Alex Waterman Email and Phone Number

I am interested in how order emerges in civil wars, counterinsurgency and peacebuilding settings. I am regionally focused on India/South Asia, but my current book project expands to include cases from the Middle East and Africa. I am currently working on a project titled "Dancing with Devils: How do Militaries Integrate Understandings of Rebels and Militias into Counterinsurgency Doctrine?" The project explores the factors shaping how understandings of rebel/militia organisations are generated and then integrated into the doctrinal process, comparing across a series of well-studied and understudied Western and non-Western case studies. In doing so, the project speaks to existing debates on the influences shaping COIN doctrine and practice. I have disseminated my research to both academic and practitioner audiences, and formerly held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati, India.I completed my doctorate in November 2018. The thesis, titled 'Managing Insurgency:' Counterinsurgency and Order Negotiation in Northeast India utilises the concept of 'order' to open up the nuanced politics of COIN and insurgency that are frequently missed out in conventional theoretical approaches. The theoretical framework explores the politics of order across three spatial levels of analysis - macro, meso and micro - and applied these to both existing debates in the COIN literature (such as the problem of unity of effort) and emergent themes. It draws upon novel interview, archival and observational data from the Assam and Naga case studies in Northeast India, based on five months of fieldwork in India whilst affiliated with the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi and Tata Institute for Social Sciences (TISS), Guwahati. In 2020, the thesis was awarded Global Policy North's "Outstanding Thesis Prize" on account of its conceptual innovations and policy relevance.