As we step into 2026, our institute is entering a decisive year: a chance to convert the strategic reset of 2025 into visible outcomes: new grants, policy influence, and interdisciplinary research that shapes national capability. Last year’s relaunch clarified who we are and why we matter: a leading hub for transformative, people‑centred security research. We exist to anticipate, not just react, to complex risks, and to translate scholarship into practice across government, industry, and civil society.

From vision to delivery

Last year, we surfaced five future‑facing, cross-disciplinary themes with new academic leads and cross‑campus teams: Polycrisis; Boundaries of Being; Truth & Trust; New World (Dis)order; and Critical Supply Chains & Environmental Security. This year, let’s turn those themes into fully funded work packages. Expect focused workshops, sandpits, and co‑creation sessions that take ideas to proposal stage quickly!

The Unsecurities Lab gives us a distinctive method to interrogate cyber‑physical complexity and foresight under post‑truth conditions. In 2025, cycles on deep‑sea ambiguity and climate‑AI showed how immersive art can unsettle assumptions and produce new heuristics for security sense‑making. In 2026, we’ll extend the series to generate analysable traces for research papers, policy briefs, and concept notes attached to grant pipelines. Join a Lab cycle!

Funding

Security Lancaster’s Mini Projects scheme remains your quickest route from idea to impact. We provide seed funds (typically up to £2,000) for priming research, grant‑writing workshops, engagement pilots, and dissemination activities. Use it to convene cross‑disciplinary teams and produce the scoping materials that make external bids competitive. Applications are considered monthly, so speak to the leadership team early and use the scheme to de‑risk bigger bids.

In early 2026, Security Lancaster will host grant-writing workshops designed to turn our new research themes into funded projects. These hands-on sessions will help members craft proposals that align with funder priorities and our strategic vision. We aim for a balanced portfolio consisting in small grants in the £100–200K range to accelerate agile research, alongside large-scale, multi-million bids that position us as leaders in security innovation.

Policy engagement

Security Lancaster is driving the future of security policy through bold engagement and cutting-edge research. We work hand-in-hand with government and industry to shape strategies that matter, aligning with national priorities and the UK’s Defence Industrial Strategy. From resilient supply chains to innovation-led procurement, our mission is clear: turn insight into impact. Through policy briefings, collaborative workshops, and forward-thinking partnerships, we’re building a safer, stronger, and more competitive UK for the challenges ahead.

Facilitated by our theme leads, expect media engagement, policy briefs, stakeholder roundtables, and responses to calls and enquiries so that our research lands where decisions are made. If your work touches responsible security governance, ethics, defence analysis or any other relevant security fields, let us know if you need any advice to get started with policy engagement.

Community

Our 2026 Security Lancaster Away Day is coming soon (15th April 2026): a key moment to strengthen our collective vision. We’ll focus on consolidating the existing research themes to ensure clarity and alignment across the institute. At the same time, we’ll create space to identify bottom-up ideas and missed opportunities, complementing our current strategic priorities. This is your chance to shape the next wave of research directions and influence how we position ourselves for funding and impact. Bring your insights, creativity, and ambition!

Institute seminars, research showcases, and partner events are our shop window. Use them to test grant ideas, recruit co‑investigators, and engage external stakeholders. Keep an eye on the events pages and do not hesitate to propose ideas for new events!

This is a year to be ambitiously practical. Bring your creativity, convene across disciplines, and choose pathways that move quickly from idea to funded work and policy impact. Never hesitate to contact us to discuss your ideas.

Basil and Dan

RECENT NEWS FROM OUR MEMBERS

Anna Sophie Maass was speaker next to Prof Marco Wyss, Dr James Summers and David McFarland to a Roundtable on the UK Security and Defence Posture organised by the Centre for War and Diplomacy. Sophie’s work on "The EU’s Changing Strategy towards Russia: The Response to Aggression" was published in a Bristol University Press volume and presented during a roundtable at the Pan-European Conference on International Relations in Bologna.

Kostas Selviaridis has a paper on Research Policy (FT-listed outlet) published on defence procurement and tech innovation, in the context of the growing policy attention to defence and security nationally and internationally and the planned reforms of MoD procurement. Kostas also recently submitted evidence to the House of Lords (Public Services Committee) inquiry on medicines security.

Basil Germond has been awarded the Freedom of the City of London at a ceremony taking place at the Guildhall on the 13th of January. Basil was cited and quoted by the Business and Trade Committee (House of Commons) in their inquiry's report to Government "Toward a new doctrine for economic security".

Richard Jiang’s NeurIPS paper introduces ELA-ViT, a novel framework that reveals how transformer layers self-organize and stabilize during learning, improving efficiency and opening new frontiers in mechanistic explainability and Agentic AI. At Security Lancaster, it advances trustworthy and secure AI, enhancing robustness against adversarial attacks, supporting reliable decision-making, and enabling safer operation of LLMs, VLMs, and agentic AI systems. By exposing the internal dynamics that drive layer specialization and stability, ELA-ViT provides a foundation for interpretable, powerful, and accountable AI.

Charles Weir wrote a blog about the EuroSec conference recently held in the DiSH which can be found here. Charles is also working on a project dealing with ransomware attacks.

Aaron Winter co-organised and spoke at AI and Our Working Lives: A Lancaster Social Sciences Panel Discussion - as part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Science earlier this month. Aaron discussed the findings from his collaborative project on AI and the 2024 Riots, which was recently published as evidence by Parliament (Home Affairs Committee). Aaron was on LBC News with Vanessa Baffoe in November, discussing the response to the Huntingdon train attack and on LBC Breakfast with Nick Ferrari discussing national identity and the far right. He also co-organised and spoke at the October symposium Continuities and Ruptures on the Right at Birkbeck and gave an invited Panel Talk on religion and the mainstreaming of the far right at the webinar Theology, Churches and the Mainstreaming of the Far Right organised by Professor Robert Beckford. YouTube link here.

FORTHCOMING EVENTS

16 February 2026 - SL Theme: Boundaries of Being – Workshop 1

February 2026 - SL: Unsecurities Lab Series 1 – Workshop 3

23rd February 2026 - SL: Grant Writing Workshop

4th March 2026 - SL: Guest Lecture with Kevin Rowlands

23rd March 2026 - SL Theme: Polycrisis – Workshop 1

15 April 2026 - SL: Away Day

16th April 2026 - SL Unsecurities Lab Series 2 - Workshop 1

6th May 2026 - SL Unsecurities Lab Series 2 – Workshop 2

June 2026 - SL Unsecurities Lab Series 2 – Workshop 3

June 2026 - SL Theme: Trust and Truth – Workshop 1

tbc - SL Theme: CriSCES – Workshop 2

tbc - SL: Industry Showcase Event

Contact us

Website: Security Lancaster - Lancaster University

Administrator: Mark Bellwood: m.bellwood1@lancaster.ac.uk

Please feel free to contact Dan, Basil or any of the theme leads if you have an idea, a query, a suggestion, a request or simply if you want to get involved!