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Hello. Welcome to a special edition of the Oxford Research Group podcast, where we look back at the history of ORG. I'm Alastair Mackay, Senior Editor at Oxford Research Group, and I'm joined by Abigail Watson, Conflict and Security Policy Coordinator at SafeWorld. In this special series of podcasts, we talk with the people involved in the development

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and evolution of ORG from its early days. In this episode, we'll be joined by Paul Rogers. I'm Rogers' Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, and Oxford Research Group's Senior Fellow in International Security. Today, we'll discuss his impressive career in the field of international security, and his crucial role in the development of ORG.

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Enjoy the show. Okay, thank you very much to Professor Paul Rogers for joining us. It would be great to start at the beginning, Paul. Could you tell us a bit about your early career? Well, I went to Imperial College in the early 60s to read life sciences, and ended up in

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the third year specialising in plant pathology. So basically, I was looking at plant diseases, what they're caused by, how you treat them, and what sort of epidemics they face. While I was an undergraduate, I got very interested in international relations at Imperial. It was a very international college, even in those days, and we had an international relations

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society. That and other things got me interested in international development. I stayed at Imperial as a research assistant, and also did a PhD in plant pathology. That involved quite a lot of fieldwork, but quite a lot of other times as well. One of the things I got heavily involved with was the very early period of development campaigning. There was

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a group called the Hazelmere Declaration Group, which was doing quite a radical assessment of world trading relations in relation to development. I was involved in that, although when it finally put out its declaration, I'd already gone to work abroad. There was a group which we had in London called the New Abolitionists, which used the very early experience in parliamentary

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campaigning to campaign with MPs for an improvement in Britain's aid and trade programme. I learnt a lot through that. I actually shared a flat one summer with Ian Haig, who went on to be one of the key people forming Action for World Development, which eventually progressed into world development movement. Now it's a very good and very effective NGO, Global Justice Now.

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I remember Ian came to our wedding when I came back from a period abroad. Sadly, he died a couple of years later in a climbing accident, which I think was a huge loss to the developing movement. When I was a student at Imperial, one of the other students was Claire Scallan. She was also involved in this work. I then went to work for two years in East Africa.

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I was a lecturer at Imperial on a three-year contract. I spent two of those years in East Africa and learnt a huge amount about development processes there. When I got back, Claire and I got married and moved to her home village in West Yorkshire. My interests had already moved beyond crop science research. I was interested in development more generally. I'm particularly

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interested in environmental aspects of development and the potential for conflict over resources, starting obviously with food resources. When I came back to Britain at the end of my contract, I got a job at one of the new polytechnics in Huddersfield, which was actually trying to develop an entirely new type of programme, not uncommon these days, but really pioneering

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then. There was a degree called a BSc Honours in Human Ecology. It combined ecology, life sciences generally, geography, economics and politics in a single degree. As I say, you can do that now, but it was very rare then. I was very heavily involved with about half a dozen other staff in this and learnt a huge amount from it. It was also intriguing in that because

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Huddersfield was a polytechnic, most of the courses were sandwich courses. Students went out for a year or maybe two six-month periods, as you still get in some universities. We actually established the Human Ecology degree as a sandwich degree. I was in charge of that programme. We were putting students into NGOs, into field studies work, into health studies,

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local authorities, all kinds of things. It was an excellent programme. It ran for the best part of 20 years. I'm still in touch with some of the students even now. That would have been in the early 70s. At the end of that period, I was looking to see whether there were basically other areas. It was very exciting work, but there were very limited possibilities for supervising

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research students. Also, I was getting, in some ways, even more interest in the activist side of things. A job came up in Bradford at the quite young Peace Studies Department. I basically applied for it and got it and moved there in the beginning of 1979. I should add that we lived in Clare's own family cottage in Kirkburton. We had a little bit of land, so we were pretty home-based

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as well. Clare was an agricultural botanist by original training. We basically carried on our interest in both flower and vegetable gardening and developed that. We kept some poultry and goats and things when our children were young. Essentially, by 1979-1980, I was in Peace Studies at Bradford, where I really stayed now for nearly 40 years. That really is the early

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development, a transition from the natural sciences, although very applied, through to the social sciences. While I still was down on the books at Huddersfield as a lecturer in biological sciences, I was teaching a lot on development studies and even international politics. Basically, retraining over eight years. As I say, you could do that then. It's rather

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more difficult to do in the university environment now. I'm very grateful it was possible then. Going back a little bit, talking about what I believe was one of your first experiences of fieldwork, it was as a senior scientific officer, wasn't it, with the East African Forestry Research Organisation. That was, as you mentioned, doing a lot of work on food

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security in several countries, in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, if I'm correct. That experience early on, what was the impact of that on your thinking? Did it start, particularly when you're looking at things like aspects around food security and the relationship between North and South globally, did that have a huge impact on your thinking?

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It certainly did. I was already very interested in the whole development field and the politics of development. Again, I was very lucky. I joined, as you say, a regional programme looking to improve the varieties of, as it happened, sugarcane. That was growing pretty widely, not for export. It was for internal consumption. The population was growing. People were slowly

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getting a little bit more wealthy. The demand for sugarcane was growing. The governments did not want to bring new land down for cultivation or have to use more fertilisers and the rest. What they wanted was better varieties. All the varieties of cane grown in East Africa have been imported from other breeding stations in India, the United States, Australia,

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or particularly South Africa. They weren't necessarily suited to the environments of the area and also the diseases and pests they suffered from. They agreed, a tri-country group under this regional body, agreed to set up a specific breeding programme. They employed a breeder from Barbados, actually, who worked in a breeding centre they set up on the Kenyan coast.

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I was 700 miles away in Uganda, setting up a unit on the agricultural research station that the Ugandan government had. The unit had to be quite a long way from where the canes were being bred. If I was looking at diseases, then we didn't want them to go straight to the new varieties. These were why the separation. I ended up running my own small unit entirely on my own with a few

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staff that I recruited. The advantage of this was that you learned quickly, but I was in a research station under their aegis and could always get advice and talk to other people. The job also involved trying to set the programme up. There was a very good Ugandan plant pathologist who'd recently completed postgraduate training. It was pretty clear at an early stage he would

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be able to take over from me. It was a two-year establishment programme. The extraordinary thing about it was that sugar cane in East Africa is grown in about 10 different places with different soils and different climates. I had to visit them all, almost entirely by road. I travelled thousands of miles on the Murrum highways, not much tarmac, throughout all three

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countries. I got a very clear idea of the environment and the peoples right across East Africa. In terms of what I learned myself, I was outside Kampala, and it was only about 10 miles from Makerere University College, one of only three in East Africa at the time. They had a very good rural economy section. I used to go to seminars there and learned even

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more then about the economics of development in East Africa. Also, working on a small research station with a lot of Ugandans, I got some real friends. The whole thing was something like a two-year learning experience. Claire was working in Britain at that time. We hadn't got married, but she came out a couple of times and spent about three months out in East Africa as well.

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It meant that I came back to Britain, still basically a technical plant pathologist, but far more interested in these wider issues. I was very lucky, in fact, not long after I came back and took the job in Huddersfield. We had the huge world food crisis in the early 70s and the World Food Congress. By that time, the world development movement was very much up and

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running. I wrote a pamphlet about the crisis and did other work with them. I was able to go to the World Food Congress in Rome, a huge international thing, called on short notice because of the crisis, and got a press ticket because I was actually reporting for their newspaper. That, again, was a real learning experience. I was already moving more to environmental science

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teaching, but again, I was lucky in many ways throughout that early period. Such a unique career path. That's not what they teach at career schools. I've got a good friend, somebody I got to know fairly well. I'm a non-theist now, but I was actually brought up as a Catholic. I got to know the Catholic chaplain at London

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University, somebody by the name of Bruce Kent. Bruce and I had been friends for 50 years or so. My PhD was actually, well, the full title was, let me get it right, the soil microbiology of soil-borne plant pathogens, with particular reference to potato scab disease. I actually worked on potato diseases. Bruce used to say, how the hell you got from potatoes to

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peaceful, I'll never understand. Anyway, I made the transition. Of course, working first in Huddersfield in environmental science, and then even more so in Bradford from 1979 onwards in a peace studies department, which was brilliant. I got hired there partly because of my experience in running a sandwich course, because peace studies did the same, but also because I was

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quite strong on the environmental side. They wanted somebody even then, this is the late 70s, who could teach about ecological issues and ecological politics. Again, very far-sighted in many ways for them. Yeah, that's great. I'm also interested in, even in your early days of studying something which seems so far away from what you later studied, there's that strand of

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activism which goes alongside your research. It's interesting, and it doesn't seem that common for academia to have such a clear focus on what it wants to achieve with the research that it's undertaken. I wonder how much the relationship with activism and academia, which carried on throughout your career, impacted each other, how the academia impacted activism and vice versa?

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Yes. Well, firstly, my actual academic study was in plant pathology, which is very applied. I mean, it included setting up and running field trials on disease treatments on farms, even when I was just doing a PhD. It wasn't in any sense purely a theoretical thing. Most plant pathologists are actually really pretty applied. Norman Borlaug, who was

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described as one of the originators of the Green Revolution, those miracle rices, was actually a plant pathologist by original training. You do see that as a feature of it. I suppose, in a sense, when you look around, there are plenty of academics who individually are also very much involved in policy and activism. I mean, Oxford Research Group has been

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associated with many of them. I was lucky in a way in that in Huddersfield, we had a small group of people who were really very interested in environmental issues and would work with activists and NGOs. They themselves were not necessarily activists. I mean, I was, for a very short period, I think it was on the Council of CND in the early 1980s.

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But if I was involved in activism, it was much more trying to provide a research background and writing policy papers, not sort of activism in the sense... I mean, I'd gone on demonstrations, Clare Wood as well, but that wasn't sort of at the front of it. So in a sense, it was very much in parallel. But in some ways, I mean, I was incredibly lucky in both of those jobs,

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both in Huddersfield and in Bradford, that I was getting paid for what I wanted to do. Although you're always... Your first requirement in a university is to do the work that the university requires, not just in the teaching, but in the academic publishing. Beyond that, you have quite a lot of leeway. It's much more bureaucratic now than 30, 40 years ago,

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but you still have some leeway. And essentially, many of the staff in Peace Studies, for example, over the years have done a lot of what they simply call double publishing. So you would do the academic work, fully referenced, peer reviewed and the rest, but you might actually adapt that as what you might call grey area publishing, which might make the basis for a

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policy paper. So for example, if I was writing something for Oxford Research Group as one of the policy papers, it may well use material that I'd been writing and publishing separately in a different way for the academic press, which is what the university wanted. One of the extraordinary things is the last 10 years or so, in fact, the process of assessing

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university research has brought in more and more what is called impact. What impact are you having? And one of the paradoxes is that if you're involved in the academy in this sort of way, you're quite sought after. But that's a very different position from even 10 years ago. That really has changed. So as you mentioned there, a lot of your work recently has been with Oxford

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Research Group, and it's a huge amount of publications have been released. And since 2003, there's been a regular stream of briefings which started on the war on terror and then moved on to all kinds of topics. And the most recent one is addressing COVID and the aspects associated with that. How did you originally become involved in ORG?

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Well, when I got to Bradford in 79, it was right at the period when Margaret Thatcher had come in in 1980, and Ronald Reagan was elected to the United States. And it was very clear that there was going to be a period of pretty high east-west tensions. And there were also a number of new nuclear weapons systems which were coming online, both in Europe and in the Soviet Union.

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And these were basically often first strike weapons, very accurate, which could potentially be used first. And there's just the beginnings of a sort of an anti-nuclear movement redeveloping after its heyday back in the 1960s. And essentially, it seemed to me and a couple of others on the staff, that while our research may be in particular areas, we really need to

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reorientate towards this area. So myself and two colleagues, Malcolm Dando, who was actually originally a neurophysiologist, and Peter van den Dungen, who was an international relations specialist, Peter very much strong on essentially arms control agreements and the rest. He's actually a world expert on peace museums, for example. Malcolm coming more from the bio and chemical side.

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And essentially, we set out fairly systematically to get into this field to provide high quality information. And we did this. The department set up basically a small publication program with not pamphlets in the campaigning sense, but pamphlets in the information sense. And Frank Barnaby, in fact, wrote one of the first ones for us. And I wrote one called simply

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A Guide to Nuclear Weapons. And that just said what they were and who had them and how many there were and what their purpose was. Very straightforward, just about 40 pages. And it sold like hot cakes. Because by 1980 or so, this is becoming a big issue. You probably will have come across E.P. Thompson, the extraordinary historian, radical historian. And he wrote a

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really key pamphlet around about 1980 called Protect and Survive. And that was in response to a government publication, which ridiculously was Protect and Survive, how the household could survive a nuclear blast. And he basically, well, he powered it and took it apart. But Thompson then got started. People asked him to do lectures around the country. And a group of activists

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in Bradford asked him to come and speak in Bradford. This, I think, would be late 1980. And essentially, he came and then asked me if I'd chair the meeting because in peace studies and working in this area. And I remember they hired a hall, 200-seater hall, just behind the main old Methodist hall, a huge one in the center of Bradford. And it was a 200-seater. By 10 minutes

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before it was due to start, there were 700 people. The street outside was completely crowded. Fortunately, the Methodist minister was one of those who came. So he opened up the whole hall. So it had a hall of 700 people, two or three times bigger than anybody expected. And Thompson gave his talk, a very good talk. And that really got the peace movement really

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going in that part of West Yorkshire. He did it right across the country. And so this obviously meant that there was a real need for more information. I actually talked to him in the pub after that evening and asked him whether there's anything a small department of peace studies could do. I mean, we had about 10 staff. There were only three or four of us working on these issues,

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covering a lot of very good issues elsewhere. And he said, well, why don't you run sort of speaker weekends to train people to speak in public on this subject? And we did two of those. I ran the first and Nigel Young ran the second. And volunteers put people up in their homes. We got 50 or 60 people from around the country to each one. And that actually gave a huge boost to

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knowledge within CND. Also helped the department no end because it made us better known. A couple of years after this, I think it would probably be about 1983, I had a, I think it was a letter from somebody called Cilla Elworthy. And she said that she was interested in setting up some sort of group to look at how nuclear decisions were made.

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And I invited her up to the department and she spent quite a lot of time with Malcolm, with Peter, one or two other of our staff, and with me. And we went through this. And she said what she intended to do. And we actually came up with the name Oxford Research Group for that particular meeting. And essentially, that was my first connection with her. And it wasn't a strong

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connection in the 1980s. They were doing some extremely interesting work. One of the key people, in fact, was Oliver Ramsbottom, who joined them. And he later came to Bradford and ended up as a professor of conflict resolution and head of department. So there'd been a very close link in that way. During the course of the 1980s and 1990s, I had occasional contact with them.

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I think I went to one or two meetings, spoke and the rest. And of course, all the ORG work then was going on primarily on how you bring people together to talk about these issues, including very senior people. And the idea originally was to try and link senior people who took the nuclear weapons decisions with ordinary people who are concerned

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about it. And this was not just Britain. They wanted to talk to all the people in different countries who had nuclear weapons. And basically, Scylla and the group were incredibly good at getting in touch with people. They formed quite a decent relationship with the Chinese nuclear planners, even. And so that was going on very much through that time. I only got a closer

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relationship, in fact, around about 1998 or 1999. At the end of the Cold War period by 1990, the need to be working so intensely on nuclear issues basically declined. And I went back to my sort of original interest, which was looking at the combination of economic, environmental and security elements in terms of what makes the world tick. And essentially,

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that took a lot of the time towards the end of that decade. I also did six years as head department, which is a pretty time consuming thing. And right at the end of the decade, I wrote a book which was called Losing Control, which tried to bring these together and said that basically, the real markers for insecurity in the long term will be things like climate change,

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marginalization, and this idea that you can maintain control, lidism, as I called it, you keep the lid on things rather than going below. And basically, this wouldn't work, because you could always find that, in a sense, as one American strategist called it, there would always be the ways in which the weak could take up arms against the strong.

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And I wrote that book, I think it was, I wrote it in 1999, 2000. It came out in early 2001, and more or less sank like a stone. And this was because people didn't believe that, you know, there was any danger. Come 9-11, it all changed. I did a second edition very rapidly by adding a chapter that went into several languages and sort of spread around pretty widely.

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At about just before then, I think at the start of 2000, 2001, Scylla had actually got in touch and said, would I be interested in doing a bit of work with them, really to parallel Frank Barner's excellent work on nuclear weapons, but look at it from more of a policy angle. And that seemed quite interesting. I'd just given up the headship, so I had a bit of time to spare.

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So I started doing that, which meant that I was already working with ORG. It was actually a day a week, they got the funding to buy me out of TQ for a day a week, when 9-11 came around. And that was really the start of this other strand in ORG's work. I mean, there'd been many different strands, but this became quite a major one. And in fact, immediately after 9-11, the view that

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Scylla took, the other ORG people and I took, was that in fact, to go to war with Al-Qaeda was a mistake. To treat a group like that as basically an enemy worth fighting in an all-out war would probably be what they wanted. They wanted that kind of conflict. And what we were arguing for was you take the legal route. We published a paper, which Scylla and I wrote

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pretty quickly in October, only about six or seven weeks after 9-11, arguing this very strongly. And that was one of the few examples of a think tank basically thinking differently. And essentially ORG kept that particular line right through. And a series of publications in the early 2000s, as you mentioned, the monthly briefings which followed later, were all about that theme. So

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that in a sense is how the transition was made and how I got involved in ORG in the first place. I wonder if we could go back slightly. I think I'm right in saying that, as you've already laid out, the losing control book, many of the themes that you talked about were predated the 9-11 attacks and then later became the foundation for the sustainable security concept, which

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was a key strand through ORG's work. The basis for the sustainable security index, which Alistair, I and Dr. Oliver Scanlan wrote. It's interesting that the attacks, far from making those theories redundant, almost emphasised the importance of them. I'm interested in how, well, were there ideas that changed on the basis of the attacks or did they just solidify your opinions and research?

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I mean, bluntly they confirmed my opinions because I thought this would be the way it goes. I mean, Malcolm and I and Simon Whitby, who is also, Bradford still is in fact, I mean Malcolm and I used to talk about the risks that in fact the United States or Western countries would basically get a response from the countries that they essentially almost appeared to run. We always

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thought that the United States might face some sort of chemical attack. Even though when you look back on it, and I've actually mentioned in losing control, there has been the attempt to destroy the World Trade Center back in 1993, which came fairly near success. Just ordinary explosive correctly placed could do massive damage. So when the 9-11 attack started, essentially,

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Bradford was always fairly well known, already fairly well known for work in this general field, and we did quite a lot of press work. I remember vividly that day, it was just before nine o'clock in the morning, East Coast time. So it was just before two in the afternoon and Simon came into my office and said, there's been an attack on the World Trade Center. So we managed to get hold of

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television and watched it. The rest of the afternoon was mad. We were taking about 30 calls an hour from the press wanting more information. And I think one of the reasons that we were so called on was because we'd thought it through already. And we were expecting, we weren't completely phased. And so this was really, in a sense, it gave us an advantage. But in response

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to your question, I wasn't surprised, horrified and dismayed, even more so for, I remember the the first edition of Losing Control actually predicted accurately how the United States would respond to an attack. And there's almost certainly go to war itself. So in that sense, it was not a surprise, although, of course, it was still a huge shock. And in fact, taking basically,

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a leap out of the book of Walden Bellow, the extremely good Filipino theorist, he basically said, well, what this would lead to would be endless war. In fact, we quoted Walden in the piece that Sira and I wrote. And I certainly thought that this would be the start of a very long and bitter, very bitter conflict, even when the Taliban seemed

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to disappear very quickly. And even when 18 months later, the war against Saddam Hussein seemed to end within three weeks. We were not convinced. And I remember writing a piece, it wasn't actually for Oxford Research Group, it was for Open Democracy, just at the time when the Saddam Hussein regime was falling, to say that we should expect a 30 year war.

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Well, we're 18 years beyond that now, and we've got a good few years to go. So no, we weren't surprised, but dismayed, certainly, and even more so when it seemed almost impossible to essentially get people to look at it a different way. I'd been lecturing at defense colleges right since 1982, mainly on nuclear issues, but later on, on these issues as well.

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And the extraordinary thing is that I've found senior military often very ready to discuss these ways of thinking about it, and in fact, to debate them. But it's a drop in the ocean when you're dealing with a massive entity like the military industrial complex, which has so many components, the companies, the institutes, the revolving door and the rest,

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but breaking into that is really very difficult. And RRG and others have tried to do that repeatedly, but it's been a tough ride. And I think people are still at it. I think when you talk about Iraq and Afghanistan, it certainly validates a lot of what you wrote all those years back. And those conflicts are still ongoing. And particularly in Iraq,

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it kind of does seem to be these cycles of violence where things come and go again. We saw a global franchise. And although people have been aware that the intervention side of things has not necessarily been the same since 9-11, it's also shifted to what we call remote warfare, which is, in some ways, very much part of what you were talking about before,

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which is this idea of trying to keep control and a lid on things just using a different method. Could you talk a little bit about remote warfare? Yes, certainly. I mean, if you look back at the start of the war on terror, I'll use that term, it was very much boots on the ground. At one stage, there were 140,000 Western troops in

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Afghanistan. At another stage, even more than that in Iraq. You found, obviously, they were taking casualties. Many, many civilians were getting killed. And in different ways for different reasons, both of those wars became less and less popular in the Western countries fighting them. At the same time, what was also happening were developments in technology,

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particularly the availability of drones, but also increased use of special forces, increased use of highly accurate standoff weapons fired from conventional fixed-wing aircraft, greater use of privatized military, and a sort of a whole range of things all coming together, cyber warfare. And this was beginning to develop about 10 to 12 or 15 years ago. And it was clear

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to some of us that this was a move towards what we originally called remote control warfare, but later became just remote warfare. And that in some way, while there are very few academics that have spotted it and working on it, 10 or 12 years ago, certainly, there was pretty little going on. And a friend of mine and I, who were both in a group called the Network for Social

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Change, were talking about this. In fact, we'd both been to a talk by Chris Cole, who runs Drone Wars UK in Huddersfield at the Quaker Meeting Center then. And talking to Graham afterwards, he said, well, couldn't we try and persuade the network to fund this and set a major project up? And a major project with the network is something which runs for three years and may

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be renewable for three, but can get £100,000 a year plus funding. And so we set to work to do this and decided that if you set up a program completely new, from the ground up, you've got to basically employ staff, get space, get equipment and the rest. The better thing to do, which network has done elsewhere, is to actually support an existing group to do it. And so we

00:32:38.580 - 00:33:04.940

went to Oxford Research Group, and I think it would have been 2012, the network agreed to put some money into a pilot program. And then after that, from I think 2013-14 onwards, they funded the scheme for the whole of the six years. So basically, it's more or less a seven-year program. And the idea then from the start was really to research this, with the key thing being greater

00:33:04.940 - 00:33:27.780

transparency and greater accountability. I mean, our own view was that this was a new, potentially very dangerous form of warfare, which seemed to answer the question of how you maintained control. And we weren't at all sure that that would be sensible, because you have to go underneath and work out why people even getting motivated to carry out these acts, which is an area we've

00:33:27.780 - 00:33:49.140

worked on a lot over many years. So that's essentially where it came about. And Caroline Donnellan joined us from the Irish Diplomatic Service as the first director. And of course, Abby, you've been very heavily involved, and you as well, Alistair, more recently. So essentially, it ran for six years under Oxford Research Group. Sadly, with the ending of the

00:33:49.140 - 00:34:13.740

group as it has been, that program could risk closing down. But of course, happily, it's transformed in a slightly different form to Safer World, with at least some secure funding. It's long term, as well as the short term. So in some ways, that has a good ending. On the sustainable security side, well, I was involved in that heavily. Chris Abbott, who

00:34:13.740 - 00:34:39.040

was basically the main researcher in ORG, developed that well. And he and John Sloboda, who was then director and myself, all wrote quite a long paper, which actually got taken up by some universities. And then we produced a short 90 page paperback, which summarized the whole idea that in fact, you have the big problems of essentially environment, economic

00:34:39.040 - 00:35:01.300

and security, you've got to look at them together, if you're actually going to get an idea about how you have genuine security. And in many ways, happily, that has become, that has sort of been taken up very strongly by the Rethinking Security Group. So in a sense, two of the three programs in recent years have gone on and are going on in different forms.

00:35:02.040 - 00:35:20.540

The further Middle East work is easing up, but there are other groups doing this. But I think you have to remember that ORG over the years has adapted a lot. And it's basically had groups that have moved out of it. I mean, casualty counting, ORG was right in the middle of that. And of course, Peace Direct was set up not long after Scylla

00:35:20.540 - 00:35:41.040

ended her period as the first director of ORG. So it's an unusual organization, it doesn't grow bigger and bigger, it tends to split off. Very sadly, the organization under the name will no longer be continuing. But the work it is doing in different ways is with different groups coming together is certainly very much there. And I hope will be for many

00:35:41.040 - 00:36:10.220

years to come. Yeah, I do as well. I also just because I'm so personally invested, I'm interested in the setting up and the development of the remote warfare program. As you already mentioned, we did. And I was there for four years. And we looked at how these trends not only not only were still relevant, but almost exacerbated. And we saw

00:36:10.220 - 00:36:38.620

remote warfare increasingly across the world and increasingly used by different countries. And as the program with me to safer world to continue to investigate what the impact of these types of operations are, it'd be interesting to hear from you what you think the trajectory of this type of warfare will be. Well, I think it is going to increase. I mean,

00:36:38.900 - 00:37:00.880

the speed of change is remarkable. I mean, some of the very early things that was were done on remote warfare or remote control, it was then called I mean, Chris had gone on to set up his own group. And he basically did open briefing. And he did some work right at the start when Carolina came in. And one of the first papers he did was to assess the potential for drones to

00:37:00.880 - 00:37:24.900

proliferate. Now this is 2013 14, when people just didn't look at this at all. And at that time, there were only two countries that were producing and exporting armed drones, the United States and Israel, the speed at which that changed in the space of three or four years was quite astonishing. And in many ways, I think, what remote warfare has tried to do is obviously track this, analyze

00:37:24.900 - 00:37:51.060

it and publish in detail. I mean, I find it extremely impressive. You have all these reports incredibly well referenced, far higher reference than many university researchers would do, which really make it very difficult to sort of contradict what they're saying. And the work on special forces, on militias, on basically, well, that early one on the the floating armories,

00:37:51.640 - 00:38:14.240

a whole range of work was done. And also, I think, what the remote warfare program has done, not easy to really spot so much is it's encouraged a lot of work in universities, a lot of research going on, which probably wouldn't have happened. It wasn't that it instigated them, but it basically catalyzed stuff, and really produced an environment with

00:38:14.240 - 00:38:39.000

some of those conferences seminars, which made people more aware of this. As far as the actual nature of remote warfare is concerned, well, US Special Operations Command now has the best part of 70,000 people in it. That's not far short of the size of the entire British Army. And as you know, Abby, from your work, this is really going on round and round the world. I mean, you look at

00:38:39.000 - 00:39:05.280

the very effective, incredibly costly in human terms, use of armed drones in Nagorno-Karabakh in the last six or seven weeks, that is almost becoming the desired form of warfare, privatized military, local militias, the drones, the special forces, that is essentially how control is being maintained. And I'm no doubt at all that all those different methods and tactics

00:39:05.280 - 00:39:29.100

are and will be deployed more and more by radical groups. And the point about all of this is that the underlying problem of an environmentally constrained world, which is divided socioeconomically, that is basically unstable. And if you think you can control it through the traditional security paradigm, you can't. I mean, that original book

00:39:29.100 - 00:39:50.000

Losing Control, I mean, I'm not far from being the only one who's written about this. It's just one of a number of works that have gone on and been some very good work. I mean, one of the leading lights of international relations theory in Britain, Ken Booth, who's emeritus at Aberystwyth, his book written, what, about 12 years ago, called Theory of Security.

00:39:50.580 - 00:40:11.180

He talks about the Great Reckoning. That's the phrase he uses to describe when you come up to the limits of what we can expect out of the environment in a world which is actually economically unstable. So there are other people doing this very much. I did an extra edition of Losing Control just a year or so after 9-11. That just added a chapter. I did a further one written

00:40:11.180 - 00:40:34.180

in 2008-9, which added two more chapters. But basically, the original text was still there. So what I'm just finishing doing now is the fourth edition, which basically rewrites it. And most of the early part, some chapters are just removed. Others are heavily modified and updated. And then there are sort of three new chapters at the end. So it's basically probably

00:40:34.180 - 00:40:57.260

60% a new book. I'm trying to update it. I have to get it done in the next, I have to get it finished in the next two months. But it's doing all right. I'm on the penultimate chapter. But just looking at it, well, frankly, the approach which I think ORG has taken going right back over 20 years, I'm sorry to say, is still spot on. It's absolutely along the right lines, as far as

00:40:57.260 - 00:41:20.960

I can see. Of course, with the added dimension that we are far closer to climate breakdown, and we are just in the middle of experiencing a classic example of a threat which is non-military, which is massive, and which we're struggling to contain, COVID-19. I mean, you know, as of what, three months ago, COVID-19 had already killed more people in Britain than all

00:41:20.960 - 00:41:41.520

the civilians in Britain killed in the Second World War, in the aerial bombing and everything else. But people don't see it as that kind of level of something. And it's a very clear example that we've really got to rethink what we mean by security. The one positive element of that is there's a lot of good work going on. And I would always also say that in a very crude way, if we

00:41:41.520 - 00:42:05.280

can learn from the failures of COVID-19, and learn about the way to think ahead in a different way, and to cooperate more internationally, that will be the perfect, if you like, rehearsal for getting the approach to climate breakdown right. Because if we don't get that right, then I wouldn't want to think about what the world will be like in 50 years time. So I think the period at present is

00:42:05.280 - 00:42:28.120

really an absolutely key period in many different ways. And I think, you know, the sort of work you're doing, Abby, no doubt you'll be doing as well, Alistair, is going to be a very important part of this. In some ways, I wish I was 40 years younger. But it's still great to have been involved so far and to see how things might go. People sometimes ask me, well, how do you keep cheerful?

00:42:28.280 - 00:42:48.360

Well, my answer to that is, if you've worked for what, 30, 40 years, first on nuclear issues, and then on terrorism and causes of violence, you've only got three choices. Basically, you're either an alcoholic, you're suicidal, or you're optimistic. And I'm not an alcoholic, I'm not suicidal. So it has to be optimism. We'll see how I'm feeling by the end of the next few years.

00:42:48.840 - 00:43:10.120

I think one of the things that you were touching on is this idea of how, firstly, we need to broaden our understanding of security. And I think COVID is a very potent illustration of this. It's a non-military threat. It's one that has completely levelled the whole system as we know it in the West and elsewhere. And it's also one that when you look more closely at it,

00:43:10.200 - 00:43:31.380

it's one that's driven by very much an interconnection of drivers. It's not simply a health crisis. It's also a human security crisis. It has ramifications to the economy, and also, in some respects, the way in which the system we've set up inhibits our response to this pandemic, which we haven't seen in the West. When we look at these threats, and it's always,

00:43:31.540 - 00:43:51.120

I think, priority about also being ahead of the curve and spotting things that might emerge. Looking more into the 21st century, are there any areas, besides things like climate and obviously the things that have been touched upon in losing control, are there any new areas that you think were certainly keeping a very watchful eye on in terms of security threats and development?

00:43:51.640 - 00:44:14.960

In terms of security, no. I think it's probably, well, two things. It's probably an acceleration of particular aspects. So obviously, automation in warfare, the whole issue of cyber defences and cyber attacks, those, I think, are going to be major. But in many ways, I think we already know what the really big one is, and that is what is happening to the world

00:44:14.960 - 00:44:37.080

environment. But in combination with that, the fact that the economic model we currently have, which is still pretty dominant, what people call literally the neoliberal model, cannot cope. It couldn't cope easily with COVID, and it certainly can't cope with climate breakdown. In fact, even trying to cope with the latter is resisted by many people who've benefited greatly from the

00:44:37.080 - 00:45:03.100

neoliberal framework. So I think, in a sense, there may be new issues coming through. For example, there could be massive IT communications breakdowns, far, far serious than anything we've had before. And since we're so dependent on IT and communications and data transmission, that is really a huge danger. We've seen that in different ways. I can't think of other ones.

00:45:03.420 - 00:45:28.380

I mean, obviously, there's a risk of sort of nanoweapons, nanotechnologies, and other things like that. There's the major risk, I think, now, particularly with the gene manipulation work that is very valuable in some ways, the possibilities of basically engineered bugs. I mean, for example, if it was possible to engineer a version of COVID-19,

00:45:29.060 - 00:45:53.340

which has the same essential features, except it was three times as lethal, then we will be in one hell of a mess worldwide already. It's a very difficult one because of the asymptomatic transmission for several days at a time from any one person. But at least it is not hugely lethal, except to people like my age. But the point is that, you know, if we had

00:45:53.340 - 00:46:16.460

something which was more lethal or stretch over a wider age range, then that would be hugely serious. I think one of the tragedies with the whole COVID thing is that Britain actually had a very good biological security strategy. A 40-page document came out more than two years ago now, and it said it all, but the government did not follow its own policy. It never really

00:46:16.460 - 00:46:39.980

recognized the potential significance of this, even though epidemiologists were saying it, because it didn't think about security in that way. And so that, I think, is going to be the huge... If we do learn that lesson and sort of think the unexpected, then we may stand a better chance of preparing and acting much quicker, but you've got to act cooperatively. In some ways,

00:46:39.980 - 00:47:02.320

I think the end of the Trump era, we hope, is a complete end, and the coming of Biden will help, although, of course, that doesn't in any way address the fundamental problems with the economic model that we're all using at present. But at least in other respects, I think it would help. But the problem is we are so concerned with seeing things in a traditional controlled paradigm of

00:47:02.320 - 00:47:24.660

military thinking, that when the push comes to shove, you are in a position to use power to maintain security, and we have not recognized that that is completely inappropriate for the big challenges that we're facing. Just to finish, although I'd love to talk about this all day, I think one of the... I mean, we've already mentioned it in the conversation today,

00:47:24.880 - 00:47:53.000

but one of the key things ORG did was to provide an evidence base to say the things that you've just said, that this isn't going to work. With ORG closing at the end of the year, I'm interested to hear what you think we should be... we as in individuals and organizations working in the peace building and conflict space. What should we be doing to make up for the loss

00:47:53.000 - 00:48:13.320

of Oxford Research Group's work? I think I'm pretty hopeful a lot of the work will continue in different ways. I mean, you're very much part of it. And I think the rethinking security thinking is another way of doing it. And that's, I think, going to do a lot of this work. So I think it will continue in different ways. I suppose, looking back, if there were two areas

00:48:13.320 - 00:48:38.240

which I think aids one in doing this, one is what you just said, really good research, applied research, which basically gives you chapter and verse. The other one, well, curiously, one of the most interesting writers on nuclear issues was Mike McGuire. He died fairly recently, he's a ripe old age. And he was a naval officer who was an attache in Moscow at one time,

00:48:38.320 - 00:49:00.900

British naval officer. He became a leading criminologist, and then wrote marvelously about the ethical issues of nuclear weapons. And very effectively, he wrote in some of the major journals. And I remember once, one of the, I think it was the Defense Select Committee invited evidence on what were the long term future threats. And Mike and I ended up the same

00:49:00.900 - 00:49:20.340

afternoon giving oral evidence. And so I think the chair asked at the start, he asked me, well, what do you think of the major threats? And I said, well, basically, marginalization and environmental issues, and old thinking about security. And there was sort of a rather gulp around the area. But he then allowed me to develop a bit. And I remember Mike saying at the

00:49:20.340 - 00:49:43.440

end, he said, Paul, what you've got is what we all have to remember. And that is the capability of saying outrageous things acceptably. And the point about that is, you know, things which may be quite outside the board in terms of how people are thinking, if you argue them from a basis in fact, and having thought it through, then you sense some chance of getting through. So a

00:49:43.440 - 00:50:08.040

combination of really knowing your stuff, but maintaining your commitment and being able to argue your case. Nobody, everybody does not have to do the research. You just have to be aware of the old thing that knowledge is power. And as long as we're enough people like ORG to do this work, that is a vital thing. I remember the previous head of department to me a very experienced,

00:50:08.240 - 00:50:31.820

wise, Irish guy, James O'Connell, saying that somebody asked him, well, is your school is your Peace Studies school activist? He said, no, scholarship is our activism. What I meant by that is we support the activists and any others who are interested. And this is a really a crucial role for a university to do. So I think that's, that's probably an excellent point. I think

00:50:31.820 - 00:50:53.560

it gives a lot of food for thought for people who will be continuing the work on the way. Is there anything else you want to add? Yes. Just to add one thing, in many ways, looking back on it, still certainly doing a great deal now. I think I've been very fortunate to actually be able to work with all the people I have, especially in Oxford Research Group,

00:50:53.640 - 00:51:15.400

but in many other as well. And it's been, it's been, I don't know, it's been quite a ride. But on the other hand, it's been something which has been hugely enjoyable. You're dealing with very difficult issues. But you know, we live on a small holding. Our sons, our four sons are scattered around the world. One of them, in fact, is a renewable energy

00:51:15.400 - 00:51:37.940

engineer. Another works partly on maritime wind power. So some of them are working in the field. But in a sense, I think managing to combine sort of what we lived in the same place for 50 years or so, with the outside work has been an added advantage in many ways, because it gives you a sense of perspective. Because basically, if you've got a greenhouse full of tomatoes,

00:51:37.940 - 00:51:53.000

and you forget to water them one morning on a hot day, they can be dead by the evening. So it does remind you that there are different priorities for different things, and not to get completely immersed in the body politic and the body academic all the time. Well, thanks very much.

00:51:53.500 - 00:52:08.380

Thank you. And many thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the discussion as much as we did. Oxford Research Group is closing at the end of the year. The remote warfare programme has moved to Safer World under the new name of the Security Policy Change

00:52:08.380 - 00:52:26.940

Programme. In the new year, this podcast will also be taken over by Safer World. But for now, you can listen to all previous episodes of our podcast free of charge on the ORG site by following the link at the top of the page. To all our listeners, we wish you a fond farewell from ORG. Goodbye.