Ben specialises in international political communication. He was co-investigator of the ESRC-funded project, Legitimising the Discourses of Radicalisation: Political Violence in the New Media Ecology. Before that he was a researcher on the ESRC project Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the Iraq War, part of the New Security Programme. Both projects were awarded the highest possible grade, Outstanding, by the ESRC’s reviewers.

This body of work on media and security is part of a broader interest in understanding the role and influence of political ideas, the translation and adaptation of ideas across different groups of actors and institutions, and the ways in which social and political life is becoming not so much mediated as mediatized. He has published extensively on security and conflict in the new media ecology (see publications). Ben is a founding Editor of the journal, Media, War and Conflict (Sage, from April 2008).

His current research addresses two questions.

• In international affairs, how do states use strategic narratives to project their interests and identities to shape the behaviour of other actors?
• In domestic politics and society, how are digital technologies creating “the new mass” society, the return of a dense social mainstream which people unconsciously locate themselves inside or as ‘radicalised’ outsiders?

Ben is Director of Research in the Department of Politics and International Relations.