Craig Jones

(MENAFN- The Conversation)

• Senior Lecturer in Political Geography, Department of Geography, Newcastle University

Profile Articles Activity

Dr Craig Jones is UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Political Geography in the School of Geography Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. He is an expert on international humanitarian law, military targeting, and war-related injury in the Middle East.

Dr Jones' earlier work focused on the legal and political dimensions of military targeting operations. His book, 'The War Lawyers: US, Israel and Spaces of Targeting' (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides a comprehensive account of the involvement of military lawyers in aerial targeting operations. Contrary to conventional understandings that internaitonal law restricts and reduces military violence, Dr Jones argues that states like the US and Israel exploit the malleability of international law to further military objectives. Military lawyers work in a considerable grey zone as part of a multi-discipliary team is to produce targets to be killed, destroyed or otherwise acted upon. While there are limits to international law, Israel and the US have pushed to expand the scope of what is deemeed permissible and legitimate. Acts that were once prohibited have become normalised and in this era of illiberalism and illiberal warfare, some state militaries like the US and Israel are sidelining lawyers and internaitonal legal considerations in favour of aggressive military action. Several of Dr Jones' publications speak to these imperative geopolitical problems while also not forgetting that it is civilians and families on the ground who bear the costs of modern military operations.

Dr Jones' current work focuses on war-related injury and the difficult journey that civilians must navigate in the aftermath of sustaining life-changing injuries. The work has two central strands, one focused on Gaza and the other on Iraq - both places have an enormous burden of injury from repeated and prolonged periods of conflict and enforced isolation (sanctions in Iraq; siege in Gaza). Both places have seen their healthcare infrastructures not only undermined but also directly targeted by military violence. Thus at precisely the moment where complex and involved care is most needed, it is paradoxically least available. It is in this context that Dr Jones leads a multidisciplinary team and project partners trained in epidimiology, public health, and social sciences, to investigate the lives of those who have been directly injured by war. We use multiple ethnographic and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to get a sense of what it is like to be injured, and crucially also what it is like to care for the injured not only from the professional perspective of healthcare workers but also in terms of family and gendered modes of care in the aftermath of injury. As with the blast of a missile that radiates outward from the point of impact, war-related injuries start with a body but their effects radiate outward in time and space, impacting the mindbody of the individual injured, the social support system that surrounds them and the wider healthcare infrastrucutures, society, and economy. It turns out that in both Gaza and Iraq - and elsewhere in and beyond the Middle East - the pathways to healing are fragmented at best and the provision of care and rehabilitation is highly variable geographically, socially, and politically. The central aim of this work is to better understand these 'trauma pathways', to document their fragmentation as well as best practice to inform scholarly and practicable work on future trauma pathways.

Experience

• –present Lecturer in Political Geography, Newcastle University

Education

• 2017 University of British Columbia, PhD
• 2010 University of British Columbia, M.A.
• 2007 Manchester University, B.A. (Hons)

Publications

• 2016 Lawfare and the Juridification of Late Modern War, Progress in Human Geography
• 2016 Traveling law: Targeted Killing, Lawfare and the Deconstruction of the Battlefield, In Luban and Kraidy: American Studies Encounters the Middle East
• 2015 Frames of law: targeting advice and operational law in the Israeli military, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space
• 2015 War/Law/Space: Notes toward a legal geography of war, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space

Grants and Contracts

• 2016 Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Award Role: Funding Source: Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation

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