David Martin Jones, political theorist who argued that Islamic State, Hizbollah and Hamas are ‘death cults’ – obituary

David Martin Jones, who has died aged 73, was a maverick, conservative author and lecturer on political theory, militant Islamic movements, geopolitics and what are now called “culture wars”.

In 2015 he argued that the Islamic State was a “death cult”, a characterisation quickly adopted by many others including Tony Abbott, then Prime Minister of Australia, and Boris Johnson, then an MP. Jones applied the same term to Hizbollah and Hamas.

He did not view these groups as freedom fighters, but rather as terrorists enamoured of savagery against others and death for themselves in preference to living in anything resembling a liberal democracy. He looked at what these groups actually said and wrote, finding in them a determination at all costs to impose a Muslim caliphate.

These were views he expressed long before the attack of Hamas on civilians in Israel on October 7 last year.

He argued that the West had helped to facilitate the rise of such groups by harbouring some of the leaders in London and elsewhere and turning a blind eye to extreme Islamic views in British universities.

More generally, he argued that the West had become complacent after the fall of communist regimes in Europe in 1989/1990. Many thought then that freedom and democracy had won and would inevitably continue in the ascendant. They lowered their guard against totalitarian regimes that had survived that change and those which emerged again afterwards.

Meanwhile, the western world was harbouring a nascent totalitarianism of its own making, encapsulated in the title of one of his 11 books, Illiberal Democracy. He saw a western culture of growing statism and compulsory conformity with supposedly liberal or progressive ideas.

Jones was out of step with the dominant Left-wing attitudes he found in most universities in the West. His friends argued that his failure to climb up the academic ladder was because he held fast to his views.

Professor Michael Rainsborough, formerly Professor of Strategic Theory at King’s College London, believed that because the writings of Jones and himself were so at variance with the academic orthodoxy they were regularly denounced and excluded from academic preferment – never receiving grants, being criticised in academic reviews, and so on.

In later years, Rainsborough and Jones joked that they were “cancelled before it became fashionable”. Whatever the truth of this, Jones had to resort to a peripatetic academic life. He had jobs at various times in Toronto, Sydney, Tasmania, Brisbane, Singapore and Budapest, as well as London.

He was born in Wales on August 21 1950 and attended Cathays High School in Cardiff, which was then a grammar school. He was one of that generation of grammar-school children who rose from relatively poor backgrounds and progressed to university.

He was the first in his family to do so, attending Reading University and completing his PhD on “Oaths and Obligations in the English Civil War”. He did not have an easy path, teaching at an inner-city comprehensive school in Kilburn to finance his PhD work.

As someone who grew up in the 1960s, he initially had hippy tendencies and espoused ideas he would later come to despise. But his intellectual development was profoundly affected when he was supervised at the LSE by Professor Kenneth Minogue, one of the leading conservative thinkers of his time.

Jones’s first teaching post was in Singapore in 1989. He was uncomfortable with the nature of the rule of the prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, suggesting that the regime wanted to know too much about people and control them too closely. He helped a lecturer, Chistopher Lingle, escape from Singapore to Malaysia after Lingle had got into trouble with the Singaporean authorities for impugning the integrity of the judiciary. Jones was himself followed by the secret police.

He moved to the University of Tasmania and wrote about south-east Asian terrorist groups, 17th-century political thought and Welsh radicals in Van Diemen’s Land – the early name for Tasmania – in the 1830s and 1840s. His work on the latter helped inform a documentary on the Welsh in Australia by Huw Edwards, the former newsreader.

Jones subsequently worked at Queensland University in Brisbane and became Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. But after a change of leadership in that department, he became unhappy with the way it was going: with typical sardonic humour he wondered how “War Studies” became “Woke Studies”. His services were dispensed with.

Most recently he had worked as research director at the Danube Institute, a Right-wing think tank in Budapest where he was more at home.

Jones was an urbane character with a dry sense of humour. What many of his friends did not know was that underneath his congenial and cheerful manner there were dark and depressed thoughts. He took his own life following a breakdown. He is survived by his wife, Jo, and by three stepdaughters.

David Martin Jones, born August 21 1950, died 16 April 2024