Michael A. Innes

Michael A. Innes (PhD, SOAS) is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Dept. of War Studies, King’s College London, and Director of the Conflict Records Unit in the department’s Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. He is the author, most recently, of Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959-2009,  published in 2021 with C. Hurst & Co. Publishers in the UK and Oxford University Press in North America. As a scholar and practitioner, he has covered conflicts across Africa, Asia and the Middle East for over twenty years. He previously served in the army, and as a civilian analyst and advisor with NATO. He is currently a UN official in Iraq.

The longer version…

Michael A. Innes is the author of Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959-2009,  published in 2021 with C. Hurst & Co. Publishers in the UK and Oxford University Press in North America. He is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and founder and Director of the Conflict Records Unit in the department’s Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War. During the 2020-21 academic year he was part of the teaching staff on the MSc program in Conflict, Security and Development, and a member of a KCL team working on the DFID XCEPT (“Cross-Border Conflict Evidence, Policy and Trends”) Program.

His academic credentials include a PhD in politics from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), as well as Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in history from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is a graduate of the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) doctoral methods course on qualitative methods, case studies and process tracing, as well as numerous professional training courses on analytical tradecraft.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Geographical Society, an associate of LSE Ideas at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a current member of the Editorial Board of the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and previously served as an editor for H-Diplo. He has held honorary affiliations at the University of Oslo, University of Leeds and Syracuse University, and previously taught at University College London, the School of Oriental and African Studies, City University London, and Concordia University.

A scholar-practitioner with 20 years’ experience in applied research roles, his interests reflect elements of academic and non-academic practice. These include the comparative politics of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, formal and informal institutions, rebel self-governance, technology developments and the history of science, and policy research in the realms of defence, development and foreign affairs. Current major research projects cover Cold War containment thresholds, the geopolitics of information, and forensic political inquiry.

He has authored articles and essays in both scholarly and popular outlets. Streets Without Joy is his first-single authored book and his fifth book-length project. He is the editor of Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates and the Use of Force (Potomac, 2012), Denial of Sanctuary: Understanding Terrorist Safe Havens (Praeger, 2007),  and Bosnian Security After Dayton: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2006), as well as a special guest-edited issue of the journal Civil Wars.

Prior to academia, he served briefly in the army, and spent six years as a civilian analyst and advisor at NATO headquarters in the Balkans and Europe. He subsequently founded a boutique political risk and investigative research firm, and spent nearly ten years working on desk and field assignments, primarily for government clients. His work has taken him as far afield as Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cote d’Ivoire, Indonesia, Kosovo, Lebanon, and north-east Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin area of West Africa. He is currently a UN official in Iraq.

He divides his time between the UK and the Middle East.