Climate Change and Violence Organising Group

Dr. Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History at Southampton and a member of the Parkes centre for Jewish/non-Jewish relations. He is an expert on the history of modern genocide (see: Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, vols. 1 and 2, Tauris, 2005). He was full-time director of the Quaker-founded Peace Advertising Campaign, latterly Changing Minds, throughout much of the 1980s and more recently co-founder of Crisis Forum, as well as founder of Rescue!History.  Much of Levene’s work is now dedicated to relating academic analysis to the reality of rapid anthropogenic climate change as a consequence of a dysfunctional international political economy.  See among other works: with David Cromwell eds. Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe (London: Pluto Press, 2007); ‘A dissenting voice; or how current assumptions of deterring and preventing genocide may be looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope,’ Journal of Genocide Research, Part 1 6:2 (2004),153-166; Part 2  6:3 (2004), 431-445, and ‘Rescue!History’, Viewpoint, 10 November 2005. Mark Levene is the project director and organiser: workshop 1.

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Dr. Rob Johnson FRSA, is a former army officer, Lecturer in International Security Studies and Head of Academic Development, University of Bath, specialising in conflict studies in a global or regional setting. He is the author of A Region in Turmoil: South Asian Conflicts Since 1947 (Reaktion, 2005) and Oil, Islam and Conflict: Central Asia Since 1945 (Reaktion, 2007).  Organiser: workshop 2.

Dr. Richard Maguire was formerly an officer in the UK Royal Air Force involved in peacekeeping operations in the former Yugoslavia, as well as the security of nuclear weapons, before moving into the academic world, where he has written particularly on the state and violence. His most recent research involves a comparative historical analysis of nuclear weapons history in France, the UK and the USA (see his guest editorship of the special edition on nuclear weapons, Journal of Genocide Research, September 2007).  Currently free-lance (post Warwick, Southampton and UEA) Maguire is directing a Heritage Lottery funded project on the connections between the international slave trade and East Anglia, including a civic venture programme involving schools, prisons, and local government which has recently won the ‘outstanding contribution’ award for 2007 from the Black History foundation.  He is currently also associated with UEA.  Organiser: workshop 3.

Prof. Dave Webb is Professor of Engineering in the Faculty of Information and Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University . He has an extensive background in physics, space physics, computer modelling and applied engineering and is also a co-founder of The Praxis Centre at Leeds Metropolitan, a multidisciplinary research centre for the ‘Study of Information and Technology for Peace, Conflict Resolution and Human Rights’. The writer of scores of journal papers on these and related issues he is also co-editor (with E. Halpin, S. Wright  and P. Trevorrow) of Cyberwar, Netwar and the Revolution in Military Affairs (2005). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of Scientists for Global Responsibility, a council member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a member of the UK Pugwash Group, and an adviser for the International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation.  Organiser: workshop 4.

Prof. Steve Wright is a senior lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University in the School of Applied Global Ethics (SAGE). His research centres on the political consequences of innovation. In 1985, he became Head of Manchester City Council’s Police Monitoring Unit, watching the local police force and from there in 1989, Director of the Omega Foundation, working with Amnesty International and the European Commission to track the transfer of military security and police technologies. In 1998, Wright authored the European Parliament’s widely influential first STOA report on the Echelon Global Spy System which revealed the extent to which all communications are read by Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill station. The US ‘war against terror’ and its human rights fallout has pre-occupied him ever since and he became chair of the trustees of Privacy International in 2004. His current work covers information warfare, new border control technologies (he is a trustee of the Mines Advisory Group) and the emergence of weapons of mass paralysis.  Organiser: workshop 4.

Prof. Colin Feltham is professor in Counselling at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of 20 books on counselling and psychotherapy. Fellow of the British Assocatiion for Counselling and psychotherapy and former co-editor of The British Journal for Guidance and Counselling.  His most recent work is What’s Wrong with Us? The Anthropathology Thesis (Wiley, 2007).  Organiser: workshop 5.

Dr. Laura Potts is Reader in Public Health and the Environment at York St John University and is currently involved in an NERC funded project looking at the chemical and biological pathogens in agriculture as a result of climate change. She chairs the UK Public Health Association's Environmental Pollution and Health Group and is on the board of Trustees of the Pesticides Action Network UK.  Organiser: workshop 5.

Dr Juergen Zimmerer is Reader in International History, founding director of the Sheffield Centre for the Study of Genocide and Mass Violence at Sheffield University (SCSG), co-editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, and a seminal founder of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS). His most recent and forthcoming works include, with Joachim Zeller ed., Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg in Namibia (1904-1908) und die Folgen [Berlin, 2003, English translation with Merlin Press, 2006] and Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz. Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster, 2006).  Organiser: workshop 6. 

Dr. Damien Short is Senior Lecturer in human rights at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and Convener of the MA Understanding and Securing Human Rights. His work on indigenous peoples, reconciliation and ‘native title’ land rights includes; Reconciliation and Colonial Power: Indigenous Rights in Australia (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).  He is currently working on a new monograph; Genocides? (Zed Books). Organiser: workshop 7.

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Marianne McKiggan is an activist with a Masters degree in Environmental Science from the University of Southampton, for which her dissertation was a critical analysis of mainstream media representations of climate change.  She is the author with the late John Theobald of ‘The Mass Media, Climate Change and How Things Might Be’ in Surviving Climate Change.  Webmaster for Crisis Forum and project coordinator.