Benjamin Kienzle

Ben Kienzle’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, International Politics and the Journal of World Trade. Ben is also a contributor to several handbooks and edited volumes in both English and Spanish about international and European security policies.

• 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

Ben Kienzle is a Reader in Security Cooperation. At King’s, he is also an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Science & Security Studies (CSSS). Between 2020 and 2023, he was seconded to the Royal College of Defence Studies, the senior college of the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, where he served as the Director of Academic Studies and academic advisor to the Commandant. Between 2019 and 2021, he was the first lead of the Defence & Diplomacy research theme in the School of Security Studies at King's. Likewise, he was an elected trustee and executive board member of the British International Studies Association (BISA).

Ben 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).

During his academic career, Ben has been eager to maintain close links with the world of 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 i Documentació Internacional), a Spanish think-tank.