Professor Vivienne Jabri

Vivienne Jabri is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and Principal Investigator of the project, Mapping Injury, a UKRI Frontier Research Grant (successfully evaluated for the ERC Advanced Grant and funded by UKRI as part of the UKRI Horizon Europe guarantee).

Her research focuses on international political theory, critical social and political theory, postcolonialism, and feminist perspectives, with specific interest in the politics of conflict, violence and security practices. She has worked with the arts, developing research and co-curating an exhibition, Traces of War, and, more recently, working on an arts and conflict project, Conflict and Injury: Injurious Acts I and II, funded partly through the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, with an exhibition scheduled to take place in early 2023.

Her current research and writing focus on two main areas. The first is the subject of her new book, which investigates the constitutive relationship between conflict and the international. This will provide a new understanding of the relationship between embodied subjectivity, political agency, violence, and the making of the international as a distinct terrain of politics. The second, with an empirical focus on the Global South, develops an international political sociology perspective on the subject of injury and politics, Mapping Injury, a five-year project funded by the UKRI Frontier Research Grant.

Vivienne Jabri serves on the editorial boards of Security Dialogue and Peacebuilding and is on the International Advisory Board of the journal, International Political Sociology. She was conferred the Distinguished Scholar Award at the International Studies Association in 2015 and the 2018 Supervisory Excellence Award in the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s. She has four monographs, including War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, and 2^nd edition, 2010), and The Postcolonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity (Routledge, 2013).

Research Interests

• Critical theory in politics and international relations.
• Conflict, political violence, and the government of populations.
• The ‘international’ as a socio-political and juridical-political space.
• Gender and feminist theory.
• Critical conflict and security studies.
• Art and visual methodologies in International Relations.

PhD supervision

Vivienne Jabri is currently supervising five PhD students (see Research Portal).

Teaching

Vivienne Jabri has designed and taught MA modules on The Global Governance of conflict and Security, Conflict Culture and the Postcolonial, War and Criminality in Global Politics, and Violence the State and Global Politics.

Publications

For a list of publications please refer to the Research Portal

Past Projects

Traces of War (2016):

Traces of War was a major new exhibition from King’s College London. Curated by Cecile Bourne-Farrell and Professor Vivienne Jabri, the exhibition brought together three internationally renowned artists, Jananne Al-Ani, Baptist Coelho, and Shaun Gladwell to explore the relationship between war and the everyday.

Conflict and Injury Project (2023):

The Score (You and I Both Know)

The Score (You and I Both Know), a new exhibition exploring the impact of war on populations living in the aftermath of conflict, opens 7 February at The Arcade in Bush House.

The free exhibition forms part of Conflict and Injury, a research project from the Department of War Studies investigating how war inflicts injuries on individuals, communities and their lived environments. The Score (You and I Both Know) is presented by Professor of International Politics Vivienne Jabri and King’s Culture, in collaboration with contemporary artist Corinne Silva and curator Cécile Bourne-Farrell.

About the exhibition

Silva draws on years of research and practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina to present this new series of works exploring the consequences of the Bosnian War on bodies, landscapes and memory, as well as the remarkable resilience and solidarity of those affected.

Through an installation of photographs and sound The Score (You and I Both Know) transports viewers to the siege of Sarajevo and the embodied, material and auditory cartography of violence. The deeply resonant exhibition is testimony to injury and resistance in the face of the deliberate targeting of civilian populations in time of war, capturing the scenes and sounds of lived experience during conflict and its aftermath.

Silva’s primary focus is a row of linden trees along the River Miljacka that mark Sarajevo’s former frontline; the only trees that remained in the city after the siege as their location was too dangerous for anyone to risk felling them. As well as being witnesses to the conflict, these trees were also active participants, forming a living shield to sniper fire. Today, their role is immortalised in their trunks and branches which bear the scars of the war. The works are complemented by a haunting voice singing a former Yugoslavian partisan song celebrating the forest as a place of safety.