Lydia Day
Lydia Day is a Project Coordinator at Unredacted, a research unit at the University of Westminster. She previously worked for several NGOs, including Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights and Action on Armed Violence, leading research and advocacy work across human rights, defence and security, and civilian harm issues. Her work has particularly focused on strengthening transparency, accountability and oversight mechanisms for abuses arising from the UK’s defence and security practices.
What are you currently working on?
I am a Project Coordinator at Unredacted, a new research unit at the University of Westminster. Our team at Unredacted investigates and documents UK state and corporate practices in the context of national security. In February 2024, Unredacted launched with the start of our first major investigation into UK Special Forces war crimes in Afghanistan. This is a multiyear investigation into what appears to have been the systematic mistreatment and unlawful killing of detainees by UK Special Forces units deployed to Afghanistan, and the subsequent multi-level coverup.
Our investigations are underpinned in part by an analysis of thousands of primary documents. Many of these documents are presented in the Unredacted Archive, which provides full access to hundreds of thousands of pages of material, becoming a permanent home for thousands of national security-related documents which have not, until now, been gathered in one place. I work closely on these investigations and coordinate the expansion of our Archive.
What are the opportunities and challenges of working in your field?
There are inevitably lots of challenges that come with researching covert national security practices. You often work on topics, such as UK Special Forces war crimes in Afghanistan, where publicly available information is highly limited. However, the flip side of this is that it is really interesting to think creatively about research methods to map these practices.
A different kind of challenge in this field is the precarity of the NGO sector. I started my career in 2019, working for NGOs across human rights and security issues. This was a difficult time to be starting out given the Covid pandemic! More broadly, the prevalence of short-term contracts, unpaid internships, and precarious funding streams can make it challenging to work in this field, particularly when you are just starting your career, and pose huge problems for diversity and access.
What advice would you give your younger self?
The main piece of advice I would give to my younger self is to believe in yourself more and don’t let self-doubt hold you back from making the most out of opportunities. This is particularly true when it comes to networking. There are so many amazing people in this sector to learn from and work with, take the opportunity to do so and don’t hold back!