Event Details

Security Lancaster Seminar with Dr Catherine Jones (Univ. of St Andrews) host Prof. Joe Burton

Security Lancaster Seminar with Dr Catherine Jones (Univ. of St Andrews) host Prof. Joe Burton

Thursday 15th February 2024, 2pm-3pm | In Person Furness Lecture Theatre 1 | Teams

Title: Wargames as a method or a methodology: exploring the terrain

Wargames or crisis simulations have variously been used as a tool to test decision making, explore strategic options, to train and to educate. However, increasingly scholars, policymakers, and businesses are questioning their research validity. How should we understand the validity of the insights that are gained from war games? Are they creating new knowledge as some analytical games claim? If they are, how can we verify or trust the insights provided. Is their analytical contribution in the design of the game, its play, or its post-game analysis? This plethora of questions (and many more) are the subject of a rapidly expanding research space in politics and international relations. This exploratory paper considers whether our first question should be: are games a method or a methodology for analytical research. The initial conclusion suggests that they might be a methodology in which a multitude of methods may be undertaken. The paper presentation will briefly set out the problem space and some of the challenges in accepting, as read, that games can be a method or methodology. It will then present the tentative argument and there should be ample time for challenge, question, and discussion, that should be use for both the presenter and participants alike.

Dr. Catherine Jones started working at St Andrews in September 2018. She teaches and researches on issues of security and development in East Asia. In June 2021 she was awarded Senior fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) and has presented, published and disseminated her research around the world. She has been a visiting researcher at the Weatherhead Institute, University of Columbia (Sept-Dec 2017), at RSIS at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the Balsilie School at the University of Waterloo. She held a Korea Foundation research grant with Sarah Teitt and visited at the APR2P centre at the University of Queensland. From 2012-2018, she was a research fellow in East Asia at the University of Warwick and completed her PhD at the University of Reading within the Leverhulme Major research Project the Liberal Way of War.