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Staff Profile

Dr Craig Jones

Senior Lecturer in Political Geography

  • Email: craig.jones@ncl.ac.uk
  • Address: Geography
    Henry Daysh Building
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
    NE1 7RU
Background

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. Before moving to Newcastle he was a PhD student in Geography at the University of British Columbia.

Dr Jones is an expert on international humanitarian law, military targeting, and war-related injury in the Middle East. He is the author of the monograph ‘The War Lawyers: US, Israel and Spaces of Targeting’ (Oxford University Press, 2020), which examines the international law of lethal targeting operations and the role of US and Israeli legal advisers in air warfare.He is currently leading a major UKRI-funded research project entitled ‘The afterlives of war-related injury: Mapping civilian trauma pathways in conflict settings’.

For any media or PhD enquiries, please email Dr Jones directly.

Other areas of expertise

  • War, security and conflict
  • Displacement and migration
  • War and health
  • War-related injury
  • Middle East
  • International law and human rights

Google scholar: Click here.

Research

Research interests

Dr Jones 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.

The first work from this project includes:

  • Analysis of the health-related fallout from the 2018-2019 Great March of Return.
  • A critical account of how 'dual use' functions to undermine civilian infrastructures during war (with Ichamati Mousamputri and Mark Griffiths)
  • An analysis of 'mass casualty incidents' in Gaza and how healthcare workers innovate to overcome challenges in healthcare provision under conditions of war and siege (with Anas Ismail, Mads Gilbert, Yousef H. Abu Alreesh, and Moatasim Saleh)
  • A reflection on settler colonialism, war machines and disability in Gaza.

Lots more work is under review and in progress.

Teaching

I am not currenly directly involved in any teaching because my all of my working time is focused on research for the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project.


I have a wealth of teaching experience in Geography. I was formerly Degree Program Director (DPD) of our M.A. in Human Geography and I led the development and curriculum for our new MA in Global Sustainable Futures (launched in 2025). I am currenly Exernal Examiner for the MA in Environment, Society and Development at the University of Galway.


PhD Students

Dan Barwick: Transnational Black Lives Matter (ESRC-funded, completed 2023)

Daoud Ghoul: Geographies of occupation in East Jerusalem (ESRC-funded, ongoing)

Omar Hmidat: Necropolitics in Palestine (ESRC-funded, ongoing)

Ichamati Mousamputri: Spaces of militarism in contemporary India (ESRC-funded, ongoing)

Anas Ismail: Therapeutic geographies of Palestinians traveling to Egypt and Jordan (ESRC-funded, ongoing)

Lamis Qdemat: Water politics in Palestine (ESRC-funded, ongoing)


If you are interested in applying to work with me for a PhD, please do get in touch.


Previous teaching

I have taught across a variety of topics and subject including war and conflict, migration and displacement in the Middle East and Europe, international law and the laws of war, cities under siege, geopolitics, political geography, the Cyprus question, Palestine-Israel, and film and documentary, among other things. 


Modules/courses taught on include:

GEO1010 Interconnected World

GEO2047 Political Geography

GEO2139 Exploring Everyday Political Geographies in a Divided City: Nicosia

GEO3041 Geographies of Film, representation and critical spectatorship

GEOG3102 Geopolitics

GEO3145 Humanitarianism: Representation, Intervention and Rescue

GEO8015 (MA) Doing Geographical Research

GEO8017 (MA) Human Geography: Concepts in Action

GEO8089 MA Dissertation

GEO8028 Gegoraphies of the MIddle East


Publications