Research

Overview

My research interests centre on the study of British foreign and security policy, with a particular focus on understanding i) the impact of the UK's foreign and security policy machinery on its approach to the world and ii) how a policymaker's perceptions of past foreign and security policy events shape their policy preferences in the present. To explore these areas, my research takes an interpretivist approach using archival methods, elite interviews, and discourse analysis.

I am open to offers for research collaborations and partnerships, including with non-academic stakeholders, I can be reached by email at t.eason@aston.ac.uk. 

Current Research

I am currently working on converting my PhD thesis, Beyond Blair: Governmental Politics, Perceptions, and the Decision to Invade Iraq, into a book. This will analyse the British decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and, in line with my interest in exploring how the UK’s security policy machinery shapes policy preferences, will produce a new analytical framework that can be used to understand how individual perceptions and bureaucratic processes interact together to shape foreign and security policy decision-making. This framework, applied to the Iraq case, will allow the book to challenge dominant Blair-centric narratives in favour of analysing the wider government machine.

I am also co-authoring an article that will explore the concept of 'myth diplomacy' and how Ukraine have actioned memory diplomacy through myth following Russia's invasion.

Previous Research

I have a record of publishing peer-reviewed articles in leading International Relations journals. In my first article, published in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations with Prof Rory Cormac and Dr Oliver Daddow, we explored how official secrecy can be (mis)used by governments to manipulate political blame games. Additionally, in my recent solo-authored article, published in Intelligence and National Security, I argued that scholars can conceptualise the policy networks responsible for British decisions to use covert action by using interpretivist Public Policy Analysis models. This introduced the largely positivist Intelligence Studies to a more interpretivist approach to studying the impact of the UK’s government machine on UK intelligence and security policy. 

My most recent article was published in the International Studies Association journal Foreign Policy Analysis. This article explores the concept of myth and how myth can extend narrative approaches to studying foreign and security policy. It does this by analysing how the narrative that Tony Blair acted as George Bush's poodle in the build-up to the 2003 Iraq war has functioned as a myth that has shaped negative constructions of US-UK relations for the last twenty years. 

Impact

While working as a Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham's Centre for the Study of Subversion, Unconventional Interventions and Terrorism, I provided research support for a report on covert influence commissioned by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.