Dr Ben Kienzle is a Reader in Security Cooperation at the School of Security Studies, King’s College London. At present, he is seconded to the Royal College of Defence Studies (RCDS), the senior college of the UK Defence Academy, where he serves as the Director of Academic Studies and academic advisor to the Commandant. At RCDS, he is also the Programme Director of King’s MA in International Security and Strategy and the PG Cert in Security and Strategy for Global Leaders. At King’s, he is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Science & Security Studies (CSSS). Between 2019 and 2021, he was the first lead of the Defence & Diplomacy research theme at the School of Security Studies. Similarly, he was an elected trustee and executive board member of the British International Studies Association (BISA).

Dr Kienzle joined King’s College London in 2012 as a Marie Curie Fellow at CSSS after completing a postdoctoral research project at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), where he remains a member of the Observatory of European Foreign Policy. He holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in International Relations from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2010) and an MA with distinction in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Ulster (2003). As part of his doctoral studies, he was a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley (Institute of European Studies), the University of Cambridge (Centre of International Studies), and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Institute of European Studies).

Throughout his academic career, Dr Kienzle has maintained close links with practitioners: he has gained work experience at the UN Headquarters in New York (UN-DPADM), at the Secretariat of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament in Brussels, and at IGADI (Instituto Galego de Análise e Documentación Internacional), a Spanish think tank.

 

Research

Ben’s research spans the fields of international security, global governance and regional integration. His work focuses broadly on international security cooperation and specific subjects include the international control of nuclear weapons, European security and the foreign and defence dimension of ‘Brexit’. His research has been supported by the European Commission, the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy. It has appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed journals such as International Affairs, Cooperation and Conflict, European Security, Global Policy, Global Affairs, Mediterranean Politics and the Journal of World Trade. Ben is also a contributor to several handbooks and edited volumes in both English and Spanish about European security policies. 

 

PhD Supervision

Ben is happy to offer PhD supervision in the following subject areas:

• Security cooperation
• International security organizations
• Regime complexes
• Informal governance
• Ideas in foreign and security policy
• Non-proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction
• European security
• EU foreign, security and defence policies

 

Publications

See Dr Kienzle’s research profile