Dr Dáire McGill's research focuses primarily on community participation and collective action in societies undergoing war-to-peace transitions, drawing fundamentally from the fields of conflict studies, peacebuilding, structural violence, active citizenship, and transformative justice. Dáire was awarded a PhD from the Transitional Justice Institute (Ulster University) in 2018, and has published in outlets such as State Crime Journal, Peacebuilding, Bulletin of Latin American Research, and the Routledge Transitional Justice book series.

Prior to re-joining Ulster University Dáire was a Researcher at the Global Security Programme’s CONPEACE initiative (Pembroke College, University of Oxford), where he led the unit on Citizenship and Community Participation. He also collaborated for a period on the Communities in Transition project, part of Northern Ireland’s Executive Programme for Tackling Paramilitary Activity, Criminality and Organised Crime.

Dáire's current research looks at the contribution of local communities in marginalised regions of Colombia to creating contextually appropriate security-related policies and practices.  This examines both how security is understood and solutions proposed at the local level, and the extent to which local knowledges influence the overall security architecture through interactions at municipal, departmental, and national level.

Dáire’s PhD operationalised the theoretical framework of Transformative Justice in a Structural Violence Reduction Matrix (SVRM), an analytical tool to evaluate the transformative potential of public policy initiatives – across their diagnostic, process, and outcome dimensions - undertaken in transitional contexts.  The SVRM was applied to rural initiatives in Colombia, providing empirical insights into the characteristics necessary for initiatives to address structural violence as well as the weaknesses of common transitional justice approaches.