Your conference team
Professor Simon Rushton - Conference Chair
Simon is a Professor of International Politics in the School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield. Simon’s research interests focus on the global politics of health, peace and conflict, and participatory research methods. His work has looked in particular at international responses to infectious diseases; the links between health and international security; the changing architecture of global health governance; healthcare delivery in conflict and other crisis situations; and post-conflict peacebuilding. His current research projects are in Nepal and Colombia. Simon joined the BISA Executive Committee as an elected trustee in 2020.
Juliet Dryden - BISA Director
Juliet has worked in the field of international relations for the last 25 years specialising in programme management, international development/humanitarian affairs and donor relations.
Juliet has previously worked at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the London School of Economics (LSE Ideas) and for 15 years with the United Nations in Cairo, Gaza and Jerusalem (UNRWA, UNOCHA, UNOHCHR). Her most recent position prior to joining BISA was at the West Asia - North Africa (WANA) Institute in Amman where she was the Director of Programmes. Juliet holds an MA in International Relations from the University of East Anglia.
Juliet has been a member of the Chatham House Council since July 2021 and currently chairs the Council Research Committee. She is also an adviser to the British Foreign Policy Group (BFPG).
Outside of BISA, Juliet loves reading political biographies, outdoor swimming, spending time with her family and living a quiet life after years of living dangerously!
Ella Bullard - Events and Communications Assistant
Ella joined BISA in September 2024 as a recent politics and international relations graduate. Throughout her studies she gained varied experience in fundraising and event planning for charities and football clubs.
Outside of BISA, Ella enjoys unwinding with a good book, exploring new coffee spots, and spending time outdoors with her dog.
Chrissie Elliot-Duxson - Communications Manager
Chrissie has worked in marketing communications for over 15 years with experience of both the public and private sectors. Her most recent positions prior to joining BISA were at the University of Warwick and spanned marketing, communications, recruitment, student experience and project management.
Chrissie has also run her own business and was formerly the Chair of her local branch of the Federation of Small Businesses as well as Chair of Coventry and Warwickshire First Young Professionals.
Outside of BISA, Chrissie is a singer/songwriter, reviews gigs for Birmingham Live and enjoys travelling.
Freya Jones - BISA Administrator
Freya joined BISA as Administrator in January 2021 on a part-time basis alongside her other roles as a School Bursar and a Ticketing Administrator for the Friends of Oxford Botanic Garden. Previously she worked as an Account Director for an Event Management agency for nine years, organising a variety of events across the globe.
Outside of BISA, Freya enjoys Pilates and reading (when time allows!), and has recently taken up playing the piano again after a 25 year hiatus.
Dr David Brenner – University of Sussex
David Brenner is Associate Professor in Global Insecurities at the University of Sussex Department of International Relations. His research explores the sociology of war and organised violence, with a particular focus on rebel movements and the socio-political orders they produce. He conducts most of this work in the context of ethnonational conflict and contested state formation in the restive borderlands of mainland Southeast Asia, especially in and around Myanmar/Burma. Focusing on largely ignored conflicts, David’s work reflects on the politics of knowledge production in conflict and security studies from its margins. His monograph Rebel Politics was published by Cornell University Press. His articles have appeared in journals such as International Affairs, International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Journal of Global Security Studies, and the European Journal of International Relations.
Dr Lydia C Cole – University of Sussex
Lydia C Cole is Assistant Professor in International Relations at University of Sussex. Her research focuses on artistic approaches to peace, engaging with visual, aesthetic, and curatorial approaches to international relations. In this context, she has been particularly interested in activist, artivist, and other socially engaged approaches to curating, which she mobilises to understand the politics of curating museums, exhibitions, monumental and other contested spaces across the United Kingdom and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her research has been published in journals such as International Political Sociology, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, and Critical Military Studies.
Professor Lara Montesinos Coleman – University of Sussex
Lara Montesinos Coleman is Professor of International Law, Ethics and Political Economy at the University of Sussex and author of Struggles for the Human: Violent Legality and the Politics of Rights, published by Duke University Press in 2024 and shortlisted for the Susan Strange Prize. She has published widely on the philosophy and politics of human rights, law and resistance, as well as on questions of critique and on philosophy and method. Her work has a strongly ethnographic component as a result of her long-term involvement with anti-imperialist internationalist struggles in Colombia. She is currently working on two projects. On is a decolonial re-reading of provisions for reparation that give weight to allegations of genocide linked to energy extractivism. The other is a book, Insurgent Human: Radical Ethics for an Inhuman Age.
Professor Mark Devenney – University of Brighton
Mark Devenney is Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, and works in the Department of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Brighton. He is a critical political theorist, who has also written about the politics of the novel. His books include Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory (2005); Towards an Improper Politics (2019) and forthcoming with Edinburgh, co-authored with Daniel Mendonca and Bianca Linares, Populist Politics in Contemporary Brazil: Understanding Lulism and Bolsonarism.
Dr Synne L Dyvik – University of Sussex
Synne L Dyvik is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. Her research interests lie in the gendered and racialised embodiment of international relations, development, war, refugee governance and humanitarianism. Her recent book Humanitarianism in the Home: Hosting-at-home and the Politics of Hospitality (Routledge 2025) and article "Homes for Ukraine" and the politics of private humanitarian hospitality explores the hosting of forcibly displaced populations in homes and explores the role of the Home in International Relations. She is also the author of Gendering Counterinsurgency (Routledge 2017) and has published in Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology, Critical Military Studies, Geoforum, Social Policy, and International Feminist Journal of Politics. She is the co-founding editor of the Bristol University Press series Gender and Sexuality in Global Politics.
Dr David Jason Karp – University of Sussex
David Jason Karp is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. His research in the fields of global ethics, human rights and international theory has been published in leading journals including European Journal of International Relations, Global Governance, International Theory and Review of International Studies. He sits on the editorial board of Business & Human Rights Journal and is former co-editor of Journal of International Relations and Development. His ongoing research projects include: first, a historical, theoretical and normative overview of the UN's 'respect, protect and fulfil' conceptual framework of human rights obligations; second, a project on the concept of 'harm' in global ethics; third, a critical evaluation and contextualisation of emergent 'business and human rights' international practices.
Dr German Primera Villamizar - University of Brighton
German Primera is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Politics at the University of Brighton. He is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (CAPPE), and serves as an editor for both Contemporary Political Theory and the Journal of Italian Philosophy. His teaching and research interests include contemporary French and Italian philosophy, Black studies, and biopolitics.
Dr Anna Stavrianakis - University of Sussex
Anna Stavrianakis researches and teaches on the global arms trade, militarism and global (in)securities at the University of Sussex. She also works with Shadow World Investigations, a non-profit dedicated to exposing and confronting corruption in the arms trade, and with activists, campaigners, journalists, lawyers, parliamentarians and others seeking to rein in the arms trade.
Dr Heba Youssef - University of Brighton
Heba’s research interests are in the fields of colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies. Recent research projects have focused on the intersections between nationalism, colonialism and empire, and the racial capitalist configurations of nation-building projects in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work unsettles normative thinking about national movements, state-building and socialist-modernist development, through in-depth readings of Zionism’s early colonial interventions in Palestine. Her most recent projects also interrogate European diplomacy in the 19th and 20th centuries, as integral to the transit of European racial and colonial logics around the world. She is also currently co-leading a new book project on the ‘Abolitionist International’, funded by an ESRC grant.
If you'd like to contact the conference team please email conferences@bisa.ac.uk.