Dr Rhys Machold

Senior Lecturer (Political & International Studies)

telephone: 01413306715
email: Rhys.Machold@glasgow.ac.uk

Biography

I am a scholar of policing, security regimes, racialization and empire, working from a transnational approach. My work has focused primarily on India and Palestine/Israel and relations between them. My book, Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024) traces the political fallout of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, often known as “India’s 9/11” or simply “26/11”, concentrating on the efforts of Israel’s homeland security to advise and equip Indian city and state governments. Drawing on more than a decade of multi-sited ethnographic and archival research, it situates homeland security as a universalizing project, which seeks to remake the world in its image. The book tells the story of how claims to global authority are fabricated and worked out on the ground.

My current research and teaching interests engage with a number of overlapping themes and concerns: 1) state- and imperial forms of power, with a focus on security, policing, racial and carceral regimes across time and space, with a focus on wars on ‘terror’ and counterinsurgency campaigns; 2) the relational production of knowledge and expertise, inspired by engagement with geographical thinking and Science and Technology Studies (STS); 3) forms of anti-carceral, anti-imperial, anti-racist and abolitionist thought and praxis; 4) ongoing debates theory and pedagogy in International Relations, particularly inspired by anti-imperial, decolonial and feminist approaches; and 5) methodological concerns around secrecy, access, fragments and practices multi-sited ethnography.

I am an editor at Critical Studies on Security and an editorial board member at International Studies Review. Before arriving in Glasgow in 2018, I held research and teaching appointments at York University (Canada), the Danish Institute for International Studies, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Wilfrid Laurier University.

Research interests

• Security, policing and carceral regimes
• ‘Terrorism’, counterterrorism & homeland security
• Insurgency and counterinsurgency
• Knowledge-production, expertise and weapons systems
• Empire, colonialism and settler-colonialism
• India/South Asia
• Palestine/Israel and the

Research groups

International Relations

Publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2026 | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2011

Number of items: 29.

2026

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2026) Geographies of counterinsurgency. In: Warf, Barney (ed.) Oxford Bibliographies in Geography. Oxford University Press. (Accepted for Publication)

Hever, Shir and Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2026) How the Gaza genocide is transforming Israel’s military relations with Europe. Mondoweiss, 26 Feb.

Griffiths, Mark, Tahir, Madiha, Bhungalia, Lisa, Jones, Craig, Smith, Sara and Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2026) Book review forum: Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel. AAG Review of Books, 14(2), pp. 55-68. (doi: 10.1080/2325548X.2025.2608978)

2025

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2025) "Pissing in the wind": grappling with the spillovers of "malevolent weathering". Dialogues in Human Geography, (doi: 10.1177/20438206251406740) (Early Online Publication)

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2025) The Myth of Israeli Innovation. [Website]

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X and Manchanda, Nivi (2025) Democracy, diversity and disavowal: tracing colonial lineages in India’s long wars. Review of International Studies, (doi: 10.1017/S0260210525100910) (Early Online Publication)

Jacobsen, Malene H. and Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2025) Refusing deterrence. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51(8), pp. 2107-2124. (doi: 10.1080/1369183X.2024.2441604)

Sen, Somdeep, Lisle, Debbie, Safadi, Naji, Tatour, Lana and Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2025) Reading Rhys Machold’s Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024). Political Geography, [Book Review] (Accepted for Publication)

2024

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X and Printy Currie, Nicole ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8292-761X (2024) Al Aqsa Flood in long histories of Palestinian resistance. Political Geography, 115, 103215. (doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103215)

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2024) Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel. Series: South Asia in Motion. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503639690

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2024) Semiotics of Rape: Sexual subjectivity and Violation in Rural India. AAG Review of Books, 12(3), pp. 23-25. (doi: 10.1080/2325548X.2024.2350388)[Book Review]

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X and Sen, Somdeep (2024) Refusing police power: resistances and ambivalences to state violence. Society and Space Open Site, 22 April.

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2024) After 26/11: India, Palestine/Israel, and the Fabrication of Homeland Security. Navayana Publishing. ISBN 9788194631316

2023

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2023) Unsettling the Hamas taboo: fragments, narrative and the politics of exposure. International Politics Reviews, 60, pp. 754-761. (doi: 10.1057/s41311-023-00457-5)

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2023) Staying with the failures: Iron Dome and Zionist security “innovation”. In: Joronen, Mikko and Griffiths, Mark (eds.) Encounters with Colonial Power: Emergent Spaces of Violence and Struggle in Palestine. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln. (Accepted for Publication)

2022

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2022) India’s counterinsurgency knowledge: theorizing global position in wars on terror. Small Wars and Insurgencies, 33(4-5), pp. 796-818. (doi: 10.1080/09592318.2022.2034352)

2021

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X and Charrett, Catherine Chiniara (2021) Beyond ambivalence: locating the whiteness of security. Security Dialogue, 52(1_supp), pp. 38-48. (doi: 10.1177/09670106211031044)

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2021) The Iron Dome System Is a Monument to Israel’s Hubris. [Website]

2020

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X and Bhungalia, Lisa (2020) "Violence Work". Society and Space Open Site, 24 Aug. [Book Review]

Velednitsky, Stepha, Salazar Hughes, Sara and Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2020) Political geographical perspectives on settler colonialism. Geography Compass, 14(6), e12490. (doi: 10.1111/gec3.12490)

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2020) Policing reality: Urban disorder, failure, and expert undoings. International Political Sociology, 14(1), pp. 22-39. (doi: 10.1093/ips/olz027)

2019

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2019) The Privatization of Israeli Security By Shir Hever. London: Pluto Press, 2018. 256 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-7453-3720-3. Conflict and Society, 5(1), pp. 204-205. (doi: 10.3167/arcs.2019.050113)[Book Review]

2018

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2018) Reconsidering the laboratory thesis: Palestine/Israel and the geopolitics of representation. Political Geography, 65, pp. 88-97. (doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.04.002)

2017

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2017) Militarising Mumbai? The ‘politics’ of response. Contexto Internacional, 39(3), pp. 477-498. (doi: 10.1590/s0102-8529.2017390300002)

2016

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2016) Security Preparedness in European Cities. Is it really time to learn from Israel? Documentation. DIIS: Danish Institute for International Studies.

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2016) Learning from Israel? ‘26/11’ and the anti-politics of urban security governance. Security Dialogue, 47(4), pp. 275-291. (doi: 10.1177/0967010616645019)

2015

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2015) Mobility and the model: policy mobility and the becoming of Israeli Homeland Security dominance. Environment and Planning A, 47(4), pp. 816-832. (doi: 10.1068/a140010p)

Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2015) Intervention – “Re-enacting Israel’s Counter-terror Omnipotence: An Opening”. [Website]

2011

Pelkmans, Mathijs and Machold, Rhys ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9842-392X (2011) Conspiracy theories and their truth trajectories. Focaal, 2011(59), pp. 66-80. (doi: 10.3167/fcl.2011.590105)

This list was generated on Tue Apr 21 18:35:02 2026 BST.