Dr Janina Dill awarded British Academy project grant

Congratulations to Janina Dill, who has been awarded a British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant.

The funding will support a project entitled 'Forcible alternatives to war'.

This project explores the idea that no political order is sustainable without a mechanism for the legitimate use of violence. Internationally the only mechanism is war with a UN mandate or in self-defence, which inevitably causes extensive suffering. With the global rise of human rights war is therefore decreasingly acceptable. Scholars across disciplines acknowledge this but merely focus on changing war. This project addresses the urgent task of thinking beyond it and finding forcible alternatives to war. It assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars to systematically establish why it is impossible that war meets individual rights standards and to explore alternative forms of legitimate international violence, such as enforcement of international law directly against leaders and targeted humanitarian missions by global police forces. The project will yield new ideas and investigate the normative and institutional implications of those usually dismissed as unrealistic. Its objective is to achieve a paradigm shift in the study of force and prepare the ground for the transcendence of war in international relations.

The project will run from 1 October 2013 until 31 September 2015.