Dr George Kyris

• PhD in Politics, University of Manchester, 2011
• MA in International Relations, University of Manchester, 2007
• PG Certificate in Academic Practice/ Higher Education Academy Fellow (2018)

I joined the department of POLSIS in 2014 and in 2016 I was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship with a project on international organisations, conflict and sovereignty. Before, I was a Research Fellow at the LSE and taught at the Universities of Warwick and Manchester, where I completed my PhD in 2011.

• Conflict, Statehood and Sovereignty (PGT)
• Approaches to Research on Government & Society (PGR)
• International Relations Theory (Year 2)

Past:

• Dilemmas in IR (PGT)
• War and Peace: Theory and Practice (Year 3)
• Introduction to International Relations (Year 1)
• Institutions, Politics and Policies of the European Union (Year 2)

I would welcome PhD applications in areas related to my research interests below, and I would encourage potential supervisees to get in touch:

- international conflict, conflict management and resolution
- international organisations, the European Union
- state recognition
- statehood, sovereignty
- secession
- unrecognised/ de facto states

My research interests are generally about international relations, security and global governance. My expertise is on state recognition and international organisations, especially in the context of conflicts over statehood, unrecognised states, and the European Union. Emanating from this, I am also interested in state theory and sovereignty debates, as well as conflict management more generally.

 

Selected Projects/ Awards:

UoB ESRC IAA supported project 'Protracted Conflict and Lessons for Security in Europe and Beyond' (with Nicholas Barker, 2022-2023): a set of knowledge exchange activities involving academics, think tanks and policy makers on the issue of Russia’s war against Ukraine and associated challenges to European and global security.

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship (2017-2020):This programme explores the role of international organisations (such as the UN, EU, OSCE, AU or ASEAN) in statehood conflicts and in relation to state recognition. Methodologically, it combines the development of typologies of (a) recognition and (b) approaches of international organisations towards statehood claimants with more in-depth process tracing of the ways in which recognition influences the approaches of international organisations towards statehood conflict. The programme offers missing findings on collective recognition, its relation to the role of international organisations globally, and makes a contribution to a state-centric academic and policy discussion, as well as broader debates on sovereignty.

'Dealing with Conflict' University of Birmingham- PRIO Workshop (2018): Together with the Peace Research Institute Oslo and supported by the Internationalisation Fund of the School of Government, I organised a policy-engagement workshop in the Cyprus UN buffer zone, which invited local stakeholders, like the European Commission and the UN, to learn how to deal with the Cyprus conflict from academics working on similar conflicts. Building on the success of the event, more workshops were organised in other conflict-affected areas (Georgia 2018, Kosovo 2019)

'Sovereignties of Birmingham', Being Human Festival (2017): Worked with local communities and school on a set of public discussions and history walks on sovereignty and what it means to Birmingham, its people and landscape.

LSE Hellenic Observatory and Neapolis University Post-Doctoral Fellow (2013): The Fellowship built on my PhD research and expanded on the role of the EU in the Cyprus conflict and lessons that can be drawn for similar conflicts (e.g. Kosovo).

• POLSIS Postgraduate Research Lead (2024- ), Admissions Team responsible for outreach (2022-2024), Director for Undergraduate IR Programmes (2020-2021), Director of Undergraduate Admissions (2015- 2017), Welfare Tutor (2014-2015)
• Co-founder (with Vera Axyonova) and chair of the ECPR Research Network Statehood, Sovereignty and Conflict'
• Higher Education Academy Fellow
• Member of: International Studies Association (ISA), the British International Studies Association (BISA), the Universities Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and the European International Studies Association (EISA)
• Reviewer for a range of publications, including Oxford University Press, Manchester University Press Palgrave MacMillan and a range of academic journals. 
• In Birmingham, Dr Kyris has been co-convenor of the European Studies Research Group, a member of the Conflict and Peace Processes Research Group and the International Relations and Security Theory research group.
• Dr Kyris writes regularly for The Conversation and The Guardian.