My research explores how leadership processes create collective action and contribute to system wide change. I am particularly interested in environments of conflict and contestation and recently published by third book Management in Conflict and Transition: the Organisational Dimensions of Building Peace. This study explores management practices in the midst of ethno-political conflict and subsequent conflict transformation processes. It draws on three case examples of conflict and conflict transformation (Northern Ireland, Kosovo and the Basque region) and asks how organisational managers in the public, private and non-profit sectors engage with ethno political violence and its legacy at a community, organisational and political level. Drawing on interviews and witness seminars with managers and leaders in the three cases, the work provides a background analysis to each case before focusing on emergent themes from the data itself. Some of these themes directly engage in the conflict arena – like those in police and security functions. Others deal with the reality of conflict and its legacy from a cultural or arts management perspective and others on the challenges of delivering services like housing and health or supporting economic regeneration.

I am currently working on a new book entitled ‘A Duty of Hope: The Anglo-Irish Division and the Work of Peace’. This work documents the activities, development and impact of the Anglo-Irish Division of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs through the prism of peacebuilding and conflict diplomacy. Drawing on extensive interviews with public officials and those with whom they worked, the book explores the iteration of the Division itself, its relationship with other branches of government and the organisational, political and diplomatic efforts at peacebuilding over almost forty years.