Vanessa F. Newby

Vanessa Newby is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Monash University specialising in the global governance of international peace and security. Her research focuses on United Nations peacekeeping and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, with particular expertise on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the WPS agenda in the Middle East.

Dr Newby is the author of Peacekeeping in South Lebanon: Credibility and Local Cooperation (Syracuse University Press, 2018), which analyses how credibility structures relations between peacekeepers and local populations. She is currently co-editing two major forthcoming volumes: Imagining the WPS Agenda in the Middle East (2026), a systematic study of WPS localisation in the MENA region, and The Oxford Handbook of Peacekeeping as Social Practice (2027). Her academic work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals including Global Governance, European Journal of International Security, Third World Quarterly and Global Studies Quarterly.

Beyond her academic research, Dr Newby contributes regularly to public and policy debates on international security, peacekeeping and Middle East politics. Her analysis has appeared in outlets such as The Conversation, Le Monde, The Interpreter and The Strategist.