Dr Eric Herring

Career

Visiting Scholar at George Washington University, 1986, Tutor at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1986-87, Social Science Research Council MacArthur Fellow at Columbia University, 1987-89. Lecturer at Bristol from 1989, Senior Lecturer from 2001. University of Bristol Research Fellowship 1994-95; Convenor, Network of Activist Scholars of Politics and International Relations, 2002-. Convenor, BISA NASPIR Working Group, 2003-. Convenor, PSA Specialist Group on Political Activism, 2003-. Faculty of Social Sciences & Law Teaching Prize, 2005. Specialist Adviser, Select Committee on Economic Affairs, House of Lords, 2006-07.

Research

My research falls broadly within Critical Security Studies (CSS) in that it relates security scholarship to progressive social change, including critical reflection on the nature of that project. To that end I have carried out research on the relationship between International Relations academia and elite power, including an assessment of why the world politics scholarship of Noam Chomsky receives so little attention in academia; on the UN economic sanctions on Iraq 1990-2003 and beyond that the occupation of Iraq; and on activist world politics scholarship.

My current research has two related themes. The first theme is bringing historical materialism into understanding security: at present, class - especially defined in relationship to ownership and control of capital - is mostly ignored within CSS as a referent of security. The second theme is the rearticulation of post-invasion Iraq to global inequalities. The central argument here is that the US has been seeking to establish not a sovereign national state in Iraq but a hierarchical governance state (that is, one which exercises mainly top-down coherent political authority through local, national and transnational public and corporate actors with governance not necessarily channelled through the national level) as part of a wider global process of struggle over the multiple frontiers of inequality between the global North and global South.

List of publications (links to IRIS publications database)

Teaching

I teach introductory world politics (first year undergraduate) and international security (at MSc level).

My teaching methods include analysis of video clips and a variety of groupwork techniques.

I am currently teaching:

• 11102: Introduction to World Politics
• M3012: International Security

I supervise PhD candidates on a wide range of topics (e.g. military abuses of human rights and their prevention, the arms trade, US foreign policy, the news media and world politics, neoliberalism, economic sanctions, the politics of scholarship, Rwanda, Iraq, former Yugoslavia, Colombia). I am particularly interested in supervising PhD research motivated by a desire to assist progressive social change.