Tom Sorell and Monica Whitty (WMG) presented a joint paper on 'Victim-Offenders in Scams' at a conference on Cybercrime held at Nuffield College, Oxford on 13th June 2017. The paper draws on a soon-to-be submitted co-authored paper, 'Romance Scams and Victimhood' connected to the ongoing EPSRC-funded DAPM project.

9th-10th May 2017 (Athens) - Tom Sorell and Katerina Hadjimatheou participated in the second Medi@4sec workshop on 'Social Media, Policing, Mass Gatherings, and Riots'. Find out more about the event here.

'Security Ethics', a new collection co-edited by IERG's Kat Hadjimatheou, Tom Sorell, and John Guelke has been published by Routledge. Find out more here.

About the Book

 Governments often act in the name of security to protect their citizenries. For example by legislation or by the recruitment and employment of large numbers of armed personnel to detect and prosecute violent crime, or via engagements in military interventions to repel or pre-empt foreign attacks. These practices are often taken to have strong moral justifications. The value of security is linked to the value of life and the disvalue of violence and injury, and all of these are central both to theoretical accounts of and common sense views about the difference between right and wrong. The essays in this volume seek to increase our understanding of state action in the name of security and take a range of viewpoints and approaches. Some articles attempt to delimit the concept of security, or dispute attempted delimitations; some consider security as a 'good' and ask what sort of good it is, and how valuable; whilst others consider the relation between state action in the name of security and state action in the name of other goods, notably liberty, or consider ethical issues in health security, climate security and cybersecurity. Overall, this collection of essays shows how appeals by governments to the value of security have grown out of relatively recent events and processes at a global level, such as the response to pandemics, the acceleration of climate change, and counter-terrorism. The volume features an introductory essay and forms part of a five-volume series on legal ethics and the enforcement of law.

IERG’s PERICLES research project has been funded in the latest round of H2020. The project will last 36 months. IERG staff involved in the project are Tom Sorell (PI) and Kat Hadjimatheou (postdoc RF), and the project is worth €190,000. The overall aim of PERICLES is to develop a comprehensive approach to preventing and countering violent radicalisation. Transitional processes of radicalization are a focus of the research, which will consider violent left-wing and right-wing as well as religious ideologies. PERICLES will particularly emphasise violent propaganda delivered digitally. Partners include TNO, Trinity College Dublin, Thales and the Netherlands Police.

On 17th November 2016, the IERG is hosting an eclectic event at Friends House in London that will investigate 'Ethics & Rights in a Security Context'. Speakers include: Prof. Marina Jirotka (Oxford); Prof. Nicholas Wheeler - TBC (Birmingham); Prof. Jason Ralph (Leeds); Prof. James Connelly (Hull); Dr. Cian O'Driscoll (Glasgow); and Dr. Tom Walker (Belfast). To register contact F.Melhuish.1@warwick.ac.uk.

Ethics and rights are central to the study of security. They have a significant place across a range of security contexts and at a number of scales or frames of analysis, including the individual, organisational, state, and international levels. This workshop brings together projects that explore ethics and rights in a security context, covering a range of subject areas, including nuclear weaponry, the treatment of people at borders, the ending of wars, the notions of digital citizenship and the common good online, the spreading of rumours or misinformation on the internet, and the norms surrounding foreign policy regarding Syria. Through examining approaches to ethics from a variety of perspectives and on a diverse range of topics, participants in this workshop will enhance their understanding of how ethics can facilitate and empower security policy.