People

John Bew, King’s College London

John Bew is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the War Studies Department at King’s College London, where he heads the Engelsberg Applied History Programme and the Centre for Grand Strategy. In 2016, Professor Bew won the Orwell Prize, Britain’s foremost honour for political writing. In 2015, he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Politics and International Studies and 2013-14, he was the youngest ever holder of the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy at the John W. Kluge Center at the US Library of Congress. Professor Bew is a New Statesman contributing writer and the author of five books, including Citizen Clem, a biography of Clement Attlee which won three national awards. Previous books include Realpolitik: A History was a Times book of the year in 2016 and Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War & Tyranny which was a book of the year in The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, Sunday Telegraph, Total Politics, and BBC Parliament. Bew is currently a Specialist Advisor to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee for its inquiry on Global Britain.

Maeve Ryan

Maeve Ryan is Lecturer in History and Grand Strategy at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She is currently completing a Leverhulme Early Career research fellowship project, entitled ‘The British Empire and the Geopolitics of Human Rights in the Nineteenth Century’. This project considers how nineteenth-century British consuls and commissioners promoted abolitionist and free-labour ideologies within the territories of rival powers and the informal empire, how they influenced rights discourses, contributed to a British humanitarian-imperial self-image, and impacted great-power relations.

Charlie Laderman

Charlie Laderman is Lecturer in War Studies. His research focuses on 19th and 20th century international history, embracing a number of themes including the political development and foreign relations of the United States and Great Britain, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the post-Ottoman Middle East, and the development of ideas on humanitarianism, global governance and statecraft. He is the author of Sharing the Burden: Armenia, Humanitarian Intervention and the Search for an Anglo-American Alliance, forthcoming in 2017 with Oxford University Press. His next book is an intellectual biography of the American statesman and Nobel Laureate Elihu Root. It explores Root’s critical role in the rise of the United States to world power in the early years of the twentieth century, the development of ideas on global governance and international law, and the emergence of an American foreign policy establishment that would continue to inform U.S. diplomacy into the twenty first century.He was previously a Fox International Fellow at the Whitney and Betty Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies, and Smith Richardson Fellow in International Security Studies, both at Yale University, and an AHRC Fellow at the Kluge Center, Library of Congress.

Andrew Ehrhardt

Andrew Ehrhardt is currently a doctoral candidate in the War Studies Department at King’s College London and serves as the secretary of the Centre for Grand Strategy. His research focuses on the British Foreign Office and the creation of the United Nations in the early 1940s. In September 2015, Andrew completed his MA research in terrorism and counterterrorism in the War Studies Department, where he focused on Irish Fenian political violence and its effect on Anglo-American relations in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, he completed his undergraduate coursework in International Relations at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr Emman El-Badawy

Dr Emman El-Badawy is the head of research in the Co-Existence team at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. She oversees the design and delivery of research projects and shapes the Institute’s research agenda on extremism. Emman is also a fellow of the British Academy and of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her current three-year research, funded by the British Academy and in collaboration with King’s College London’s Professor John Bew, is a comparative study of violent and nonviolent Islamist propaganda. She holds a PhD in Arab and Islamic studies from the University of Exeter.

Professor Brendan Simms, University of Cambridge

Brendan Simms is Professor of the History of European International Relations. He is an expert on European geopolitics, past and present. His principal interests are the German Question, Britain and Europe, Humanitarian Intervention and state construction. He teaches at both undergraduate and graduate level in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and the Faculty of History. His MPhil course on the History European Geopolitics (co-taught with Dr Charlie Laderman) uses scenarios as part of the teaching and learning process. He has supervised PhD dissertations on subjects as diverse as Intervention and State Sovereignty in the Holy Roman Empire, Sinn Fein, the American colonist and the eighteenth-century European state system, the Office of the UN High Representative in Bosnia, and German Civil-Military relations. Brendan is a frequent contributor to print and broadsheet media. He has advised governments and parliaments, and spoken at Westminster, in the European parliament and at think-tanks in the United Kingdom, the United States and in many Eurozone countries. The Centre for Geopolitics is designed to draw together all these interests.

Dr. Kun-Chin Lin

Dr. Kun-Chin Lin is the Deputy Director of the Forum on Geopolitics. He is a university lecturer in politics and Director of the Centre for Rising Powers at the University of Cambridge. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, and obtained his PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. Kun-Chin was a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford and taught at King’s College London and the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the politics of market reform in developing countries. His current projects include federalism and regulatory issues in transport infrastructure and electricity grid expansion in China, industrial policy and privatization of Chinese state-owned enterprises, and the economic and security nexus in maritime governance in Asia and the Arctic. He is a member of Energy@Cambridge, Cambridge Centre for the Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, Centre for Science & Policy of the University of Cambridge, and a collaborating partner of the Global Biopolitics Research Group based at King’s College London. Kun-Chin is an editorial board member of Business & Politics, and an advisory board member of Routledge Research on the Politics and Sociology of China Series and Palgrave MacMillan Studies in the Political Economy of Public Policy Series. He is an Associate Fellow of the Asia Programme of the Chatham House.

Timothy Less

Timothy is director of the Nova Europa consultancy, which provides political risk analysis of Eastern Europe and a member of Darwin College, where he is conducting research on the geopolitics of Southeastern Europe. He studied Contemporary Eastern European Politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and International Relations at the University of Cambridge. Previously, Tim spent a decade working as an analyst, diplomat and policymaker at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office where, among other things, he served as the Political Secretary in Skopje (Macedonia), ran the British Embassy Office in Banja Luka (Bosnia) and the EU Institutions Department, and led the Prime Minister’s initiative on Countries at Risk of Instability. He is also a former lecturer in Eastern European Politics at the University of Kent and a former risk analyst for the ratings agency, Dun & Bradstreet, where he covered the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.

Dr. Patrick Milton

Patrick Milton is a postdoctoral research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, whose research interests include the history of intervention for the protection of foreign subjects in early modern central Europe, the political and constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire, early modern international relations, and the long-term impact of the Peace of Westphalia with a particular emphasis on its mutual guarantee. At the Forum on Geopolitics, he is a Research Affiliate of the ‘A Westphalia for the Middle East’ Laboratory for World Construction, which seeks to draw lessons from the treaties of Westphalia (1648) for a new peace settlement for the Middle East. He was previously a visiting fellow at the Leibniz-Institute of European History, Mainz. He holds a PhD and a BA in History from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in International Relations from the University of Warwick. His work has been awarded the 2013 German History Society/Royal Historical Society Postgraduate Essay Prize

Dr. Michael Axworthy (1962 – 2019)

By Professor Ali Ansari, Honorary Secretary, The British Institute of Persian Studies

It is with great regret that we announce the passing of our colleague and friend Michael Axworthy on 16 March 2019.

Michael read History at Peterhouse, Cambridge before moving on to a successful career at the Foreign and CommonwHiealth Office; he met his wife Sally while they were both working at the British Embassy in Bonn. He subsequently headed the Iran Desk at the FCO between 1998 and 2000, crucial years when a thaw in Anglo-Iranian relations became a very real possibility. Michael always retained a passion for scholarship and eventually decided to leave the FCO for a career as a writer and academic, combining at this stage, his growing – and undiminished – love for Iran, with his natural historical curiosity. It was a bold move which was to yield spectacular results. His first book, The Sword of Persia, a new biography of Nader Shah (2006), drew on his intimate knowledge of military history to provide a fascinating and nuanced perspective of the conqueror and the consequences of his rule for Iran. This was swiftly followed (2008) by his single volume history of Iran – Empire of the Mind – which again perfectly encapsulated and exhibited the fluency of his pen and his ability to collate and analyse vast amounts of information, presenting them in an accessible and entertaining manner and thus reaching a wider readership beyond the confines of the academy.

By now Michael had secured a position at Exeter University where he headed its new Centre for Persian & Iranian Studies, to be followed by an award of a PhD by publication by his alma mater. His new responsibilities slowed but by no means stopped his tenacious capacity for producing books and in 2013 he published his study of the Islamic Republic, Revolutionary Iran, which was again exceptionally well received. Further important contributions to the field were to follow including, Iran: What everyone needs of know, published in 2017, synthesizing much of his long accumulated wisdom about the country, followed in 2018 by the edited volume, Crisis, Collapse, Militarism and Civil War: The History and Historiography of 18th-century Iran, arising from the conference he organised in Exeter in 2013. More recently he had returned to policy-orientated work with his Westphalia project for the Middle East, which he convened with his old college Peterhouse.