Event Details

CWD experts discuss the UK’s defence and security prospects, bringing insights from current defence analysis, international relations, history and international law.

UK Defence and Security: Past, Present and Future

Tuesday 21^st October

17.00-18.30

Amidst a major land war in Europe and conflict across the globe, in 2025 the UK government published its Strategic Defence Review (SDR), planning the ‘step-change in British defence’ needed to preserve the UK’s national security. The SDR sets the UK’s goal to be a leading member of a ‘more lethal NATO’. This means enhancing the ability of the UK’s armed forces to perform on the battlefield, boosting its defence industry to ensure supply of weapons and ammunition, and developing its cyber warfare strength. The UK must ‘move to warfighting readiness’. According to the Prime Minister, this means ‘the biggest shift in mindset’ for generations: to make defence and security the ‘fundamental organising principle of government’.

In this context, the Centre for War and Diplomacy (CWD) at Lancaster University considers the past, present and future of UK defence and security. Whilst the UK embraces cutting edge military technologies, there are lessons to be learned from the past. From our standpoint in 2025, we can look back upon the international rules-based order of the twentieth century, and on the decades of relative peace following the Cold War, as a flicker in the historical dark. The norm is a multi-polar and unstable world – where, in the words of Thucydides, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. Thus, for much of the past seven centuries, Britain’s government and economy has been geared for war. Meanwhile, the place of international law – which governs relations between states – may be in jeopardy, and the UK must navigate the new world while upholding the values it prizes.

In this panel discussion, four CWD experts discuss the UK’s defence and security prospects, bringing insights from current defence analysis, international relations, history and international law.

Anna-Sophie Maass is a Lecturer in International Relations and Diplomacy in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University. After having graduated with a PhD in Politics and International Relations from La Trobe University, Anna-Sophie worked at the College of Europe (Natolin) before taking up a Lectureship in European Politics at the University of Groningen. Her research is at the intersection of European Studies and International Relations. An assessment of the reasons shaping the gradual deterioration of EU-Russian relations is at the core of her monograph EU-Russia Relations 1999-2015. From Courtship to Confrontation (Routledge, 2016). Anna-Sophie’s research interests also focus on EU diplomacy, EU foreign policy towards the post-Soviet space and Russian politics. Within the research consortium EU Foreign Policy Facing New Realities: Perceptions, Contestation, Communication and Relations, funded by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), CA17119: https://foreignpolicynewrealities.eu/ Anna-Sophie coordinates a working group aimed at the professional development of early career researchers and launched a policy brief series.

David McFarland is a former member of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps where he was a military intelligence operator and operational intelligence instructor at the UK’s Defence School of Intelligence. This work saw operational deployments across the globe and included an extended period conducting defence diplomacy in East Africa. As an independent consultant he has served multiple mandates as an Expert on Mission for the United Nations Security Council conducting investigations and advising on sanctions matters. He is the author of the book Understanding Hybrid Warfare: Navigating the smoke and mirrors of international security and was awarded an MBE in 2016. He is an Associate Member of the CWD.

James Summers is a Senior Lecturer in International Law and Director of the Centre for International Law and Human Rights in Lancaster University Law School. He is the author of International Law: Text, Cases and Materials (CUP, forthcoming) and Peoples and International Law (2nd edn, Nijhoff 2014), as well as, editor of Contemporary Challenges to the Laws of War (CUP, 2014); Kosovo: A Precedent? (Nijhoff, 2009); and Non-State Actors and International Obligations (Nijhoff, 2018).

Marco Wyss is Professor of International History and Security at Lancaster University, a Research Fellow at the Department of Military History, Faculty of Military Science, Stellenbosch University, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Previously, he was a Senior Lecturer in Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Chichester, and a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich. He gained his PhD from the Universities of Nottingham and Neuchâtel, and currently works on Britain’s and France’s postcolonial security roles in West Africa. He is the editor of the International Journal of Military History and Historiography, and co-editor of Brill’s ‘New Perspectives on the Cold War’ book series. He is, among other works, the author of Un Suisse au service de la SS (Alphil-Presses universitaires suisses, 2010), Arms Transfers, Neutrality and Britain’s Role in the Cold War (Brill, 2013) and Postcolonial Security: Britain, France, & West Africa's Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Peacekeeping in Africa (Routledge, 2014), Neutrality and Neutralism in the Global Cold War (Routledge, 2016), The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Europe and China in the Cold War (Brill, 2018).

Sophie Ambler, who will chair the roundtable, is Reader in Medieval History at Lancaster University. She works on the history of war in medieval Britain c.1100-1400, taking in military recruitment, the experiences of low-status combatants and war-torn populations, battlefield medicine, battlefields and conflict landscapes, and the shifting patterns of thought concerning personal responsibility in conflict, including post-conflict justice and the history of treason. Her current work builds on her previous research on the ethics and practice of war, politics, rebellion and revolution in medieval Britain, set out in two monographs: The Song of Simon de Montfort: England's First Revolutionary and the Death of Chivalry (Picador and OUP, 2019) and Bishops in the Political Community of England, 1213-1272 (OUP, 2017). Sophie holds a Philip Leverhulme Prize in History (2020) and in Michaelmas 2022 was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.