PEACE STUDIES RESEARCH

Following the tragic events of September 11, and the proceeding military action in Afghanistan, both the British and international media have relied extensively on the expertise of our staff in the Department of Peace Studies.

Professor Malcolm Dando, Professor Paul Rogers, Dr Simon Whitby and Professor Graham Pearson conducted more than 300 interviews over the course of 10 weeks. News and Views went to investigate some of the work currently being undertaken by them.

As Paul Roger's area of expertise includes terrorism and political violence he was well placed to comment on events after September 11. Only two years before, he had accurately predicted how America would respond to a successful attack on the World Trade Centre in his book, entitled 'Losing Control: Global Security in the Twenty-First Century'. The first print run of his book sold out rapidly following the attacks in the United States. Paul received his first query from the media within minutes of the first plane crashing into one of New York's Twin Towers.

Paul's impressively long list of expertise includes arms control and disarmament, proliferation, environmental and resource conflict, North-South relations, global security after the Cold War and Persian Gulf security.

In addition to his academic output, Paul has written for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, and has contributed hundreds of radio and TV interviews during the year to networks throughout the world.

It is with some surprise that Paul says he finds time to relax, but he lists his hobbies as building, smallholding, hill-walking and bell-ringing! But he is keen to point out that it is the Department's ethos that teaching comes first, and he works his media interviews around lectures. His daily schedule is so tight, that he had an ISDN line fitted at home three years ago to avoid having to travel to radio interviews.

Paul said: "I have managed to do 120 interviews in the last two months without missing a lecture. The teaching comes first. There has been a huge amount of comment and argument in the Department on the conflict. We have students from all over the world, including the Middle East, so lectures can get very lively as you inevitably end up discussing current developments. The risk is that you end up with 'News at 10' lectures, so we do our best to strike a balance between the academic work of the Department and its relevance to the wider world."

Focusing on the trends in international conflict, Paul has developed his analysis of the linkages between socio-economic divisions, environmental constraints and international insecurity. Much of his work concentrates on western military responses to regional conflicts and political violence, and he is concerned with those trends in political violence likely to have the greatest impact on wealthy industrialised states.

Paul has completed a paper on 'New Threats to Western Security' for the 2000 edition of Royal United Services Institute's World Defense Systems, and his monograph on 'War and Peace in the Early 21st Century' is nearing completion for the London-based International Security Information Service. He has also written articles for The World Today and New Political Economy on the Kosovo War and also contributed an article to the BBC's online network.

Working with Malcolm Dando and Simon Whitby, Paul has continued to work on aspects of biological warfare against crops, with publications including papers prepared for NATO Advanced Research Workshops during the year in Prague and Bucharest.

Paul, together with Simon Whitby and Malcolm Dando, published 'Biological Warfare Against Crops' in the world's biggest science magazine, Scientific American.

Simon submitted his PhD thesis on 'Anti-Crop Biological Warfare and its Control' and graduated in July last year. His new book, published last month, is the first substantive study of state-run activities in the field of anti-crop biological warfare. 'Biological Warfare Against Crops' aims to show that where states are intent on acquiring a capability to wage anti-personnel biological warfare, and have access to modern biology, investigations into conducting biological warfare against crops are also likely to have been carried out.

Simon said: "It is a reasonable assumption that offensive anti-crop biological warfare research may represent a significant component in both current programmes, about which little public information is available, and future biological warfare programmes."

The book places current concern over the production of biological weapons in the context of the initiative to strengthen the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC).

Simon argues that the risks posed by this form of warfare can be minimised, but this would depend largely on the effective and efficient implementation of regimes concerning the peaceful use and control of plant pathogens that pose a risk to human health and the environment.

In April, Simon gave a lecture at the Chemical and Biological Warfare Colloquium, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University, Boston. Last month, he gave a lecture on State Anti-Agricultural Programmes at Cornell University, in New York.

As well as publishing numerous articles on biological warfare and its control, Simon is currently Webmaster for the University's project on 'Strengthening the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention' (BTWC). The project, which is co-directed by Professor Malcolm Dando and Professor Graham Pearson, is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The University was awarded £200,000 to monitor the negotiations to strengthen the BTWC and monitor the subsequent implementation of a Protocol to the Convention.

The project makes available, through its website, official documentation and analysis of relevance to the negotiations and the development of the Protocol regime.

As the negotiations to agree a compliance and verification Protocol for the 1972 BTWC approach the end-game, Simon has been updating the project's website with official documentation from the negotiations. Key analyses and commentaries on the progress of the negotiations have also been added to the website throughout the academic year. In addition, he has filmed and edited a series of thirteen web videos relating to key aspects of the negotiations to strengthen the BTWC. These can be found at www.bradford.ac.uk/acad/sbtwc

Last month, Graham and Malcolm travelled to Geneva for the 5th Review Conference of the Convention, for which they had prepared a 175-page Briefing Book entitled 'Strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention: Key Points for the Fifth Review Conference' for the 144 State Parties participating in the review of the Convention.

The book, which is available on the project's website, addresses the key items of the Review Conference agenda, provides analysis on issues facing the State Parties, and recommends language to be adopted in the Final Declaration of the Fifth Review Conference. The State Parties were meeting at a time of unprecedented international concern and awareness of the dangers of the use of deliberate disease as a weapon of war or for terrorist purposes.

Professor Dando, said: "Today, public and political awareness and concern about biological weapons is at an unprecedented level, and the world expected all the States Parties - large and small, developed and developing - at this review conference to seize the opportunity to make the world a safer place for all for us.

"Attention world-wide is therefore more focused on the Review Conference than ever before. The opportunity is now. Every State Party needs to explore every avenue and go the extra mile to ensure that the Final Declaration of the Fifth Review Conference meets the expectation of the international community and makes the world a safer place for all of us."

Malcolm and Graham have to-date produced some 33 Briefing Papers, 22 Evaluation Papers, and they have recently produced three briefings for a new series of Review Conference Papers. The pair also presented these papers to the delegations of the States Parties during the course of the Protocol negotiations, and at the Review Conference at the United Nations in Geneva.

Under a grant from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Malcolm assisted in the production of the first three in a new series of International Security Information Service (ISIS) Briefing Papers on 'Preventing Deliberate Disease'. This material is also available on the project's website.

Malcolm has also assisted in the organisation of four NATO Advanced Research Workshops (ARWs) in Prague (times two), Moscow and Bucharest, on technical issues connected with the negotiations and was a key speaker at them all. With Graham, he wrote the NATO Guide to Best Practice for organising such workshops. Malcolm has just completed the book, 'New Biological Weapons: Threat, Proliferation and Control' which deals with the little discussed problem of future toxin and bioregulator weapons and how the misuse of science might best be prevented.

He has been an invited expert to various meetings internationally, including the Pugwash scientists' organisation (which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995), and the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington D.C.

He recently completed a study for the Ministry of Defence on the impact of the use of chemical or biological weapons and agents on the ability of British forces to carry out military operations from 2000 to 2020 and has lectured on 'the proliferation of biological weapons' to the Advanced Command and Staff Course at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Bracknell. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Biology in March 1999.

Graham was Director of the UK's Chemical Defence Establishment, at Porton Down, from 1984 to 1990 and Director General and Chief Executive of the UK's Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment, Porton Down, from 1990 until 1995. Following this, he was Assistant Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK (Non-Proliferation).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Member of the Research Council of the US and Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute. He is also a participant in international negotiations of the control of chemical and biological armaments.

His research interests include the control of chemical and biological weapons, especially in relation to the current Chemical Weapons Convention and the review of the Biological Weapons Convention.

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