Duncan Depledge

BA (Hons), MA, MPhil, PhD

  • Lecturer in Geopolitics and Security

Duncan Depledge joined Loughborough University as Politics & International Studies Fellow in 2019. His academic background is in political geography, international relations and security studies. He has extensive experience of working with governments, parliamentarians, think tanks, international organisations and militaries in the UK and abroad.

Prior to joining Loughborough University, Duncan was the Director of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Polar Regions in Westminster, which he also helped to establish (2015-2019).

From 2017-2018, he served as special adviser to the House of Commons Defence Committee during its inquiry on ‘UK Defence in the Arctic’.

Previous to that, Duncan was a Teaching Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London (2015-2016), and a Research Analyst on the Climate Change & Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute (2010-2014).

Duncan is an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, a member of the UK Arctic & Antarctic Partnership Steering Committee, the University of the Arctic/Northern Research Forum Thematic Network on Geopolitics and Security, and the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Polar Regions’ Advisory Council.

Duncan’s research is focused on the changing geopolitics of the Arctic. He is particularly interested in the implications of Arctic geopolitical change for the United Kingdom, which formed the subject of his first monograph, Britain and the Arctic (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) and several papers published in The RUSI Journal and International Affairs over the past decade. More recently, his research has concentrated on the defence and security implications of environmental and geopolitical change in the ‘Wider North’ (encompassing the Arctic and adjacent areas in the North Atlantic and Northern Europe) and the relevance of that to the UK Ministry of Defence and NATO.

Duncan also has a growing interest in maritime security and geopolitics. He has a book chapter on ‘Military security and the Oceans’ forthcoming in 2020, and will be exploring this subject further.

Both the ‘Arctic’/’Wider North’ and the ‘Maritime’ speak to Duncan's theoretical interests, which are rooted in critical geopolitics and critical security studies.

Duncan’s research also informs his broader interest in the geopolitical and security implications of climate change. In 2016, he was a contributing author to the Second UK Climate Change Risk Assessment Evident Report for the Committee on Climate Change.