Project Coordinator (Unredacted)

We wish to recruit a motivated and experienced Project Coordinator for Unredacted: an exciting new academic research and impact project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and based at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster. Unredacted is designed to bring about a step-change in the transparency and public understanding of UK national security practices, drawing in expertise from academics, human rights investigators, NGOs, lawyers, parliamentarians and journalists.

The successful candidate will be joining a project team with an international reputation for academic research in the field of counterterrorism and human rights, and an outstanding record of translating this research into significant impact beyond academia. As part of this project we are launching the UK’s first permanent, public collection of national security documents. Working with a range of non-academic partners, we are bringing together and publishing thousands of important and often inaccessible documents in fully searchable form. The Archive’s extensive document collections and rigorous analyses will shed new light on the often-hidden practices of national security, and will bolster the accountability work undertaken by legal, parliamentary and NGO sectors in relation to state abuses of power – particularly in relation to human rights.

The first phase of our project will be focused on a number of interconnected practices which have sat at the heart of contemporary US-UK counterterrorism operations, including intelligence-sharing agreements, special forces capture-kill operations, global detention and interrogation operations, international counterterrorism training and covert mass surveillance programmes.

The successful candidate will be responsible for the day-to-day running of the project, including maintaining our collections of national security documents and our parallel FOIA Project, building and maintaining relations with project partners, and maximising media and parliamentary engagement with the project’s outputs. They will also provide research-based support to the research activities undertaken by the academic project leads, across a number of discrete investigations.

For an informal discussion about the post, please contact the project director, Dr Sam Raphael s.raphael@westminster.ac.uk

To apply for this vacancy please click above. Further information can be found in the job description and person specification, which can be accessed through link below.