Academic Staff: Brian White

Teaching Associate

Professor Brian White, BA (Wales) MA (Lancaster) PGCE (Birmingham) PhD (Leicester)

Telephone: + 44 (0) 114 222 1708
Fax: +44 (0) 114 222 1717
Feedback & Consultation hours: Monday 15.00 - 16.00 and Tuesday 15.00 - 16.00

Email: Brian.White@sheffield.ac.uk

Profile

Brian White joined the Department at Sheffield in 2007. He is also an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Institut d´Etudes Politiques (Sciences-Po), Toulouse University. He was previously a Professor at Warwick University and at Staffordshire University where he was also head of department. In the last ten years, he has been a Visiting Professor of International Relations at Rhodes University, South Africa, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, the University of Leicester and Chulalongkorn University, Thailand.
Professor White has more than thirty five years’experience of teaching International Relations in the UK and abroad primarily in the areas of foreign policy analysis, British and US foreign policy, and security studies. He has delivered invited lectures in fifteen different countries. His long term research interests have been in foreign policy analysis and British foreign policy. In the last decade, however, he has been one of the pioneers of the relatively new study of European (EU) foreign and security policy.

Teaching

Over many years, Brian has sustained a strong commitment to teaching and learning at both undergraduate and graduate levels. This inspired him to take a postgraduate teaching certificate at the beginning of his career. His main priority is to transfer his own enthusiasm for the subject to his students. He has found that the best method for doing this is to teach in small groups and to encourage the students to make regular presentations as the basis of a critical engagement with other students and with relevant ideas and literature in the subject. This promotes inquiry-based learning and the development of analytical, communication and other transferable skills.

POL3019 Terrorism, Violence and the State

This module provides an introduction to contemporary forms of terrorism. The module looks at terrorism as a form of resistance to the state. It therefore examines the nature of the modern state and the citizen’s obligation to obey the state. It looks at non-violent resistance to the state before looking at violent resistance and terrorism. The module looks at motivations and justifications given for terrorism and well as tactics, strategies and goals. It also looks at state terrorism, counter-terrorism the ‘war on terror‘since 9/11 and the relationship with media. Throughout the module, students work in small groups to research a particular terrorist group of their choice. This perspective is applied to each week’s topic. Thus each student develops an indepth understanding of a particular group as well as a more general understanding of terrorism.

POL6005 Contemporary Global Security

This MA course begins with a general introduction to the field of Security Studies and an evaluation of the concept of security. It then covers the main theoretical perspectives on security. Thereafter, the focus of the first half of the course is on security issues such as terrorism, economic security, environmental security, and so on. The second half, in contrast, looks at various ways of establishing increased security, from arms control to security institutions, to post-conflict reconciliation. The emphasis here again is on small group work and student presentations.

Professional Activities

Brian White has been the External Examiner for PhD candidates at a number of universities including Cambridge, LSE, Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol, Kent (Brussels), Keele, Loughborough and Warwick.

Current Research

Brian continues to work in the area of EU foreign and security policy with a special interest in conceptualising and theorising this increasingly important domain of policy-making.

Key Publications

• W.Carlsnaes, H.Sjursen and B.White (eds) Contemporary European Foreign Policy (London, (Sage, 2004)
• B.White, R. Little and M. Smith (eds) Issues in World Politics 3rd edition (Basingstoke Palgrave, 2005)
• B.White Understanding European Foreign Policy (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001)
• B.White, `The European challenge to foreign policy analysis´, European Journal of International Relations, Vol 5, no 1, (1999) pp. 37-68
• B.White, Britain, Detente and East-West Relations (London, Routledge, 1992)
• M.Smith, S.Smith and B.White (eds) British Foreign Policy: Tradition, Change and Transformation (London, Unwin Hyman, 1988)

Click here for Professor White's full list of publications.

PhD Supervision

Topics include:

• British counter-terrorist policy
• The role of Turkey in EU security policy
• Congress and US detente policy
• EU foreign and security policy