Dr Jonathan Leader Maynard is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics, and a Parliamentary Academic Fellow working for the International Affairs Unit of the UK House of Commons. Prior to joining King’s in 2020, Dr Leader Maynard was based at the University of Oxford, where he served as the Rank-Manning Junior Research Fellow in Social Science (2013-2015), and then Departmental Lecturer in International Relations (2015-2020).

Research interests

Dr Leader Maynard’s research spans International Relations, political science and political theory, and is focused on the role of ideology in armed conflict, geopolitical competition, and extremist politics, particularly in forms of violence against civilians such as genocide, state terror and systematic human rights abuses. He also has secondary research interests in the broader role of ideology in contemporary politics, the ethics of political violence, and methodological debates within political theory and qualitative political science.

Dr Leader Maynard’s work has been published in an interdisciplinary range of journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Ethics, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Genocide Studies and Prevention. His new book, Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He is also the Co-Editor (with Mark L. Haas) of The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations (Routledge, 2022).

Teaching

• World politics since 1945
• Ideology and Identity in World Politics
• Undergraduate Dissertation Module

PhD supervision

Dr Leader Maynard is available to supervise PhDs in the following areas:

• Genocides, mass killings and atrocity crimes
• Political ideology
• Extremism and radicalisation
• Methodology of political theory and qualitative political science
• The ethics of political violence

Recent publications

• The logic of idealization in political theory, American Journal of Political Science (2024)
• Humanizing Dehumanization Research, Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology 4 (2023) [co-authored with Aliza Luft]
• The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022) [co-edited with Mark L. Haas]
• Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022)
• Political Realism as Methods not Metaethics, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25/3 (2022)
• Ideology and armed conflict, Journal of Peace Research 56/5 (2019): 635-649
• Is There a Distinctively Political Normativity?, Ethics 128/4 (2018): 756-787 [co-authored with with Alex Worsnip]
• Convergence and Divergence in the Study of Ideology: A Critical Review, British Journal of Political Science 48/2 (2018): 563-589 [co-authored with Matto Mildenberger]
• Dangerous Speech and Dangerous Ideology: An Integrated Model for Monitoring and Prevention, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 9/3 (2016) [co-authored with Susan Benesch]
• Preventing Mass Atrocities: Ideological Strategies and Interventions, Politics and Governance 3/3 (2015)
• Identity and Ideology in Political Violence and Conflict, St Anthony’s International Review 10/2 (2015): 18-52
• Rethinking the Role of Ideology in Mass Atrocities, Terrorism and Political Violence 26/5 (2014): 821-841
• A Complex Systems Approach to the Study of Ideology: Cognitive-Affective Structures and the Dynamics of Belief Systems, Journal of Social and Political Psychology 1/1 (2013): 337-363 [co-authored with Thomas Homer-Dixon, Matto Mildenberger, Manjana Milkoreit, Steven J. Mock, Stephen Quilley, Tobias Schröder and Paul Thagard]
• A Map of the Field of Ideological Analysis, Journal of Political Ideologies 18/3 (2013): 299-327