveness. Lloyd George's opinions I think not only just on senior commands but also on the British Army's officer corps more broadly have had an enduring and something of a distorting effect actually. On how we view learning and innovation in the army of the time. So what I want to deal with, with the time given to me, is challenged this view. Instead I want to highlight the role that both senior commanders also those at mid and junior levels played in creating the necessary conditions for innovation to occur. But I also want to show as a corollary how those individuals work together in order to stimulate, facilitate and co-ordinate innovation across the organisation. And note here that I'm referring to the organisation, not a particular regiment or branch or formation. Because to my mind innovation, if it's to be done effectively, has to be an institution wide undertaken, underpinned and enabled by an effective organisational culture. And that's really kind of the first of standard point I want to speak to this issue of culture. Because I don't think you can talk about command in the military without talking about the organisational culture within which it sits. In his contribution to the Wafelrym, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a British professional military education blog. In his contribution on speaking truth to power, Lieutenant-General Sir John Kisley used the example of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Hay, the commander in chief of the British forces in the first world war. He uses this example of him turning white with anger at being questioned by two staff officers. And for Kisley, what's interesting is that Hay's reaction tells us more about organisational culture than it does about the Field Marshal himself. The implication then is a culture that didn't break criticism, that was inflexible, that was intolerant. Other modern commentators and scholars have supported this view, suggesting that the army's bureaucratic framework and the culture of the pre-war period actually militated against a factor of learning, another suggesting simply that the army did not encourage open discussion or reassessment. Now, time unfortunately prevents me from detailed counter-argumentary of fall, but I'd suggest the opposite actually, and that from my research into the army, I found that it has a pretty flexible culture, which was necessarily shaped by a number of factors such as British national identity and the geo-strategic realities that Britain faced on the eve of the first world war. The army's culture was one that emphasised pragmatism, that prioritised individual action and demonstrated a preference for principles rather than for prescription. And that actually rather than acting as a break on innovation, this culture provides the army with the ability to adequately examine and promote new ideas and solutions. And this culture is propagating through a number of means. You have the regimental tradition, for bad or good, training regimes, but perhaps more importantly, the army's capstone doctrine of the time, which sought to empower the individual, the subordinate, as well as encouraging individual initiative. Now, there are some scholars who question the continual relevance of culture or wartime, but for me, I think it's clear that the army's culture at least set the preconditions to innovate, but its focus on the individual and its incredibly personalised nature was in many respects a double-edged sword, because such a culture facilitated experimentation and diversity, but with that comes a plethora of different methods and approach, which militates really against the uniformity that one might want or desire in a military organisation. But if we bore this down to a simple truth, is that this culture just prioritised individuals and that individuals often learned in ways that made best sense to them. And this is no more evident than in the British Army's officer corps, who were known to flat-hire directives and orders of immediate superiors, and in many respects these individuals had the ability to influence institutional behaviour to a considerable extent. What I want to sort of do now is show how this culture actually sort of played out in practice, as it were, and how it's enabled for the creation of an environment, but commanders in particular to facilitate innovation. For me, innovation can only really occur in an organisation that's actually rich in connections and relationships, and how those innovations are identified and how they're diffused is dependent on the size, the extent and also the degree of coupling. For me, the army's culture underpins the development of a network of individuals that are working together to co-ordinate and stimulate innovations. By using their own personal, but also their professional connections, they build up effective working relationships with others in different parts of the organisation. So in a way this is bringing a little bit of social network theory into the study of the army and this conflict. So for me there are three particular roles that one can discern in this network, and this reaches from the men in the field all the way up to those at the top of the army. So first off you have an expert, and I use this term quite loosely rather than with the baggage of the Victorian and then the audio period. These experts you have a certain knowledge, experience or idea that sets them apart from their colleagues. And these individuals in a First World War context are responsible for the development of platoon tactics, military mining, in-line water transport and artillery survey techniques to name just a few. What's interesting is that there's no one type. These experts come from a diverse range of backgrounds. Some are young university students, some are middle-aged, some are scientists, academics, some are career soldiers, some are other ranks, non-commissioned officers, and you get some who have a brigadier in rank. Yet despite these differences there are similarities in that, at least in the case that I've looked at, they're quite marginal characters. So even though they might hold significant rank, they're not in the heart of the organisation. Some actually straddle the very uneasy boundaries between the military and the civilian ones as well. But what binds them all together is that their expertise gives them initial legitimacy, which proves really important in attracting the attention of the second role in this network, which is that of the broker. So the broker is there to kind of generate support for that initial idea. So someone comes to this individual with a good idea and it's for them to actually then further enhance the legitimacy and credibility of that idea. So if we were to think about in project management tabs we might see them as project sponsors. And these individuals are responsible for connecting disparate and discreet groups together. So in many ways they're boosting the army's cognitive diversity by bringing different people into conversation. And they act as kind of almost bridges over which ideas and innovations can flow. But I think it's important we don't just see them as gatekeepers or intermediaries because they often had significant resources in their own rights such as their own influence, their own political capital. And they wielded those resources in order to affect this process. Importantly, they had the ear of the leaders, so our patron figures if you will, and this is the final role in this network. So these are your kind of institutional elites, staff and holding, general officer rank whose prestige and support were vital preconditions for these kind of ideas to succeed. Again, in project management tabs we might see them as our project champions, fostering innovation by creating a coherent vision and encouraging purpose of action amongst their subordinates. And I think in many ways for those of you who are familiar with some of the innovation literature, it kind of reflects a lot of Stephen Rosen's work on early ideas around the visually senior leader who creates promotion pathways for their subordinates. But what these high ranking figures do I think is use their legitimacy, use their position in the organisation in order to protect these brokers and also these experts, giving them the time, the space, the environment to actually go away and solve and address challenges. Who are these people in the first world war context? So I appreciate some of you might know quite a bit about the first world war, some of you may or may not. The commander of the British Third Army formation, an individual called Edmund Allenby, he goes on to a significant fame in the Palestine campaign. Actually oversaw the establishment of the first senior officer's score on the western front, which encouraged officers to ventilate their views in an almost insubordinate way. These views were actually pushed up to Allenby as commander, as it was felt, and I quote, it was no bad thing for higher command to realise what the front line thought of them. Another example we might highlight is Henry Rawlinson, he's the commander of the British Fourth Army, as well as actively patronising artillery survey techniques and developments. After the Battle of the Somme in 1960, him and his chief of staff actually played a really important role in circulating tactical improvements among the force. Subordinates were encouraged to speak truth to power, with one officer actually praising, I quote, the obvious desire to get at the real truth and a wish to obtain the ideas for commanders. Oh, this is fine in principle, but I think fundamentally without that supportive culture encompassing the structure and leadership as a wraparound, ideas and knowledge will remain fixed or undeveloped. Individual unstructured initiatives will remain just that. The French general Philippe Petain had remarks in 1915 that the war had engendered a lack of curiosity and mental laziness in combatants, that new equipment, new ideas were only known by those who developed them, that what was actually learned was little shared across the force or with those who didn't take part. As Jonathan Kraus of This Parish has remarked, military command in many ways is required to act like a pump, intelligently circulating good ideas and encouraging the replacement of less than good ideas, less than common bad ones. The British Army, I think, was similarly reliant on this kind of command structure, a structure that understood, that acted on the ideas of men in the field, an effective training structure in order to spread those ideas across the organisation, but also a network of individuals that are empowered to promote them. And I think it's through this network or this networked way of looking at innovation, that we can see how a culture that's innovative by instinct actually pervaded the entire army. Now I appreciate that what I put forward there, it makes a rather unorthodox and more positive view of the army's experience of the first world war. And that certainly made me say, but what I see with my research into the army is that innovation was very much everyone's business, whether you looked at it at the local level, whether you looked at it horizontally or more vertically. The army, I think, reveals a willingness to interact with and reach out to those individuals with good ideas and recognised expertise, whether they were civilians or soldiers, whether they were junior or senior. In short, then, it's the ideas that had value, not the rank. And I think there's probably much to be said here about the British Army's use of civilian expertise and the role that High Command actually played in actively reaching out for that. And I think we should dismiss the army's own agency and productivity in this process. It wasn't a conservative consumer per se, but often a co-creator of knowledge and expertise. And I think we can look at the army's voracious appetite for the business, the science and statistics, for example, to show how it's actively reaching out for new methods and effectively, or essentially, new ways of trying to shorten the war itself. So while we can call the army's culture innovative by instinct, it was far from perfect. We're talking about a complex hierarchy called organisation. There are always going to be pockets of scepticism. And I think this is natural because changes often perceived as being quite threatening, particularly for those who feel that their role or their prestige or their bone or being is somehow at risk. So, friction, stickiness, these are just part and parcel of the innovation process. And rather than ignoring these and seeing these as things that we don't really need to consider, they should be regarded as fundamental, interrelated factors in the process, not as distinct or independent or problematic. One officer in 1919 charities have been remarked that jealousy, difference in opinion, want of coordination, want of an exact system laid down on paper, would generally, I think, have been fatal amongst other nations, but it worked with us on the whole because every officer was doing his best to help with work along. So, to try and pull this together. So, to go back to Lloyd George's comment, in that far from allowing no play for initiative imagination or inventiveness, I think the army is absolutely capable of facilitating and promoting innovation. And this isn't limited to a particular branch. Unfortunately, time has completed me from giving you lots of detail on these case studies, but we see this in different operational theatres and the artillery engineers infantry. And I think in many respects, this is spurred on by the victory imperative. But it's also coupled with the threat of possible defeat as well, which means that innovation is very much everyone's business. I think where innovation is concerned more broadly, and this has resonance, I think, with the armed forces today, is that we need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that it is an inherently unpredictable and messy process, particularly when you're reinserting human behaviour and agency back into the heart of this conversation. It's also not something that can be forced or injected into an organisation. All these calls for organisations to be more innovative, I think are misguided and actually overlook its inherently problematic nature. We need to almost reconcile ourselves to the fact that innovation is a process. It might be a slogan as well, but it's certainly a process. It's one that relies on an interplay between culture, people and risk, particularly the risk failure. As a result, it's not easy, and it's certainly not cheap. We see innovation banded around a lot in austere times, but changing culture and changing how people view or think about change is actually both time and resource intensive. I think we also fetishise and commodify concepts like learning and innovation. We present them as these little neat packages that move from point A to point B in a seamless fashion. I think this is dangerous because it overlooks the challenges and reality of failure. We're trying to identify good ideas over bad ones, and of the needs to negotiate inherent frictions such as trust, relevance and motivation, or, of course, a lack thereof. For me, command plays a vital role in mitigating some of these challenges, as well as empowering and promoting a learning environment. The management theorist Peter Seng remarks that leaders are responsible for the learning. Commanders, even in contemporary forces, need to be comfortable listening to dissenters, promoting self-reliance and where necessary, actually subversing the chain of command itself. I think in many ways this ties into the need to be open to receiving what Chilcot has referred to as a reasonable challenge, as well as actually offering that as well. I think there are numerous examples in the British Army in the First World War of commanders at all levels driving innovation and taking considerable risks, but there are also those who worry about their job, their reputation, their prestige, about the number of casualties they might sustain. For the Army of today, there are some officers who highlight attention within their service that reasonable challenge, while necessary, is actually incompatible with the command culture that prioritises or places job security as paramount. I think command has a responsibility to create an environment, whether that's in the barrack room or whether it's on the battlefield, for innovation, creativity, problem solving and learning to take place. I think it's short to create a culture that is innovative by instinct. We need to put in capabilities a new kid to one side that addressing risk, managing failure, challenging provisioning and speaking truth to power. Without doing all of these, armies will be wavenly underprepared to fight the next fight. Thank you very much for your time. The challenges are three conceptions about the structure of bureaucracy in the Army of the First World War. Please hold your thoughts and questions on that and we will move on to Professor Bill Dupott. Thank you. Thank you. Professor, I want to say a brief comment. When I agreed to talk on this topic, I didn't realise I'd only have 20 minutes. I will do my best to summarise what is a very complex serial event and try to understand partly what the challenges were faced at the end of the First World War, some of the approaches that were available and the problematic nature of these and to what extent these might be considered to be successful or not. Of course, the Great War conventionally ends in November 1980, but I would stress the security challenges that we see are not or at least only partly a consequence of the timing and the nature of the ending of the war. The events of 1998 are important, but there are bigger issues that we have to understand as well. I think there's some blood deeply by David Lloyd George, in fact, who we've mentioned already. He gave an address to Parliament in December 1917, summing up how he felt the war was going at that point and how it had gone in 1917. He tried to identify some events that he thought would be significant 100 years later. In this, he was quite percipient, I think. He stressed that the Russian Revolution is very important. He noted the advent of the United States into world politics. America joined the war earlier that year. He noted also the setting up of something called the Versailles Supreme War Council, which was an institution for managing the Allied war effort and strategy war efficiently drawing on representatives from Britain, France, Italy and the United States. Something that I think is generally overlooked as a precursor to modern interstate co-operation organisations, but actually Lloyd George himself described it as the machine of the League of Nations, that in itself is going to be the beginning of something which will have a greater effect in international relations than anyone can imagine at this particular moment. He also identified the emancipation of the Arabs from the domination of Turkey as a great positive of this year. Of course, the British had backed the Arab world, particularly associated with the action of Turkey in the Netherlands. In terms of military events, to draw some positives from, or it was a difficult year on the back of the hill, he identified the captures of Baghdad and Jerusalem as the key events of the war that year. Now, within a year from this speech, the war would be over, but one has to then wonder whether actually the war had been won at that point. Certainly, two wars were resolved with armistices that were signed in October and November 1918. One was the war against Turkey in the Middle East. This was, in some ways, an old-fashioned imperial war that actually had started in November 1914, and the other was the war-traditional balance-of-power war fought against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Principally, or to begin in August 1914, the conventional First World War that came to end with the final armistice of Germany on 11 November 1918. But war had not ended. Another war, a very important war, had broken out in 1918 as a result of the events of 1917, and that was the war against international Bolshevism, and this would have to be fought out in the years following the First World War, a civil war in some ways in Russia, but it was a war with international dimensions and implications. There were also some specific challenges that actually predated the war or led to its outbreak back in 1914. There were some challenges that were actually a consequence of how the war had developed, how it had been conducted. Some of the challenges emerged from the collapse of states and empires during or at the end of the war. We have domestic and international challenges. We have international political and social challenges. We have local, we have regional, and we have global security challenges for which have to be addressed. The longest standard challenge perhaps is that of pre-war European security. This was why the war breaks out in 1914 in the first place. I think this contemporary sketch gives an indication of the problematic nature of Europe for 1914 and the risk of the broad oversindication, which is all I can do at the time I've got. This is a war that breaks out over great powers' issues of state and their security interests. For example, for Austria-Hungary, perhaps for Russia, their issues of nationality and domestic security in Eastern Europe. For France, it's an issue of security against Germany. This will be the second invasion of France by Germany in living memory. For Germany, it's a question of security against France and for a Russian ally, the fact that Germany felt surrounded and threatened on both sides. British security is a question of the balance of power on the continent of Europe and more precisely the issue of Belgian neutrality, which is compromising of which was the direct threat to British maritime security. The other great powers that then joined the war had similar agendas. Turkey joined the war in November 1914, was reasserting internationality. Italy, that joined in in May 1915, was essentially fighting its final war of unification, finishing off the process that had begun in the middle of the 19th century. These are the issues that start the war, much disputed even now. These are the issues that spread the war between 1914 and 1960. These issues remain to be resolved when the war comes to an end. These are essentially issues of what we would call old diplomacy. They were issues of honouring alliances and settling treaties. As an example, the Treaty of London of April 1915 was signed with Italy and promised the Italian's irredentor Italian territories under Austrian rule as their reward for joining the allied side in the war. The problem is, even while these treaties were being signed, the war was changed. Really by the end of 1914, and certainly during the course of 1915, what had begun as a statesman's war was becoming a popular patriotic war. Rather to a greater or less extended opinion on the state we looked at, this was a phenomenon that characterised the war as it developed in its first two years. Also, the nature of the war comes apparent in 1915. It's a war of mass mobilisation with associated shifts in political and social relationships in all the deliverance as a result of the strains of this process of mobilisation. Summarising briefly, you see the rise of the power of labour, organised labour through trade unions. You see a changing role of the state. You start to challenge the role of private enterprise in conducting the war. You see increasing state, inferiority and power over the lives of citizens. You also, as the war goes on, see a realignment of domestic politics, essentially towards the political streams, whether they be pro-war on the right or anti-war on the left. Then the deliverance passed through a very difficult year, a year of attrition in 1960. The year of the battle of the Solomon Verdun in the west and also of the Izzonzo battles in Italy, the brutal offensive on the eastern front. The war is getting into its stride, showing its true nature, nature of mass warfare, huge casualties, increasing strain on the individuals and collectives of the states of the wave of war. Then in 1917 you have a year of increasing disenchantment with the conflict. William Mulligan suggested that this would result in a presentation of the moral purpose of the war, in which the continuation of the struggle for a particular vision of future peace was the basis for the remobilisation of civilian populations and armies. 1917 is a key year. This is the year that Lloyd George is reflecting on. It's a year when, in some ways, the war that had been fought between 1994 and 2016 is fundamentally going to change and shift its nature. Also, it's a year in which the war is still expanding. America enters the war as an associated power and brings a very different, more populist and more idealistic agenda, a security agenda, the Wilsonian agenda associated with President Woodrow Wilson into the mix. But other people have other ideas in 1917 that are going to complicate things. Get the idea of the International Socialist Peace promotion at the Stockholm Conference in the summer. A peace without annexations and indemnities is exactly challenging the capitalist, imperialistic principles of the states that had gone to war in 1914. And it's popular, it's adopted by the currency government as the first revolution in Russia in 1917. The German Democratic Party is in the Reichstag after peace resolution supporting this sort of peace against the will of the German High Command Emperor in Germany in the summer of 1917 as well. So you see populism starting to challenge authority structures as the war develops. And then at the end of the war, at the end of the year you get a monumental event, of course, the Second Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik coup with their slogan, peace, bread and land. Peace ending the war was the fundamental objective of the Bolsheviks. But their method of doing so by armed conflict would challenge the social and political structures of all European states. And then in 1918, very quickly, the war suddenly comes to an end. Rhifftraddoli up there is what happens, but essentially in August and November all four states in the Central Powers Alliance are defeated one by one at the same time. And suddenly you have a situation where there has been a victory. But before American military intervention has really become decisive as Wilson had anticipated. Most people were expecting the war to carry on into 1919, even 1920. Whereas a military intervention I can't go into brought the war to a rapid end. Now the analysis terms that resulted reflected essentially immediate security concerns of the states that have defeated their adversaries. For example, the analysis of Germany called for the liberation of French and Belgian territory, an army of occupation in the brine land, the elimination of the threat from the German high seas fleet required by the Maritime British Empire. These analysis terms wouldn't give you security in the long term. They were not the basis for the lasting peace. Lloyd George in December 1916 when he became Prime Minister had argued that the war would be fought until the Allies got restitution, reparation and guarantee against repetition. But that's a sound bite. It doesn't actually give you much of a basis on which to negotiate a practicable settlement. People have been saying the same thing about a certain agreement signed by Donald Trump at Kiev yesterday. But we'll see where it goes as it will. So this is the way the war developed, which was the key year we don't know. All of them certainly set challenges for the post-war security settlement. Also there are contested ideas of peace. Wilson intervenes in 1917, and he claims he wants to secure peace without victory, which will be unacceptable of course to world leaders who are fighting this war for national interest. And also of course to many of their people who are happy as they are and believe in what the war has been fought for. And they feel they need to justify the efforts and sacrifices already made. Which is why the International Socialist Peace, although popular on the left, was not going to gain a foothold throughout society. Unfortunately, with the victory that comes about in 1918, the Allies have secured victory but without peace. Peace still has to be negotiated thereafter. And this is going to take place against a background not of quiet calm but of continued conflict. Although eventually World War 1 ends in 1918, in fact World War 1 ends in 1923 when the final peace settlement is signed. There is a longer period of peacemaking, or at least a longer period of peacemaking, as there is of war making. And the question is who is going to be in peace? How is it going to be made? How is peace going to be enforced and sustained? I like this picture. It shows the Hungarian peace penitentiaries actually being escorted in to sign the Treaty of Trinon in 1920. A note there, marching or walking caster, a French guard of honour in theory, or actually a demonstration of French power. In some ways, France is the top nation that comes out of the First World War. And in some ways, a peace conference is going to take place in Paris, it's going to be largely directed and dominated by French statesmen. And it's going to try, as it were, to address some of the old security issues that France has to address within the context of the new security issues that have emerged out of the war. But this is against a background of conflict. You have war makers who are challenging the peacemakers at every turn. You have new states and new policies, some of which are represented at peace conference, some of which are not. You have issues of civil war, of border wars, holding, for example, fighting six wars in 1919 to try and establish or expand its borders, which haven't been agreed. Yugoslavia and Italy are fighting about their perspective borders. You get rapacious old states that remain in particular. Remain is enjoying the war in 1916, being knocked out with Russia in 1918. Come back in again in September 1918 to try and grab what she hadn't got through the treaties she made with the Allies in 1916. The remaining army were the only Allied forces on the ground in Eastern Europe at the end of the war, and that allowed the remaining to free reign to annex what they wanted. This was in the interest of the Allies, for example, the remaining forces were instrumental in suppressing a Soviet regime established in Hungary in the middle of 1919. So what you've got, if you put it in a sentence, you've got an untested new world order, and you've got it juxtaposed with the rather resistant vestiges of the old order. This, I think, is the nub of the security problem that you have to settle at the end of the first world war. Who's going to make peace, and what sort of peace should it be? Is it a peace made by the victors? Is it security for the victors alone? Is it for the liberating? Those populations sort of emerged from the empires of the fact of those worlds? Or should it, as far as possible, be for everyone? It is a French military victory with Allied help, but the Allies tried to dress it up as a collective victory. This is the obverse of their victory medal. All Allied soldiers received this medal, and it stayed at the Great War for Civilisation, or in French and Italian, in words, for other nations. So they had this sort of collective idea of what they are trying to do, but in practice, how that works out is rather more problematic. It has an idealistic options, presented by Wilson, to be the realism of the statesmen that have been making the war up to this point. So some people see the war as a liberal victory, but there still remain an essential nationalist and conservative political tradition throughout Europe that has not gone away and has to be accommodated. But there is a reaction to the old style of diplomacy. Wilson has promoted what he calls open diplomacy, an end to treaties and the likes, territorial arrangements, a collective security system to be set up through a league of nations. Wilson turns up triumphantly in Paris in 1919, in the belief that he can then dictate peace. And he realised pretty soon he's not going to get things all his own way and soon heads back to the United States and leaves it in the hands of his diplomats. Because essentially the Wilsonian agenda, the New World Agenda, clashes with the old. I like what Clemence O'Rodd cynniglyf said, the good Lord gave us 10 commandments, we broke those. Wilson has given us 14 points, we shall see. Our European states would have more traditional and rather different agendas. For France, for example, the security against Germany is paramount. Germany must be kept weak and isolated. Germany is to pay for the war, to pay for war reparations and a war guilt clause. We written in the Versailles, to justify this approach. Germany is to be disarmed and occupied. Britain will back this attitude to a certain extent. Britain certainly wants German naval power to be broken and wants to maintain its marified control of the sea. There also is a massive empire to be addressed. We must remember that great powers and leaders are apparently minded. Would the war consolidate or expand their empire and how would it change this coagulatio between motherland and colonies? Yes, on the British example, Britain asserted their nationhood in return for the support they'd offered to the motherland. Ireland, on the other hand, had now embarked on a process that was recently bloody of breaking away from the British Empire. And you've got to add to that the enemy within the states, international communism, formally created with the foundation of the common term in March 1919. This represented an internal threat, a social threat, as well as an international threat, ultimately epitomised in the war between the Soviet, the Soviet Union at that point, between Russia and Poland in 1920, 1921. And Bolshevism, communism as it became, was designed across all the appeal to population to create a domestic security challenge. They promised to bring about an end of the war in 1917 by essentially ending class conflict, but they were willing to fight for this object. How do you deal with this threat? By intervention in the Civil War, in 1918-19, or later, by a policy or campaign. Also relevant to what we're going to talk about later, how do you deal with the problem on the Middle East? In some ways, you've postponed the problem by creating League of Nations mandates, but there's a democratic deficit in that part of the world that is packed to 11 something that will be mentioned later, I guess. There's artificial construction of states out of the provinces of the former Ottoman Empire, where borders do not fit with ethnicity or religion. Generally, the principle that we have to contend with is that the old empire emancipates peoples, but they don't have any tick or tradition of self-government or of democracy, which are the principles by which they have been emancipated. And there's a more general crisis of domestic government alongside this as well. Part of this crisis is capitalism. This is a liberal capitalist war that ends in a socialist conflict, you might call it. This is a post-war problem of state debt, currency failure, business collapse, a long economic crisis, leads to hungry people, and people will understand when people are hungry that leads to social unrest and to revolution as we witness in Russia and Austria hungry as the war is still going on. The other side of this is the rise of the army and the fact that hot-lays and obligatory young men have been brutalised by the war and come home and are prepared to take our arms and fight for these new causes on the streets. So this liberal victory does not translate into a stable liberal society. Fascism, if I can't talk back in detail, presents itself as an alternative to liberalism and something more faithful than resisting communism. So essentially if you look at the states of Europe between the wars, most of these, even the Victorian states, will not survive as liberal states until the end of the 1930s. Czechoslovakia lasts until Germany invades Britain lasts, Scandinavia, and Benelux, but otherwise, the democratic basis of the peace is not there. So in some ways the peacemakers do not achieve what they want. Fosch was the general who led the Allied armies in 1980. He referred to the peace haven of Germany as an armistice for 20 years. I think there are some more general problems inherent in the security situation at the end of the First World War. Germany and Russia were the issues. Could Bolshevism, communism be contained? Could Germany be made and kept weak? The answer to this was no, and we're all aware that within 20 years was the power vacuum in Eastern Europe between Germany and Russia that was the power, that was the second world war. What can we conclude from this? I think Lloyd George is fundamentally right about the key events of the end of the war. America and Germany, Russian rivalry, have defined geopolitics for the rest of the 20th and into the 21st century. He mentioned Baghdad and Jerusalem. Yes, they were still flashpoints in the early 21st century. So Lloyd George has certainly witnessed the birth of the modern world in 1917 and its new security challenges. These were not challenges that could be engaged with or resolved by the CREED 1914 methods and statesmen, although they certainly tried. 1917 is also a geopolitical fault line perhaps between a century of imperial Pax Britannica, as you might call it, and confrontational and unstable post-imperial world system that followed. Quasi-democratic Britain negotiated his way through this better than many other states. The four authoritarian, out-made empires that fell in 1917 and 1918 could not. But sooner or later Britain, by two, would be swept away by these new forces. It was American money, American hard power. It was from this ideology. It was nationalist self-determination. The other thing Lloyd George noted after Bursaid, it was the Bursaid system. This was the system set up to win the war, but it was also very important in making and sustaining the peace. Future peace and security lay into operation. The fact that America refused to ratify the Bursaid peace treaty in Wilsonian liberalism proved rather ephemeral and impractical didn't mean the principle was not there. You will see that collective security doesn't go away. Lessons are learned and enacted after World War II. In addition to the European Economic Community is the end result. I think of the cooperation process set up in the First World War that Lloyd George was referring to. Monet, Jean-Marie, the guy who laid the process on establishing the European Economic Community was a member of the French delegation, the Economic Delegation at Paris Peace Conference, and had been active in the Bursaid apparatus as a civil servant. I think he was at the canes of France at this point. It's difficult in 20 minutes to elaborate a very complicated situation. I hope I've done so. I hope I've explained complexities, some of the problems, some of the failed solutions. There's a tendency these days in Europe to see the First World War as Europe is trending. I think we should include the poseable period in our analysis. Maybe this is Europe's tragic comedy. We'll turn now to Dr Helen McCartney, who will talk to us about the collaboration of the First World War in Britain. Brilliant. Thank you very much. In the aftermath of conflict, narratives surrounding it, justifying it and understanding it, are often separate ones. The complex understandings of cause and motivation become reduced in the public sphere. Some ideas are privileged over others, and some meanings can be omitted altogether. As time passes the meanings of commemoration, they often change. They can be influenced by the immediate concerns of those designing and participating in the commemoration, and the form in which those commemorations are put forward. They tell us as much about us of how a society views its present and its future as its past. So in light of this, I want to look at the commemoration of the First World War during the centenary period, and given the topic of our discussion, examine her contemporary attitude to British armed forces, and attitudes to conflict more generally, British attitudes to conflict more generally, have influenced centennial commemoration. I hope to persuade you that the centenary has seen a diversification of commemorative scenes and messages. In the decades leading up to the centenary, British themes of First World War commemoration were fairly narrow. There was a concentration of British experience on the western front, mainly from the point of view of the soldier, and the message was often one of futility. The soldier was seen as a victim of a mismanaged war. Since 2014, I think that these familiar, narrow, futility narratives, although they're still dominant, there are other themes and other messages that are getting out there. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the public has a greater grasp of the complexities of the conflict. Sorry. It doesn't necessarily mean that the public has a greater grasp of the complexities of the conflict. Just that it illustrates the reasons behind commemorative choices are constantly shifting, and into some cases are as complex as the conflict itself. Is that better for everyone? Okay then. So, my first theme, the diversification of theme rather than a message. To illustrate the diversification of themes, I want to look at how refugees appeared as part of the combat British commemorative landscape. The First World War caused the uprooting of millions of European citizens, and yet this hasn't been a major part of commemorative activities in Britain in the years leading up to the centenary. The centenary, coinciding with numerous refugee crisis in Europe, has led to a new strand of commemorative activity. Multinational companies including Nestlé, numerous media outlets, and local museums and community groups have highlighted the 250,000 Belgian refugees who made Britain their home between 1914 and 1919. Here's a good news story that can be told about the First World War. The idea that organisations and local communities welcomed refugees on a large scale, generated funds, and housed people in need, that is something that actually can be celebrated about the First World War. You don't have to look at them the mass of dead there. You can take a different focus. Indeed the First World War memorial that we can see up here to the 6,000 Belgians who worked in East Wiccanum in Richmond at a Belgian-owned handragon aid factory was part funded from Richmond Council's Civic Pride Fund. So it gives you an idea at least the way they presented it to get the money in the first place. These types of community projects have also involved reaching out to Belgian relatives of former refugees, honouring their forebears' courage and enterprise, while creating new international connections and an international angle to the commemoration. This is something we often haven't seen before in British commemoration. It's often been very narrowly focused just on British experience, but by looking at refugees you've automatically got an international angle there. The story of the refugees isn't always that crazy. Belgian refugees hadn't been remembered in many communities in the intervening years, in part due to their rather rapid repatriation by the British government to the end of the war. They were unceremoniously kicked out in some ways. And community relations hadn't always been smooth. Yes they'd been welcomed to a large extent in 1914, but by 1915 and sometimes community relations were fraught. These aspects are often, although not exclusively glossed over by some projects that's difficult history that doesn't necessarily fit in with their overall aims. However I think the fact that refugees and by extension the importance of allies, particularly the Belgians, are now seen as a legitimate theme of commemoration. The other projects I want to look at in light of what we're discussing today is the 14-18 hour collaboration between the three UNITE members of the Syrian National Orchestra helping to mark the centenary of the Sykes-Picot agreement in 2016. This project drew a direct line from the British French agreement to carve Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into their own spheres of influence due a line to the Syrian conflict today. Its theme was also refugees with a very contemporary focus. Many Syrian musicians were forced to leave the country as a result of the conflict and so coming together in June 2016 was an important and symbolic moment in interviews surrounding the event to music musicians stressed the transformative power of music but also showed the human face of the refugee. Damon Albarn was keen to counter negative attitudes towards refugees by showcasing their talent. There's one musician put it and I quote Media tries to show as a savages as terrorists but there are different sides to every country in the world. There is the musician and the graphic designer and the coffee shop worker we also need to show the normal side. So that's one theme I think that can show how the First World War is being diversified, the commemoration of the First World War is being diversified by theme but I also want to put forward the fact that the First World War is also being diversified by message. I've identified three key messages here. The first is this familiar script that sees the First World War as a futile conflict. Casualities dominate commemoration leaving to an interpretation that both the objectives of the war and the way in which it was prosecuted were pointless with devastating consequences for families left behind or coping with those physically or psychologically wounded. But this is still very much the dominant image of the First World War in the public sphere and has been reinforcing recent years by British experience of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Direct comparisons were drawn over the last decade suggesting that the lessons of the First World War had not been learned and reinforcing the British public's use of force. And this was the public image I genuinely expected to see during the centenary and only this image. But actually I think we can see that there have been other interpretations that have been coming to the fore. This futility narrative I'd argue now coexists alongside two other significant scripts. The second acknowledges the tragic character of the First World War but sees the deaths as a blood sacrifice for future freedom. This narrative suggests more broadly that armed conflict can have a positive outcome and can contribute to peace and security. The concept of the First World War securing freedom has been argued that that's pretty nebulous and actually pretty meaningless. But nevertheless you see that repeated a lot in different commemorative forms and I think it has a strong resonance from many people. These people, the First World War, has a redemptive aspect and the vast number of deaths did instill hold meaning. And the third narrative I'd argue is different again whilst the first two revolve around the moral positions on the utility of war. The third largely divorces the conflict from state goals eliminating instead how the war illustrates more universal human values that have resonance for people today. In following this practice those commemorating today may have been influenced by recent trends in the way in which British war dead in Afghanistan have been remembered. The notion of personality Anthony King has argued has become integral to definition of production. So the way in which recent conflicts have been remembered is probably helping to modify not only the forms of commemoration that we're seeing on the First World War but also the messages OK, let's look at some centennial projects to see if I can illustrate some of these. So I've got three examples here. The first is the Tower of London Poppy's installation. Blood swept lands and seas of red. It was inspired by a line in the will of the Derbyshire soldier who was killed at the war. The artist Paul Cummins and set designer Tom Piper created the artwork of 800 and, sorry, I'm too excited. An awful lot of ceramic poppers in the maze of the Tower of London with each poppy representing the death of a member of the British imperial forces. Funded privately and designed to mark the outbreak of the First World War the installation grew slowly between July and November 9, 2014 and was conceived as a temporary transitory piece of art with the poppy's soul for charity at the end of the period. What I think is really important about this type of commemoration project is that the fact it's offered a lot of opportunities for people to interact with it. It was the opportunity to be involved in the artwork itself in person. People applied to the poppy planters and helped to create and dismantle the visual memorial. This action by itself has been described as a piece of theatre with over 20,000 people participating while millions observed and often queued to look on and watch the sea of poppies grow. Those spectators also participated in creating creating the artwork by leaving photographs and crosses and dedications to ancestors along the motor walk and engaged remotely through Twitter, Facebook and an online dedications page and a nightly roll of honour ceremony where names nominated by the public were read out. Due to its popularity the way in which the window sculptures that formed part of the original display have now gone on tour around the UK orchestrated by... today they've been seen by over 3 million people so this is a very significant memorial that a lot of people have had some kind of interaction with. The second project that I want to highlight is the Shrouds of the Song project privately funded. It staged 19,240 hand stitched Shroudy figures to represent the dead on the first day of the battle of the song. It opened to the public on the 1st of July 2016 in Exeter and was reconfigured in front of Bristol Cathedral in November of 2016. During the two week exhibition over 145,000 people viewed the exhibit in person and the project had a popular Facebook page in a website which showcased public responses to the artwork photographs and media. During footage of the Exeter display there's now been downloaded over 13 million times and this had, again, a charitable element contributing its profits to service charities. Following the success of the initial exhibitions again it's got new life a campaign was launched to generate another display to mark the centenary at the end of the war and that now has backing from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the first part of the display was exhibited in the grounds of the Cathedral last week and that's where this photograph was taken from. The third and final project is entitled there but not there and again it's one designed to have national reach. The artist believes that the waters in Britain are no longer visible to the British public. They're there on memorials but they're simply names on memorials they don't really have any meaning for the community. His idea was through six foot aluminium silhouettes of soldiers in this picture in front of the Ministry of Defence all perfect figures that can be made to sit down they were ideal for sitting in a church pew or in a community setting. This would bring the dead back into the community. The figures are available to buy to raise money for military charities backed by senior retired military figures with inspiring wounded military patrons. The project has recently received just substantial cash boost from the government. So those are the three projects what can they tell us then about centennial commemoration? If we look at these images we can see that all the projects draw a direct link between the UK Armed Forces and the British Army of the First World War. What I want to argue is that this takes various different forms. You have the inspiration of the project in the first place. You have the military's participation in their creation and you have the military being beneficiaries in the form of charitable donations to military charities. I want to have a look at these three themes in a bit more detail. So for some contemporary conflict inspired their work in the first place. Rob heard the artist responsible for the shrouds and began by thinking about the consequences of contemporary wars as soldiers during his own recovery from injury. While his project has reflected all three public scripts about the war he heard himself, I think, linked through identifying with values rather than a moral stance on the war. He spoke of the bravery and tenacity of contemporary soldiers battling back after worse injuries than his own. But he also spoke of the bravery and tenacity of First World War soldiers explaining that stitching the shrouds sometimes 15 hours a day despite continuous pain in his hands provided him with a focus which allowed himself to do something extraordinary in the wake of his own severe injury. So in sharing the same value of tenacity both with the soldiers he was commemorating and the veterans which benefited from the money he was able to make a connection between himself and two different communities. We can also see that the UK armed forces are participating very visibly in the commemorations. Look at those photographs. Here the imagery is connecting the contemporary soldier very much to the dead of the First World War in particular because the shrouds and the poppies represent the dead. I think that is actually really quite striking. Service personnel and their families participated both by planting poppies and laying out shrouds and by making dedications often to those serving now as well as in the past. Indeed I think this is a really interesting aspect of these projects that individuals have used them to mark recent wars as well as the First World War. The link between today and the First World War was usually made with reference to that redemptive, that second interpretation of the war. The idea that the war has a purpose and the war had a meaning. The quote from Sergeant Christopher O'Brien who is laying out the shrouds a week ago illustrates this quite well. He spoke about and I quote soldiers who lost their lives for the greater good so we could have the life we've got today. He linked this to remembering friends that he had personally lost on military operations. Similar dedications were made on the online tower of London Dedications page for the poppies and on reflections cards collected in Liverpool in 2015 when the poppies were on tour. But it's not just the serving soldiers who participate. Military charities too have connected with projects through directing them, enabling them and becoming the beneficiaries of that commemoration. Again they've usually subscribed to that second scene that redemptive interpretation. So for example, the 2014 British Legion poppy appeal single was filmed amid the ceramic poppies in the Tower of London mode. And Josh Stone commented that the song chosen a cover of Eric Vogel's Greenfields of France stood for and I quote the peace and sacrifice made by Simen. She overtly linked the sacrifice of first world war soldiers with those serving in 2014. Although ironically do the use of an anti-war song with the more challenging versus omission. Now charities are treading a really fine line in interpretation here. Soldiers laying out shrubs or planting poppies can be interpreted in lots of different ways. They don't have control over how the public is going to interpret this. The link can just as easily reinforce the victim image of the soldier and the futility of war as saying death and injury is having some kind of worth. This was certainly demonstrated in the people's online responses to the poppies. You see those those ideas there in online responses. Military charities aren't blind to this conundrum. There's a widespread concern that the contemporary portrayal of a soldier as a victim of recent wars is impacting negatively on the armed forces. Perhaps this explains the explicit mission of there but not there to educate the public on how the fight is made then and now as well as even hidden wins. So they haven't taken this redemptive interpretation for granted. They realise that they are playing the part and that their interpretation will be one that is made. I hope I've persuaded you that British public narratives about the version of war that has emerged from these projects are more diverse than those we've seen over the last decades. I still think the futility strips dominant and we're not at the end of the commemorations and I haven't had time to number crunch and look at all the projects that are out there. But I think we can still see that there are more diverse even if then dominant messages that are coming out of this centenary and that I think is very encouraging for the future commemorations. Thank you very much. Now we have some time for questions. Good afternoon everyone. I'll start shortly. My name is Enid Ghein. I'm a licensed security fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies covering conflicts across the Middle East. I am my work is focused on stereo so I'm part of the community of the community of the Middle East. I am focused on stereo so I'm particularly pleased that King's College is giving this issue the academic and policy attention that it requires. The certain conflict has gone through many phases. I don't think we're yet at the end contrary to the expectations out there. We're still among regional and local actors for a bit more misery and drama. But it's still a good time, seven years into that conflict to look back and try to come up with broad insights and conclusions about this war and what it tells us about modern warfare. King's has put together a burdens panel on various aspects of the conflict. I will very briefly introduce the speakers. First Renew Lenders who I met a long time ago in Beirut when he used to enjoy the good food and the nightlife there. But he has done a lot of great work with ICG back then and now works on the Middle East, particularly Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. He'll cover a very interesting aspect of the war, which is how the regime and other actors have adapted to the militarification effect and how this has brought new questions about sovereignty, statehood, etc. A bit more. Charlie Winter is also here at King's, where he covers terrorism and insurgency. He's done a lot of work on Daesh and HDS. Actually, your latest report is on my desk. I have time to read it yet. But interestingly ways of looking at how those jihadi militant groups govern, conduct war appeal to audiences abroad but also at home. Then Dr Martin is a lecturer here in the war studies department and she's going to be looking at the chemical warfare in Syria and try to derive some conclusions about the utility of chemical weapons whether the norm about the non-use of chemical weapons in war still holds. If yes, why, if not, why. So that's going to be interesting and then Professor Winter is also a professor here in physics and he will look at the ethical dimensions of the war and how to choose partners in alliance in such a complex human and political terrain. So, Ryn, you go first. Thank you very much for your kind introduction. Thank you for being here. Well obviously I won't be able to go into much detail in the 15 minutes that I have but I'm going to do instead is just to give you a bit of a taste of a research project that I've been working on together with my colleague at the war studies department Antonio Giosconzi and which was kindly our field worker, was kindly funded by the faculty. Now the Syrian war since 2011 may present a watershed development and civil war wars are being waged. Now most strikingly we argue here a foreign sponsored network of transnational volunteers effectively battle the vicious incertancy to the effect that by the end of 2016 or so a once beleaguered and feeble totalitarian regime, the Syrian regime managed to regain the upper hand and is currently seeking to consolidate its wartime gains. Now the Syrian case points up to the significance of the intense use of non-state militias in counter-insurgencies at an unprecedented scale. The involvement therein of transnational networks mobilized around sectarian identities and encouraged, coordinated and sponsored by third parties including state and non-state actors. Accordingly Iran is heavily involved by its Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps of the Basaran. Russia, by its armed forces and private military companies operating in Syria and the Lebanese armed group for Izbollah and the Iraqi Shiite cleric and his followers grant Ayatollah Hadi El-Sistani. They all have been instrumental to the emergence of a complex network of militias seeking to preserve the Syrian regime and to defeat the opposition and rebel forces. Now the Syrian experience seems to underscore the military payoffs of such a specific mode of wartime mobilisation and we think is therefore likely to help inform key states sponsors Iran's future approaches too and involvement in many conflicts currently and lately affecting the Middle East. Further more state incumbents and non-state groups worldwide, especially within military regimes, are likely to pay close attention to what is happening in Syria in this context as it suggests pathways to gaining regional and international leverage far beyond the reach of their conventional military capabilities. Now the work I have been doing with Antonio just does the aims at untangling documenting and analysing serious case that has put the notion of a networked war at an entirely new level. Our key research objectives include to assess how and why non-state armed groups are formed and deployed through and around foreign sponsors, draw on in the shape, religious or sectarian identity and effect serious statements and regime claims in state sovereignty and last but not least enhance sponsoring parties capabilities to project military force externally. For this we just a note on kind of conceptual note we draw on two kinds of literature that are on one hand very helpful in informing our research project but also fall significantly short. There's one body of literature and tradition in study of civil wars which looks at how states have outsourced violence and two militias fighting on their behalf but consequences this has for stateness, for state strength and weakness and sovereignty and so on. But most of this literature looks at these dimensions exclusively in a domestic context and ignore the external international transnational that are so important in the Syrian case and arguably in other cases as well. Now on the other hand there's a body of literature that looks at proxy wars and that term has been coined during the Cold War the primarily used in the context of the conflict between the great powers basically them fighting wars against each other in other arenas in ways that do not go as far as risking a nuclear confrontation in that period of time. The problem in the notion of proxy wars are the multiple though we apply it to the current Syrian civil war and the conflict which is often done in many media commentary and academic accounts. Firstly what often is assumed in the context of the study of proxy wars is that we are talking primarily about state actors State actors give support or sponsor or train or equip forces that are associated with receiving states and their regimes. Now what you see in the Syrian context is interestingly I think it's the proliferation of non-state actors as being prime actors in this context. So for example the so-called principles or those sponsoring actors include a non-state actor like Hezbollah they also include the non-state actor like Adil Sustani from Iraq alongside and next to a collaboration with state actors including Russia and Iraq. On top of that presumably the state actors sponsoring proxy forces and militias in Syria also include the pastaran which itself has a very ambiguous relationship to the Iranian state by its establishment and its evolution ever since and still has many of the characteristics of being a non or quasi state militia operating next to parallel with the Iranian regular armed forces to make matters even more complicated an actor like Hezbollah can be looked at as both a principle a sponsoring actor in this context and to the proxy itself of Iraq so there is a lot of variation here that is not very neatly grasped by the notion of proxy of proxy wars now another characteristic that is flagged up in the Syrian context is the sheer complexity of the number and the number of principles and actors involved so often with the proxy kind of relationship it is assumed that there is one state outside or two competing states that sponsor their respective clients in a certain civil war but here we have many actors state and non state principles sponsoring various militias and then a host state and regime that also maneuvers in all of this which basically points up to a much more complicated situation where this we assumed a lot of bargaining and negotiation among these actors among each other who all will have at times similar strategic goals and interest but often will also be adults with each other and as the conflict evolves and the regimes consolidation of its military victory seems more pertinent these principles will likely start to clash with among each other so basically what we did was to merge two literatures one literature that looks at at the proliferation of non state militias in civil war fighting on behalf of a regime encounter insurgency efforts but primarily in domestic context and then the proxy war kind of approach that looks at the external dimensions and using concept of both and yet questioning the assumptions made by both these literatures now just a brief note on how we did this obviously it's tremendously difficult to do research on a civil war internationalized civil war like in Syria there's an old three-terrain regime which always made doing research on the ground difficult if not impossible and then there is the active fighting going on which makes it impossible to go for us as researchers to enter Syria so I used to go to Syria often but I've stopped doing that for obvious security reasons now luckily and that's some of my fellow panel members will comment on that as well there are various methodologies developed that try to circumvent these problems we hope to have made a contribution in that respect as well but basically what we did was to set up an arrange and organize a network of local researchers who did the interviewing for us obviously carefully managed and steered by us and many of them were actually taking part in the militias themselves so they started interviewing their peers which is one major set of sources that we used this process of interviewing is still ongoing but the first results started trickling in already and that's just to give you the taste of our findings so far our interview findings on Syria as foreign-sponsored pro-regime militias still need to be cross-checked and contextualized to assess their accuracy and relevance fully of course but what they thus far most strikingly signify is that the complex networks and changes of combat involving pro-regime militias in the Syrian war match the complicated approaches to the intricate and negotiated role of state sponsored militias in our conflict in the literature that I briefly touched on by our focus on foreign or external sponsors of states pro-regime militias as we hope to contribute by placing such constellations in an international and international setting now comprehensive state revolution of violence has been instrumental to the Syrian regime's relative military successes against a long scrolling insertity it also underscored how the regime has readily adjusted its status to what was required to counter and perhaps at some point in the future defeat the insertity essentially in two ways by allowing and encouraging militias to fight on its behalf and by drawing in foreign actors to help organize fund trade and staff them and come to the regime's rescue such as had the seemingly paradoxical effect of on the one hand reinforcing the regime's resilience while at the same time counted its claims to be the sole embodiment of Syrian state sovereignty the extent to which or whether the regime will be able to reclaim its sovereign state at a mutual undoubtedly dependent on complex negotiation and bargaining among other things on the future of such militias in Syria the spoils of war that will be offered and last but not least Iran's determination to continue to use a mobile army of Shiite fighters transnational Shiite fighters operating from Syria and Seoul to pursue its regional ambitions versus Saudi Arabia versus Israel but also to bolster Iran's leverage vis-à-vis the United States that process of negotiation and bargaining is currently in full swing I think rather surprisingly for us at least we've got a very close look at the dimensions of this bargaining from our interview just as the regime maneuvers among its main foreign sponsors and proxies and principles who vie for power while insurgents are on the retreat and I'd be happy to go in a little bit more detail in the Q&A and thank you very much for your attention Everyone here, are you alright? If you can't then chat I'm going to talk about the work that we've been doing at my CSR which is the international centre for the study of radicalisation in the war studies department on the Syrian conflict over the last few years the particular thing that I've been focusing on is the Islamic State and focusing on a particular facet of the Islamic State that is its strategic communication operations so how it communicates both with supporters inside Syria and Iraq and also outside Syria and Iraq how it gets those people to join it but also how it engages with and intimidates its adversaries as well so the way I've got into all of this and this is the principle tool for my data collection is using open source methodologies so using the fact that the Syrian conflict has been massively mediated over social media I think it's absolutely true that it's the most socially mediated conflict in history and using that as a lens to understand how these groups in this case the Islamic State are operating how they're branding essentially their insurgency so on the screen here and I apologise in advance to my fellow panel members because there's a few videos to create next or just try and see on this tiny screen this is telegram so this is where the Islamic State shares disseminates, distributes all of its propaganda whether it's a video or a magazine or a newspaper or an audio statement from everything comes through here this is all of that in Excel so once I've collected it I've been outcribing for the last few years and you get a really interesting staggered view of how the Islamic State's narrative priorities, how its strategic communication objectives have shifted in accordance with its evolving circumstances in Syria and then once you've done that you can get some nice little graphs and a few graphs in here so I won't bore you too much with them but the thing that I'm going to focus on in particular in this short 15 minutes after just quickly running through what the objectives behind any jihadist group strategic communication programme is is the appeal so I'm going to look at the brand of the Islamic State and I'm going to look at it as it has been manifesting itself in recent months in particular so first of all on objectives so why do jihadist groups communicate, why do they make a propaganda so whether this is the Islamic State or Heir Tathlera Shem or AQAPM Yemen for example it doesn't just need to be in Syria or Iraq the first is to propagate the ideology this is to get people thinking about that particular form of jihadism so recruit people essentially the next is to legitimise the group so this is more defensive messaging this is where in this case the Islamic State counter messages or what it perceives to be counter propaganda against what again it perceives to be an intellectual war against it and then we have the last point which is particularly prevalent in the context salient in the context of the Islamic State and this is the intimidation of adversaries so whether that's using propaganda to amplify the impact of a terrorist operation in the west or whether it's using propaganda to transmit a video of a western or non-western hostage being executed in a horrible way that is geared towards intimidating adversaries among other things but I think the primary of that is intimidating adversaries so on to the appeal I've broken it down into three different things so just to explain this pie chart that you have before you AQAPM 2018 is that denotes that all of this data is from the month of AQAPM 2018 so all of the propaganda that the Islamic State disseminated during that month has gone into this pie chart of course there are some items that are very difficult to categorise so by its good event it was about three out of 100 places seven I think it was so blue designates that it was warfare focused propaganda orange designates that it was civilian life focused propaganda and then that little saliva of grey that is victim of focused propaganda so the aftermath of airstrikes artillery strike I'll go through each in the next few slides and show you an example and hopefully there's audio but not too much audio because there's some video clips in Haiti no violence so the first aspect so this is about three quarters of all of the Islamic State's propaganda audio, visual propaganda there's photo reports, videos, newspapers it is focused very much on warfare this is very different to 2015 when it was more focused on utopia than anything else the idea of civilian life inside the Islamic State so now the focus overwhelmingly is on tactical on the ground use updates it's very much like war journalism but of course through a very particular net the emphasis is continuously on the strength and steadfastness, courage, capability of the Islamic State's soldiers and their ability to engage in a very professional conduct on the battlefield I know that sounds strange considering how well known this group is for its barbarity but still that is the approach that is taken when it comes to mediating at a particular moment it also focuses on delivering through this warfare focus propaganda a strategic policy statement so there have been more of these in recent months than there were a couple of years ago there's been a bit of a fusion of policy and propaganda simple branding propaganda over the last few years and again that's in response to the shifting circumstances of the group and the next slide is going to show you one minute from the video that was released in February of this year where the Islamic State did something which is entirely unprecedented in the context of global jihadism it essentially not just essentially it explicitly welcomed and celebrated the involvement of female combatants on the battlefield in Syria and that's a huge deal which of course other groups have done in the past but they've kind of viewed it as a dirty secret in this case though the Islamic State was the whole part of the embracing and that's very significant it should also give you an idea of the day-to-day warfare material that we're talking about too there's a huge amount of unpack there but I don't have any time to unpack any of it if there are questions in the Q&A I will have to be taken so the next aspect of the Islamic State propaganda that I'm going to talk about is the victims of focus stuff so in the month of April there wasn't that much of it but it has been a continuous atmospheric presence in the group's brand for the last few years victims of it is very very important to any extremist group so when the Islamic State is talking about it it focuses on the aftermath of air strikes and artillery strikes mainly showing dead or dying children or dead or dying old men never women that just talk about women that have been killed in air strikes so this is not only to justify the hardships that supports it going through in theatre so people who are still living in territories controlled by the group but also it's used to try to incite acts of terrorism in the Islamic State's name that brought this idea of retributive violence it's very important to the group I'll show you a very quick clip a video that was released a few weeks ago from the southern Syria and this doesn't have any dead bodies on it it's focusing purely on agriculture and the destruction of agricultural land as a response or as a result of Syrian opposition artillery strikes that just gives you a very quick flavour of what I'm talking about as I say this retributive isn't particularly prominent in this month it is incredibly important to the group's ideology and its ability to attract supporters and also keep those supporters as supporters so keep people part of the group keep people thinking they're fighting for something so the last aspect and this is one of the ones which is interestingly most over the last years is this idea of a civilian utopia so whether that's in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen or West Africa or Egypt, wherever the Islamic State has a football it tries to chuck out a bit of utopia propaganda from that football and the reason that it does this is because it is trying to show that it is walking the walk and just talking the talk so I think it's very useful to understand a lot of what the Islamic State does through the lens of its competition with rival jihadist organisations and what the Islamic State is doing very systematically as propaganda over the last few years is presenting itself as a fully fledged caliphate providing a very detailed idealisation of the situation in the areas that it controls so this is geared not just towards attracting people by showing how nice it is to live there but also to show that it is actually fulfilling the jihadist project whereas groups like North Korea it perceived not to be and this has been a very comprehensive and very consistent idea that has been present throughout the last few years fluctuated back in 2015 and over half of all the Islamic State's propaganda focused on the civilian utopia side of things now it's much much less than that though over across January, February, March, April 2018 it did increase slightly the next video is a clip from a May 2018 video from the Euphrates problem so it spans straddles Syria Iraq it's from what the Islamic State calls Euphrates products and essentially aside from trying to undermine the credibility of democratic electoral systems it presents what the Islamic State is doing instead so it tries to show this is bad and look at what we're doing instead you'll get a sense of what I'm talking about here it covers a lot of material and social welfare so this is all food which has been given up extensively for free to the needy people in Euphrates products so that just gives you a very quick flavour with the doctor of what the Islamic State brand looks like today it changes a lot it changes a great deal but those are the foundational thematic elements that have been present since the very beginning I've got one more video to show you and then no more videos and I'll shut up this one focuses on the trajectory of the Islamic State and I think it's very very interesting because it shows how this group which is by all intents and purposes according to accounts from Western governments defeated shows how it's trying to navigate through this period of defeat how it's trying to frame it as not actual existential defeat but one more step towards ultimate victory so it's interesting very interesting for that reason and it's had a lot of it's been very prominent on Islamic State forums so telegram earlier it's constantly being brought up there as a way to show we may have lost all this territory but we know what the Islamic State project the jihad is still on track the prophecies are all still on track you know sadistic monstrous enemy absolute butchess decent people in what has been called Assyrian slaughterhouse and its people a war on terror we're also taking strong measures to protect our nation from radical but you get a sense of a reframe position itself I think what we're presented with now is something of a new dawn for it in fact actually after that introduction sequence is over the screen goes completely black and then in white writing says the jihad has entered a new phase one where it focuses according to this video according to other publications of the Islamic State over the last few months where it focuses more on attacking the enemies of Islam rather than trying to focus on the proto state the government stuff Syria and Iraq so with that proto state taking in fact see the Islamic State needs a new unique selling point or it's trying to work towards a new unique selling point so a way for it to define itself against its rivals a way for it to engage in this game of jihadi one-on-one shit but it remains a jihadist group out there and it remains to be seen whether it will be able to do this but certainly in its propaganda the focus is more on encouraging inciting terrorism so attack specifically against civilians and civilian government inside Iraq Syria showing that stability isn't safe and also outside of Iraq and Syria Western countries in Southeast Asia in Russia, in Africa I will leave it at that, thank you very much for listening I'm going to talk to you about chemical weapons after Syria what I'm going to be presenting is a paper that I've done with two colleagues in the will of the more studies department Jeffrey Chapman who's a PhD student and Dr. Hassan of the teaming and in particular I'll be presenting the arguments that we're making in this forthcoming article in security studies so before I present our arguments there are two introductory points that I want to make the first regards why we focus on chemical weapons so the conflict in Syria raises lots of interesting and important questions some of which are being discussed by the other panel members today and it's not clear at all that if what you're trying to do is understand the Syrian conflict you need to understand the role of chemical weapons in it I think this also holds if you're interested in the humanitarian consequences of the Syrian conflict again it's not clear that you should focus on chemical weapons for that there are lots of other probably greater aspects to the humanitarian situation that we see in Syria but for questions about chemical weapons Syria plays a large role this is because it's the first major use of chemical weapons since the Iran war in the 1980s the first recognized use of chemical weapons since the signing of the chemical weapons convention in 1997 and also because Syria's agreement to give up its chemical weapons and join the chemical weapons convention was a major achievement in 2013 the second introductory point is that I'm going to be talking a lot about military utility and we focus on military utility in this paper because it plays an important role in states decisions regarding the use and acquisition of weapons but I want to be clear that we are not implying that military utility is the only factor in those decisions or that if a weapon has military utility that it should be used ok so what do we know about chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict so one of the problems that we faced in our research is that the record on this is incomplete and unclear by September 2016 there were more than 150 allegations of chemical weapons attacks according to human rights watch though only 85 cases can be confirmed from 2013 to 2017 and a commission established by the UN Human Rights Council reports an even lower number of confirmed cases 34 which are represented on this graph by Forbes up on the slide so according to the UN commission there were 5 confirmed chemical weapons attacks in 2013 8 in 2014 10 in 2016 and 11 in 2017 the graph also distinguishes the attacks by the agent that was used so attacks of sarin a nerve agent are in orange attacks of chlorine an industrial chemical and the world war 1 era agent are in purple and the green attacks are those in which the agent has not been determined so the question that we focus on in our paper is whether the use of these weapons in Syria means that we will see further proliferation in use of these weapons in other conflicts will the example of Syria lead other states to change their CW policies will it make other states more likely to acquire and use of these weapons does the use of chemical weapons in Syria and the international response to that use undermine the norm or taboo against chemical warfare or the chemical weapons convention so just to give you a preview of where we are going our research suggests that Syria's use of chemical weapons is unlikely to lead to the further acquisition and use of these weapons by other states chemical weapons have had little military utility in Syria providing little incentive for states to change their policies and acquire and use these weapons the international community has responded to the use of chemical weapons in Syria signalling that chemical weapons are still taboo and that the international community may impose cause in response to any future use by other states while it's true that the international community's response has not eliminated the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime it has consistently signalled that there are costs to the use of these weapons so the current debate in the literature and in the policy world argues that the Syria case may undermine the norm by normalizing chemical weapons or by undermining deterrents by failing to impose heavy costs so the economist has argued that if Syria's dust squad is not punished others will use chemical weapons Theresa May in justifying strikes against Syria argues that the strikes will send a clear signal to anyone else who believes that they can use chemical weapons with impunity a speaker at the first committee of the UN General Assembly argues that chemical weapons must not become the new normal Richard Price who is a leading scholar in the chemical weapons taboo has asked after Syria is there still a taboo against the use of chemical weapons and UN Secretary General is reported to have expressed alarm at a weakening of the taboo what we argue though is that a key assumption in this debate has gone unexamined the debate has assumed that chemical weapons in Syria have had military utility we argue that in order for the Syrian case to encourage other states to acquire and use chemical weapons it needs to demonstrate not just that the costs of use are low but also that there are benefits to using them so a key question for us is whether the use of chemical weapons in Syria has had military utility has it helped the Syrian regime to accomplish its goals so there's one more bit of background that's important here almost all states in the world are members of the chemical weapons convention which embodied the taboo against chemical weapons and prohibits chemical warfare the chemical weapons convention has 193 state parties with only 4 states who are not full members Egypt, South Sudan Israel and North Korea this means that any unraveling of the chemical weapons norm will involve state parties abandoning the CWC deciding that there is more to gain from having chemical weapons than there is to gain from an almost universal treaty that prohibits foam given the benefits that most states have seen in the chemical weapons convention we argue that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would have to demonstrate clear military utility in order to get states to reconsider their chemical weapons policies and only if states reverse their chemical weapons policies will we see significant future proliferation and use so develop our thinking on the military utility of chemical weapons we turn to two different bodies of literature the literature on chemical weapons to see what it suggests about possible tactical or battlefield utility and the literature on civilian victimization in order to understand how chemical weapons might be used in that kind of strategy so according to the literature on chemical weapons in general there are lots of ways that chemical weapons may be useful tactically they can kill or injure large numbers when protected troops they can help penetrate tunnels, caves and other fortifications they can impose large logistical and operational challenges to look for evidence of tactical utility we situated our cases within the overall war and on current events on the ground we then gathered information on the number of casualties changes in control of territory shifts in the momentum of the fighting and evidence that chemical weapons undermined morale of opposition forces the other body of literature that we use is that on civilian victimization this literature understands civil war as a competition for the support of or control over population the aim of civilian targeting is understood to be preventing civilians from helping the other side by directly killing them by killing some as a deterrent or by convincing civilians to flee so when looking for evidence of the success or failure of chemical weapons and the strategy of civilian victimization we gathered evidence on whether the use of chemical weapons in Syria has inhibited the ability of rebels to maintain their operations by decreasing civilian support either through depopulation or by undermining morale so in our research we focus on two cases the August 2013 Seren attack at Guta this attack caused somewhere in the area of 1400 deaths and then a series of chlorine barrel bomb attacks on the homo planes in the summer of 2014 which killed about 13 people so why these two cases these cases as I mentioned earlier there are at least 167 alleged attacks but there's little information available on most of them and only a small number of them have been confirmed because of this lack of information it wasn't possible to investigate all of these alleged cases or even a representative sample of them we decided to focus on Guta and the homo planes for the reasons on the slide these cases have received lots of attention so they'd be salient to actors thinking about chemical weapons in Syria and whether they're worth acquiring for them for other states there have also been international investigations that have confirmed these attacks and provided credible information on them and then across these two cases we have variation in the type of chemical weapon agent used with sarin and rockets used to Guta and chlorine and barrel bombs used on the homo planes so our sources have included official documentation from various international bodies open source information in Arabic and English including that provided by international local NGOs media reports and secondary analyses so what did we find chemical strikes in Guta had limited tactical utility despite the local impact in terms of casualties the use of chemical weapons did not create military advantages for the Assad regime or lead to a significant change in the balance of power on the ground the findings are similar for the chemical weapons attacks on the homo planes there's no evidence that the chlorine attacks broke the morale of the opposition or aided regime advances turning to possible effectiveness in a strategy of civilian victimization in Guta we found no evidence that the chemical attacks led to a collapse of civilian morale or of support for the rebel forces and again we found the same story on the homo planes rebels maintained enough civilian support to continue operations and the chlorine attacks did not depopulate the region but I've just told you about 2013 and attacking 2014 and as you may know chemical weapons have been used since then so this raises two questions first have the more recent attacks had more military utility and second why does the regime keep using these weapons if they don't have utility so in answer to the first question we argued that the more recent attacks still do not demonstrate enough military utility to motivate other states to revise their chemical weapons policies for example in regard to Aleppo the available information suggests that Russia's intervention and the increased air power that intervention provided played a more important role in chemical weapons and the regime's victory there so what about the second question why does the regime keep using these weapons if they're not useful well we don't know the Assad regime denies that it uses chemical weapons so it hasn't explained any logic behind their use and there are no records of decisions or discussions within the regime available we can speculate and a lot of people too speculate about this the regime might think that they're useful even though they're not even if the regime knows that they're not very useful they may be so desperate that they're throwing everything including the kitchen sink at the opposition or at least some of these attacks may have been tests of the international community's resolve and whether it would continue to impose costs for the use of chemical weapons but again because the data necessary to answer this question is not available we explicitly designed our question and our research to exclude our focus is not on why the Assad regime is using chemical weapons but on what lessons about the costs and benefits of chemical weapons will be drawn by other states so just some conclusions very quickly as used in Syria chemical weapons have had limited military utility the international response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria has reinforced the stigma attached to these weapons there is therefore no reason to believe that the Syrian case will lead to significant proliferation and use that will overwhelm the chemical weapons norm and just to caveat of course this doesn't mean that we won't see any use of chemical weapons in the future states of existing arsenals states threatened with overthrow are those already ostracised by the international community may be more likely to use these weapons and the difference that the international community's response to the use of sarin as opposed to the use of chlorine suggests that when use does occur it is more likely to involve the less lethal agents like chlorine thank you thank you I think I'll use the prerogative of chair to actually probe you a bit more on some of your findings thank you very much I'll take one I'll start I'll start with the obvious question I'm going to be talking about military ethics and I've spent my entire career responding to the instant question how do you explain military ethics the idea that in a situation in which the normal rules of civilised behaviour have broken down you still have rules the most people outside the military it doesn't make a lot of sense and yet military ethics is durable it's endured for thousands of years you'll find the principles of the restraint of war in some of our earliest writing and it's also incredibly widespread you'd be hard pressed to find a culture or a religion that doesn't recognise the importance of first of all identifying the exceptional act of war may be justified but also how that exceptional act should be limited so that's all very well but have you applied something like military ethics to a situation like Syria a messy complex situation what on earth is the right thing to do in Syria at the moment for those of us looking to this situation it's a good question The Atlantic magazine a couple of months ago asked precisely that question and decided to ask a number of moral philosophers around the world what they would do they interviewed Helen Frow, Peter Singer, Nancy Sherman big big names who thought a lot about the normative aspect of the use of force in international affairs it's a fascinating piece it's got a rather depressing conclusion though which basically is well this is a lesson in why we should have interviewed a long time ago there's not a lot to say about what we should be doing now and the reason that they can't contribute much about what we should be doing now is fairly obvious when you have a look at things like the way of approaching the use of our force in international affairs something like the Just War tradition it's very very hard to see how you could apply something like the Just War tradition framework an old venerable framework that's evolved over something like two and a half thousand years and thinking it's not a western idea it's a remarkably universal idea the criteria that it suggests and the Atmella side about when military force may be justified and it's very hard to see how you can actually apply this to the Syria conflict and come up with anything other than no we shouldn't the first criteria is easy the Just Cause is a very clear Just Cause they're mass humanitarian catastrophe crying out for somebody to do something to stop it but very very quickly when you start going into a criteria you realise that that's not enough now the Just War criteria are a mixture of prudential deontological and consequentialist reasoning that basically try and determine when doing the exceptional might be admissible that's what it's job is and so those criteria it's a checklist that you go down to all off fantastic but it is the case that the less satisfying the answers are to each of those six questions posed on the left the less justified on the literature intervention will be now Helen for Alpeter, singer Nancy Sherman we're applying to such a framework and you can see very very quickly why despite the Just Cause the argument for intervention falls very very quickly don't need to go through all of them just focus on proportionality for example this is the idea that an intervention must do more good than harm but the scale of the military operation the scale of the strikes that would be necessary to change a sad's behaviour we'd be very clearly warned would be enough to trigger a more robust Russian engagement in this situation so is it proportional to start Third World War I'm like if the type of military operation that you're planning is not going to be of a sufficient level to change a sad's behaviour then it's very hard to see how that could satisfy the reasonable prospect of success criteria basically the wasting of life to know actual benefit cannot be justified and that's without getting into questions such as how on earth do you work out the right intention to the Trump administration in this kind of situation very very difficult so despite the terrible suffering the guidance of the just war tradition suggests that the large scale intubation is not probably not the right thing to do so in such a confused situation of changing sides strange alliances can the just war tradition contribute anything can it give us any guidance about what we might want to do in this situation or how we might make judgments in this confused situation well one of the things that the just war tradition suggests and you can see from the two lists of criteria there is it separates out the moral responsibility into two areas the moral responsibility on the left resides with those who start conflicts the princes, the governments, parliament the moral responsibility on the right hand side is for those who actually conduct those hostilities and traditionally that makes a lot of sense it allows us to hold the right people to account you don't hold the soldier responsible for the war in which they're fighting this is articulated we talked about remembering Syria with World War I presentations but it's more recent as well the people of Royal Wood and Basset coming out and showing their respect to the fallen soldiers from Afghanistan they weren't showing support for the war that's not the point that was not what they were doing what they were doing was showing support for the soldiers that had fallen in that war they understood innately intrinsically that there's a separation between these two levels of responsibility this wasn't a pro-war anti-war demonstration it was simply a demonstration of respect so this traditional distinction between the two levels of moral responsibility has stuck with us throughout the history of the just war tradition it's recently been challenged though and you can see why it's been challenged with more contemporary events surely sometimes you must realise you're fighting on the side which is just so wrong that you must realise that you're on the wrong side you must surely and if you're fighting on the wrong side why on earth should you be treated as a morally equal to the person who's fighting on the right side and that's a fundamental challenge that just war religionists are supposing at the moment surely sometimes people just must know they're on the wrong side but actually that's quite a big ask it's all very well to assume perfect knowledge and physical truth if you like but I'd be willing to bet that there's quite a lot of people fighting for Assad that are doing it to save their families from the threat of what ISIS will do to them if their homes are overrun Does that mean every soldier that's fighting for Assad is morally fine? No, of course not The moral distinction that just war tradition asks you to draw is not that it doesn't matter the point is it doesn't matter which side you're fighting on you're still responsible for your actions in that but nobody knowingly fights for a cause they know to be just there is a certain moral equality there and if you don't believe that then you have some real challenges in situations where are you sure you're on the right side we commit our armed forces are they always on the right side if you don't allow that separation of moral responsibility then you can wait on the people that you're sending to do your dirty work So does that mean that every Syrian soldier is blameless? No, not at all, that's not what the just war tradition says at all what it says is that you don't blame the Syrian pilot for flying on behalf of Assad you blame the Syrian pilot for rolling the barrel bomb onto the civilian population that's what they should be held responsible for the division of the moral responsibility in understanding that and the just war tradition is quite useful for explaining that kind of moral distinction I'd suggest so you blame for the action not the side that's how the just war tradition can be applied to value judgments in this kind of situation but where else can normative theory help here? Whilst the just war tradition might rule out the large scale intervention that's very different from saying it's justified so if you could aid or assist others already there to stop some of the worst successes and protect some people could that be the right thing to do? Well it's not widely advertised of course but there are boots on the ground now from the west it's not easy to find a blameless ally to work with but we are working with people on the ground some groups are clearly better than others special forces from the west are currently involved with a wide range of support training and assist operations sometimes thought that refer to as through with or by but who to help and can normative theory help us at all here? Well it's how the US refers to the type of operations that are going on at the moment refer to it as unconventional warfare we'll ignore the debates about that title but it consists of operations of activities that are conducted to enable resistance movements or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupied power by operating through or with an underground auxiliary and guerrilla falls in a denied area so through with or by a third party surrogate actual efforts but who to help who to help if it might be ethically okay somebody who's already there who do you choose? Now there's been institutionalised attempts to answer that question the Lee amendment in the US Foreign Policy Assistance Act 1997 attempts to do this it introduced a betting process so that US special forces for example cannot partner with those who fail the betting process obvious violators of human rights anybody with an appalling human rights record are automatically banned supported through this kind of work but of course as in other walks of life this doesn't help with post betting behaviour it's just like when you have your criminal record bureau check that only accounts for whether or not you've been caught up to now not what you might do in the future so how do you know that the force that you're going to be working with is actually going to stay morally acceptable to work with or in this case it's terribly helpful it tends to focus on command responsibility which generally is not applicable for this type of operation so a war crime committed that's not under my command well it's not my problem is it it's up to somebody else to sort that out but of course it's not just war crimes there are other areas of activity that would appear to come under local legal jurisdiction or own legal rules how do you navigate that kind of mind field the local coalition partners in Afghanistan for example historically would take creepy besson boys and rape them traditionally on a Thursday night pray for absolution on Friday how are you supposed to partner up with somebody like that what does the law help for the people who are actually in that situation working along with such coalition partners what the law says that this is a domestic issue that must be dealt with domestically so that doesn't seem to be terribly helpful here there's no requirement there's no good Samaritan requirement in British or American or Australian law for example but it seems to me that Moranee you can't walk away from responsibility by saying law doesn't require me to act in this situation so can military ethics bridge the gap and I think it can in fact I think the just war tradition can help bridge the gap here the just war tradition is a very flexible framework it's not simply about traditional state on state conflict despite what some of the revisionists might say it's actually a way of thinking about when you might be justified in doing something which is exceptional something which is normally against the walls so going to war against another state is something exceptional and therefore that's how we're used to applying this criteria in this situation it can be a guide for behaviour for when to support a surrogate and when not to now Dean Peter Baker my colleague in University of New South Wales suggested that these titles might be helpful in this situation how would you apply these principles to know who to work with well just running through them very quickly in the last minute does the surrogate force have a just cause for their own participation it might be the protection of university it might be a different just cause to why the sponsor feels they need to be involved but that's okay as long as both parties have a just cause the just cause authority does the surrogate force represent the interests of a significant body of local people if it doesn't then basically you're just talking about mysteries right intention you've got to keep a close eye on this to ensure that the motivation does not go beyond the original just cause proportionality will the benefits of helping the surrogates outweigh the negative effects you can't see the future obviously but it's asking you to make a well-intentioned judgment about what you can predict what you can clearly predict then prospect of success can they actually achieve their goals if not don't support them it also asks you to keep an eye on whether or not they've run out of steam you shouldn't be supporting them any more at all either and letting your surrogate partner know that you might withdraw your support is an important part of that contract to start with funny last resort the proliferation of armed groups generally should be avoided I would suggest so can we reasonably achieve the desired just outcome without arming training and otherwise enabling a non-state or irregular group i.e. is this really necessary in the below proportionality discrimination side we should train and quit to promote discrimination and continue to influence positively there from the proportionality side you should only provide as much help as is actually required where the cause is just that large-scale intervention is impossible working through with and by is one of the alternative tools in the state toolbox we can't ignore the moral and ethical implications of what our local allies and partners do with our help we can't simply say it's got nothing to do with us if we're facilitating their actions so I'd suggest that normative theory can contribute something useful even in the most complex conflicts imagine thank you professor and thank you to all the panellists that was truly fascinating we have plenty of time or not plenty we will be in the whole day tomorrow as well but at least half an hour to take questions from the audience comments