Dr. Matthew Harries is Managing Editor of Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, and Research Fellow for Transatlantic Affairs at the IISS. Before joining the institute in November 2014, Matthew was a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Science and Security Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he was lead author of a study on conventional deterrence. His PhD, on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Global Uncertainties programme, and supervised at King’s College by Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman. While at King’s College, Matthew also founded and managed a track-two dialogue between early-career British and Chinese nuclear-policy researchers and practitioners, and co-edited the NPT Briefing Book. Matthew is a member of the board of advisors of the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He previously worked for the IISS as a research assistant, and has served as a consultant for the International Centre for Security Analysis (ICSA) at King’s College. He read history and politics at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating in 2008 with first class honors.
Publications
"Britain’s Dangerous New Politics," in Survival, November 21, 2016; "Brexit and Political Malpractice," in Survival, May 20, 2016; "Nuclear Deterrence," in Harsh V. Pant (ed.), Handbook of Nuclear Proliferation (London: Routledge, 2011)
Spring 2018
This seminar will investigate the question of a relationship between the palpable travails of Western liberal order and the intensified antagonism between Russia and the West. It will focus on Europe, and proceed from the assumption that the Cold War of 1946-1989 offers a useful analytical framework, even if the analogy needs to be approached with a prudent skepticism. If there is a new Cold War, it is very different from the first. Cold War dynamics operate, but are not always decisive; the Cold War antagonist, Russia, is threatening but remains weak in fundamental and possibly irreversible ways; and new dynamics are at play, including the various collisions of nationalism and supra-national interests that are currently putting European and transatlantic cohesion at risk. Europe’s own problems, mostly not of Russia’s doing but perhaps all subject to Russian exploitation, may be its downfall.
Spring 2018
This seminar and workshop has three purposes. The first is to read, reflect upon and actively discuss fiction and non-fiction models of excellent writing. The second is to participate in a shadow editorial process putting together two issues of the bi-monthly journal, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy. Approximately half of class time will therefore be organized as editorial meetings where students, under the direction of the instructor (the Editor of Survival), will participate in various aspects of the process: commissioning articles, evaluating submissions, preliminary editing of accepted copy, and laying out the issue. The third purpose is to hone students' writing skills, with emphasis on the intersection of writing for the policy debate and writing as a literary art. To this end, each student will meet individually with the instructor in five half-hour tutorial sessions to go over the student’s written work.