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Lindsay Murch

Investigating the effect of distance from the theatre of war on the concept of heroism in the US military

Supervisor: Professor Nicholas Wheeler and Dr Peter Gray (Co-supervisors)

Lindsay Murch is a doctoral researcher in the ICCS and POLSIS and a research assistant in the developing field of drone warfare. Lindsay's PhD research starts with the premise that transnational civil society has played a role in the regulating and prohibiting of both anti-personnel mines (APMs) and Cluster munitions.

It aims to discover what this role was and to ascertain if there are lessons from these cases that can be applied to the burgeoning campaign against the use of killer drones. By applying process tracing to the data gathered from these interviews, Lindsay aims to establish causal links, and their direction in order to establish how the literature on transnational civil society can contribute to our understanding of how new international norms develop.

As drone technology is rapidly proliferating this case offers a unique opportunity to see how a norm develops through the efforts of bodies such as the International Committee for Robotic Arms Control (ICRAC), and to compare this with accounts of the development of norms against earlier weapons systems.