On 21st October 2025, the CWD hosted a roundtable discussion on the theme of UK Defence and Security.

The event responded to the UK government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), in which the Prime Minister committed to make defence and security the ‘fundamental organising principle of government’, with the largest sustained increase to defence spending since the end of the Cold War.

The SDR responds to a shift in the global geo-political context: after decades of peace dividend when money and energy was spent on the nation’s health and welfare, the return to the historic norm of land war in Europe and powers competing for dominance across the globe. Yet the UK now stands with the rest of the world in a new technological and political age, of autonomous weaponry and entangled national and international infrastructures.

The SDR set various goals, including to increase the lethality of UK armed forces ten-fold through new technologies and invest in the UK defence industry - inlcuding a focus on the North West, with the regeneration of Barrow, home to the production of the UK’s fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines. Through these and other measures, the UK will move to ‘warfighting readiness’.

In this context, the roundtable addressed the strengths and weaknesses of the UK’s status in the defence and security landscape, the threats it faces and the opportunities on which it can capitalise. The discussion drew insights from international law, from History, from International Relations and from practitioner expertise.

The CWD commentators were:

David McFarland, formerly of the British Army’s Intelligence Corps where he was a military intelligence operator and operational intelligence instructor at the UK’s Defence School of Intelligence, with operational deployments across the globe including an extended period conducting defence diplomacy in East Africa. As an independent consultant he has served multiple mandates as an Expert on Mission for the UN Security Council conducting investigations and advising on sanctions matters, and has published on hybrid warfare.

Anna-Sophie Maass, a lecturer and academic at the intersection of European Studies and International Relations. Her research focuses on EU-Russia diplomatic relations, coercive diplomacy, security and defence and EU foreign policy with its neighbouring countries. She has shared her expertise in a European Commission study on EU financial aid to neighbouring countries, at GCHQ’s North-West Partnership for Security and Trust and at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Marco Wyss works across history and security studies.His research field includes the military and security history of the Cold War in West Africa, Britian and France, and European Defence Policies and Armed Forces. He leads an international research network on the past, present and future of Grey Zone Warfare, and co-convenes the Lancaster Defence and Security Dialogue, a think tank and public panel considering how the UK can navigate the complex realities and risks of an interdependent world.

James Summers researches and teaches international law at Lancaster and, as the other panelists, is a member of the CWD. His interests span the rights of peoples, self-determination and statehood, nationalism, the use of force and the laws of war, international organisations and international environmental law. He has published on matters including secession, in relation to the principle of territorial integrity and humanitarian intervention, on contemporary challenges to the laws of war, and on non-state actors and international obligations.

The roundtable was chaired by Sophie Ambler, historian and CWD Co-Director.

The roundtable drew from the CWD's core ethos, to unite scholars and practitioners across the university and beyond to address war and diplomatic relations between states in the longue durée, providing the historical context and strategic analysis to address current global challenges.

In this spirit, the CWD will also support the launch in 2026 of new postgraduate training in Defence and Security: a suite of programmes (PGCert, PGDip, and MA) combining academic disciplines and insights from practice with hands-on training in the application of knowledge to real-life scenarios, programmes that can be studied alongside full-time employment. Please see the university admissions pages for more details.

Details of upcoming events can be found on the CWD Events Portal,