Dr Ben Fermor

Ben Fermor completed his PhD at Leeds and before that undertook a BA in International Politics and MSc in International Relations at the University of Surrey.

Ben researches US security and foreign policy and is interested in the war of position between narratives of national identity, threat and Otherness in US politics under the leaderships of Obama, Trump and Biden. He has written on topics such as populism, nationalism and racism in the context of Donald Trump’s leadership, and is currently investigating the discursive formation of the ‘Biden doctrine’ in relation to climate security and environmental diplomacy. Ben’s work is informed by Critical Security Studies, and uses frameworks such as securitisation, emancipation and decolonisation.

His PhD took a post-colonial approach to investigate changing constructions of security and threat in Barack Obama’s language on the Middle East Peace Process, the Arab Spring and (counter-)terrrorism.

Latest publications:

Fermor, B & Holland J, (2020) ‘Security and polarization in Trump’s America: securitization and the domestic politics of threatening others’ Global Affairs, 6:1, 55-70. DOI: 10.1080/23340460.

Holland, J. & Fermor, B. (2020) ‘The discursive hegemony of Trump’s Jacksonian populism: Race, class, and gender in constructions and contestations of US national identity, 2016-2018’, Politics. DOI: 10.1177/0263395720936867

Email: b.j.fermor@leeds.ac.uk