Centre for International Studies Staff

Kirsten Ainley

Director of the Centre for International Studies and Chair of the Management Committee [on leave until 2017], Assistant Professor of International Relations

Email: k.a.ainley@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts, academia.edu 
Twitter: @kirstenainley 

Dr Ainley’s research is located at the interface between international political theory (IPT), moral philosophy and law, and is concerned with investigating the ways in which agents (individual and collective) are and should be held responsible for harm. She focuses in particular on the history and development of international criminal law, IPT, human rights and humanitarian intervention. She has conducted research at war crimes courts in The Hague, Cambodia, Sierra Leone and Tanzania and published on international criminal law, transitional justice, the International Criminal Court, individual and collective responsibility for atrocity and the notion of evil in international relations.

Dr Ainley is co-author of Understanding International Relations  with Chris Brown (Palgrave, 2009). She is currently working on a monograph on Rethinking Agency and Responsibility, which theorises agency as sociality and responsibility as a social practice and uses this to reexamine individual and collective responsibilities in international politics, plus an edited collection on Accountability and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone.

She holds a PhD in International Relations from the LSE and a BA (Hons) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Christ Church, Oxford.

Tarak Barkawi

Reader in International Relations

Email: t.k.barkawi@lse.ac.uk  
Web: academia.edu 

Dr Barkawi’s research interests concern armed conflict between the West and the non-European world in historical and contemporary perspective. He has written on colonial armies, ‘small wars’ and imperial warfare, the Cold War in the Third World, and on counterinsurgency and the War on Terror. More generally, he is interested in the place of armed force in histories and theories of globalization, modernization and imperialism, especially from a postcolonial perspective. He has also written on International Relations theory, the so-called ‘democratic peace’, and strategic studies.

Dr Barkawi earned his PhD in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, under the supervision of Raymond Duvall. He was previously educated at George Washington University and the London School of Economics. He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University; the Department of War Studies, King’s College London; the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University; and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University. He has held faculty positions at the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth; the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College; the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge; and the Department of Politics, New School for Social Research.

Dr Barkawi is author of Globalization and War and is currently completing a book on the Indian Army in the Second World War. It is a postcolonial critique of military sociology and the ‘why soldiers fight’ literature. He is also researching a new project on Orientalism at War in Korea. This project uses Orientalism to understand the shock delivered to the US military, government, and public by the events of the first year of the Korean War. It is an attempt to understand why and how ‘small wars’ generate political and cultural crisis in metropolitan countries.

Dr Barkawi is co-convenor of the CIS History and Theory in IR research group.

Catherine Boone

Professor of Comparative Politics and African Political Economy, Departments of Government and International Development

Email: c.boone@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts

Professor Boone holds a BA from the University of California, and Ph.D from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research interests include property rights and development; territorial politics and political geography in state- and institution-building; land tenure and land use policy; institutional approaches to political explanation and their critics; subnational political analysis; African political economy; land politics in post-conflict settings. Her latest book is Property and political order: land rights and the structure of conflict in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and she has previously published books on Merchant capital and the roots of state power in Senegal, 1930-1985 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Political topographies of the African state: territorial authority and institutional choice (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Professor Boone is currently serving on the steering committee of the American Political Science Association's Africa Initiative and the Advisory Board of the Social Science Research Council's African Peacebuilding Network, as well as numerous editorial boards and committees. She teaches African Political Economy at Masters level in the Department of Government and International Development.

William A. Callahan 

Professor of International Relations

Email: w.callahan@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts; academia.edu  

Professor Callahan's research and teaching focus on the international politics of East Asia, including Chinese foreign policy. He is interested in the interplay between ideas and policy, and the dynamic relationship of security and identity. Other research interests include International Relations and International Relations Theory. 

He is author of China Dreams: 20 Views of the Future (Oxford University Press, 2013), China: The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford University Press, 2010), Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia (Routledge, 2006) and Contingent States: Great China and Transnational Relations (Minnesota, 2004).

He has published articles in numerous journals, including International Organization, Public Culture, Asian Survey, International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Strategic Studies.

Christopher Coker

Director of the Centre for International Studies and Chair of the Management Committee, Professor of International Relations

Email: C.Coker@lse.ac.uk
Web: LSE Experts

Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian Staff College. He was a NATO Fellow in 1981, and served two terms on the Council of the Royal United Services Institute. He is a serving member of the Washington Strategy Seminar; the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis (Cambridge, Mass); the Black Sea University Foundation; the Moscow School of Politics and the IDEAS Advisory Board. He is a member of the Academic Board of the Czech Diplomatic Academy. He was a Visiting Fellow of Goodenough College in 2003-4. He is a member of the Executive Council for the Belgrade University International Summer School for Democracy and also President of the Centre for Media and Communications of a Democratic Romania.He is a former editor of The Atlantic Quarterly and The European Security Analyst.

He has advised several Conservative Party think tanks including the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies and the Centre for Policy Studies and helped to draw up the Party's defence platform in the 1996 European Parliamentary Elections. He has written for The Wall Street Journal; The Wall St Journal (Europe); The Times; The Independent; The European, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement and The Literary Review.

He is a regular lecturer at the Royal College of Defence Studies (London); the NATO Defence College (Rome), the Centre for International Security (Geneva) and the National Institute for Defence Studies (Tokyo) He has spoken at other military institutes in Western Europe, North America, Australia and South-east Asia.

Ayça Çubukçu

Assistant Professor of Human Rights in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for the Study of Human Rights

Email: a.cubukcu@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts; academia.edu
Twitter: @ayca_cu 

In conjunction with the history and critique of international law, Dr Cubukcu’s research and teaching interests are in the fields of social and political theory, human rights, cosmopolitanism, secularism, postcolonial studies and transnational social movements. In her current research, Dr Çubukçu focuses on the politics of transnational solidarity, and on the entanglement of international law and human rights ideals with the ethics and politics of violence.

Before joining LSE, Dr Çubukçu taught for the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University and the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

A transdisciplinary scholar by training, Dr Çubukçu holds a BA in Government with Distinction in All Subjects from Cornell University and a PhD with Distinction from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.

Dr Çubukçu serves on the Advisory Board of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights and leads the Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity research group at the London School of Economics. She is also an Honorary Member of the Centre on Social Movement Studies at the European University Institute, an Affiliated Scholar of the Institute for Global Law and Policy and the Harvard Law School, and a co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Turkey page.

Katerina Dalacoura

Associate Professor of International Relations

Email: k.dalacoura@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts; academia.edu

Dr Dalacoura’s main areas of expertise are human rights, democracy and democracy promotion in the Middle East, with special emphasis on Egypt, Iran and Turkey; Western policy and the Middle East; political Islam, and the international politics of culture and religion with particular reference to Islam. She is author of Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights: Implications for International Relations (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003) and Engagement or Coercion: Weighing Western Human Rights Policies towards Turkey, Iran and Egypt (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2003). She has published in Democratization, International Affairs, International Studies Notes, International Relations, Millennium, the Review of International Studies and Third World Quarterly and has authored a number of chapters in edited books.

Dr Dalacoura has previously worked at the University of Essex and the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Timo Fleckenstein

Associate Professor of Social Policy

Email: t.fleckenstein@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts; academia.edu

Dr Fleckestein’s research interests include public-policy making, comparative social policy, and political economy. He has published on labour market policy and politics of labour market reform, as well as welfare state transformation. He is the author of Institutions, ideas and learning in welfare state change: labour market reforms in Germany (Palgrave, 2011). In 2009, he was awarded the Prize for Best Paper by the Journal of Industrial Relations. Dr Fleckenstein holds a DPhil in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford (2007), where he was also a research officer.

Stephen Humphreys

Associate Professor of International Law

Email: s.j.humphreys@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts 

Dr Humphrey’s research interests include: climate change, in particular as it creates or exacerbates human rights risks; international criminal law, with a particular emphasis on the transnational construction of crime and the remaking of sovereignty; the distribution of risk and security under international and transnational law; the fragmentation of international law; legal theory – drawing in particular on critical theory – and in rule of law promotion: the contemporary form of law and development. He is the author of Theatre of the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and editor of Human Rights and Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Dr Humphreys holds a PhD in law from the University of Cambridge. He was Research Director at the International Council on Human Rights Policy in Geneva and, before that, Senior Publications Officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative in New York. He has also worked in Senegal on climate change policy and lectured in English literature at ELTE University in Budapest. He has translated poetry and drama from Hungarian and French. He is a member of the International Bar Association's Task Force on Climate Change Justice.

Heather Jones

Associate Professor of International History

Email: h.s.jones@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts 

Dr Jones is a specialist in First World War Studies with a particular interest in the evolution of wartime violence and the cultural impact of the conflict in Britain, France, Germany and Italy. Her other research areas include: the history of prisoner of war treatment in twentieth-century Europe; Weimar Germany; Irish politics, conflict and culture, 1913-1923. She is the author of Violence Against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and the editor, with Christoph Schmidt-Supprian and Jennifer O'Brien, of Untold War: New Perspectives in First World War Studies (Brill Academic Publishers, 2008). She is currently working on a monograph on the propaganda representation of the economic blockade of Germany during the First World War.

Dr Jones came to LSE in 2008. She is a former IRCHSS Lecturer in European History at Trinity College, Dublin and held a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence. She also held a research position at the Institute for International Integration Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. She obtained her B.A. at Trinity College Dublin, where she was a foundation scholar, and holds an M.Phil. from St John's College, Cambridge. A former Government of Ireland Research Scholar in the Humanities and Social Sciences, she completed her Ph.D. at Trinity College Dublin, in 2006, on wartime violence against prisoners of war in Britain, France and Germany, 1914-1920, a study which was awarded the Eda Sagarra Medal by the Government of Ireland Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr Jones is a member of the Board of Directors of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne and an external associate of the Centre for War Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. She is also a senior member of the International Society for First World War Studies.

Tomila Lankina

Associate Professor of International Relations

Email: t.lankina@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts 

Dr Lankina’s current research focuses on the historical influences on sub-national democracy and authoritarianism in India and Russia. In particular, she explores the imperial and colonial human capital legacies and their developmental and democracy effects in these settings by analysing sub-national data that she has gathered. She has also conducted research into external influences, such as those of the Council of Europe and EU, on sub-national democracy in post-communist settings. She is the author of Local Governance in Central and Eastern Europe, co-authored with Anneke Hudalla and Hellmut Wollmann (Palgrave and University of Oxford St. Antony's Series, 2008) and Governing the Locals: Local Self-Government and Ethnic Mobilization in Russia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). Other recent publications include articles in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, World Politics and Post-Soviet Affairs.

Dr Lankina joined the LSE IR Department in September 2012 as Senior Lecturer in the foreign and security policy of Russia and Eurasia. Before coming to LSE, she held research and teaching appointments in the UK, America, and Germany—at De Montfort University in Leicester, the Humboldt University in Berlin, the World Resources Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, DC, and Stanford University.

George Lawson

Associate Professor in International Relations

Email: g.lawson@lse.ac.uk  
Web: LSE Experts; academia.edu 

Dr Lawson‘ s theoretical work is oriented around the synergies between historical sociology and international theory.  He applies these theoretical interests to the study of revolutions, particularly in two books: Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile (2005) and Anatomies of Revolution (forthcoming). He is also co-editor of The Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the convenor of the BISA funded working group on Historical Sociology and IR.

Dr Lawson is currently finishing a project (with Barry Buzan) that charts the ways in which a range of important dynamics in contemporary international relations have their roots in the 19th century ‘global transformation’. Articles drawn from this project have been published in International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations and International Affairs. A book version of the argument The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations will appear in the Cambridge Studies in International Relations series in early 2015.

Dr Lawson is co-convenor of the CIS History and Theory in IR research group.

James Morrison

Assistant Professor of International Relations

Email: j.a.morrison@lse.ac.uk  
Web: Personal website 

Dr Morrison specialises in international political economy. While he has always been interested in policy, he was originally trained as an historian. As an undergraduate at Chicago, he studied political and economic ideas and institutions in the British Empire and the early United States. Dr Morrison spent his fourth year abroad at Cambridge, where he wrote a second undergraduate thesis on John Locke’s mercantilist political economy. He then went to Stanford to pursue a PhD in history under Jack Rakove. He remained, however, unusually interested in the role international politics played in shaping and constraining seemingly “domestic” policies. At the same time, he became increasingly impressed with the sophisticated tools social scientists have developed to study these issues. So, halfway through his PhD program, he switched into political science.

Currently, Dr Morrison studies the role of ideas and intellectuals in foreign economic policy. Drawing on his background as an intellectual historian, he takes the ideas at play seriously and go to lengths to ensure that he contextualises and develops them as well as an historian might. He is, however, ultimately interested in the ways in which these ideas--and the intellectuals who proffer them--interact with institutions and interests to shape policy. Dr Morrison’s research utilises both the methods of contemporary social science and historical analysis and he has recently published ‘Before Hegemony: Adam Smith, American Independence, and the Origins of the First Era of Globalization.’ International Organization 66(3): 395-428.

Prior to Dr Morrison coming to the LSE, he was an Assistant Professor at Middlebury College (2008-2013) and a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University (2012-2013). He has a Ph.D. in Political Science and a Master’s in History from Stanford University. He is also an alumnus of the University of Chicago (graduated 2003) and a member of Trinity College at Cambridge University (matriculated 2002).

Dr Morrison is co-convenor of the CIS History and Theory in IR research group.