Dr. Max Thompson is Deputy Head of Department in Defense and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He is responsible for oversight of the Army Higher Education Pathway, which has included integrating WPS into academic exercises. He completed his DPhil in International Relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, writing on the role of friendship in U.S. foreign policy and alliance formation. Before arriving at RMAS, he held lectureships at several Oxford colleges and worked as an international consultant at the International Trade Centre in Geneva. His research interests include alliance theory; U.S. foreign policy; the development of the liberal world order; human security; and the women, peace, and security agenda. He recently co-edited and contributed to Women, Peace and Security in Military Operations (Howgate, 2023), which considered how militaries can best integrate and apply WPS in their operations.
If it better aligned its policies with the pillars of the U.N.’s Women, Peace and Security agenda, the United Kingdom’s use of economic sanctions against the perpetrators of gender-based violence would carry more weight.
Kallie Mitchell and Dr. Max Thomas discuss sanctions and the WPS agenda.
To achieve the “whole-of-government" approach to implementing the Women, Peace, and Security Strategy, the U.S. government needs to include the Treasury Department as a key department. As the U.S. Treasury enacts sanctions meant to respond to human rights violations, it should consider sanctions’ effects on women and girls and thus should include relevant civil society groups in planning.
