Martin Kear

I am a critical theory scholar with a specific focus on non-state armed groups (NSAGs) and their complex and asymmetric violent and non-violent interactions with the state. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates components from international relations, politics, post-colonial, religious studies, and history to critically analyse and account for the causal drivers behind the shifting political behaviour of these movements. I am particularly interested in understanding the role that resistance, in its various forms, plays as a key causal driver behind the decision-making processes of these groups concerning any move they make into institutional/electoral politics and how they justify these decisions to core constituencies. I am also interested in understanding the changing function of violence in these groups’ organisational narratives that necessarily accompanies these decisions and similarly how they justify this to core constituencies. By doing so I seek to interrogate and critique dominant Weberian and Hobbesian norms and assumptions that pervade IR literature concerning the legitimacy/illegitimacy of the use of violence by state and non-state actors.