Dr. David Brenner

David is Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of Politics, University of Surrey. He holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE), where he remains affiliated as an associate fellow at the Global South Unit. He has extensive field work experience in conflict and post-conflict environments. Based on ethnographic research on the Kachin and Karen rebellions in Myanmar (Burma) his doctoral thesis analysed how rebel leaders capture and lose authority within their own movements and the ways in which these internal contestations drive wider processes of conflict and peace. His current research interests include the social dynamics of insurgency and political violence, ethno-nationalism and ethnic conflict, (non-)state formation in contested borderlands and revolutionary art forms.