Rita Floyd is Senior Lecturer in Conflict and Security in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include security and International Relations theory, environmental security and, more recently, ethics and security. She has a monograph forthcoming in 2019 (with Cambridge University Press) entitled The Morality of Security: A Theory of Just Securitization. This book offers a new way of approaching ethics and security by bringing together insights from moral philosophy via the just war tradition, and Security Studies via securitization theory. This book develops principles of just securitization concerned exclusively with when securitization (i.e. the use of emergency politics whereby putative threats are addressed using exceptional means) is morally permissible. Developing this project, her work for the ISRF takes her existing research on ethics and security further. Her project Emergency politics: security, threats and the duties of states, aims to unpick when securitization is morally required, tackling issues such as culpability in threat creation and the obligation to securitize. Whilst this project is ultimately intended as a research monograph in its own right, it builds logically on the assumptions of Floyd’s existing work on just securitization. After all, a theory of the obligation to securitize must begin by thinking about the permissibility to do so, as one can only have a duty to perform acts (i.e. securitization) that are permissible.

Biographical details correct as of 02.10.24