Cahir O’Doherty is a second year PhD student in the Politics department at Newcastle University under the supervision of Dr Kyle Grayson and Dr Simon Philpott. The (provisional) title of his thesis is ‘Conflict, Culture and Closure: The Intertext between Popular Culture and Security at the End of Wars.’ His research seeks to answer the question ‘how do political leaders use the tropes, narratives, and imagery of popular culture to create a sense of ending for conflicts whose end points are open to contestation’ using the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, and the 2011 NATO Intervention in Libya as well as contemporary cinema.