Dr Maeve Ryan is a Reader in History and Foreign Policy in the Department of War Studies, King's College London. A historian by training, her research focuses on British foreign policy, diplomacy and strategy; histories of the British empire, slavery, abolition, human rights and humanitarian governance; and contemporary geopolitics, defence and security, with a particular interest in the implications of climate and environmental risk in a changing world order.

The Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War

Dr Ryan is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Slavery in War (CRSW), a ten-year, £10 million initiative jointly led by King's College London's School of Security Studies and the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab. The world's first major initiative dedicated to the systematic study of the nexus between slavery and war, the Centre brings together leading researchers across war studies, modern slavery studies, law, geography, political theory, international relations, digital humanities, and data science to build a new interdisciplinary field, transform global understanding, and drive real-world change. Its research is structured around four interconnected strands — Reconceptualising, Understanding, Forecasting, and Tackling — spanning historical conflicts from antiquity to contemporary crises and forward, through pioneering predictive methods, to 2040 and beyond.

As Director, Dr Ryan leads the Centre's ten-year research programme, a large community of early-career researchers across both institutions, and an extensive programme of engagement with governments, militaries, international organisations, humanitarian actors, and survivor communities worldwide. She also leads the Centre's major data initiative: the development and expansion of the Contemporary Slavery in Armed Conflict (CSAC) dataset — the first systematic, large-scale study of enslavement in modern armed conflicts — into a comprehensive, open-access digital repository that will integrate archival research, survivor narratives, Earth Observation data, and quantitative analysis. This data infrastructure draws on and underpins the Centre's analytical and forecasting work across all four research strands.

Statecraft, Grand Strategy, and Policy Engagement

Dr Ryan is a Founding Co-Director of the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) at King's College London — formerly the Centre for Grand Strategy (CGS), which she co-founded in 2016. Under her leadership, CGS grew into one of the School of Security Studies' most active research communities, with a large community of affiliated researchers, doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting scholars, and a diverse programme of public lectures, workshops, wargames, and international conferences. She is also one of the directors of the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy (AJI), a major initiative supported by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation in partnership with Johns Hopkins, the University of Cambridge, and the Stockholm School of Economics.

From 2019 to 2024, Dr Ryan directed the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme 'Interrogating Visions of a Post-Western World' (£1.05m), mentoring fifteen doctoral students working at the intersection of applied history, world order, and strategic foresight. She has led a series of high-impact policy engagement projects in close collaboration with partners across the UK government, including the Cabinet Office National Security Secretariat, the Ministry of Defence, the Joint Intelligence Committee, and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. The Forum on Future Strategy — a programme of closed-door dialogues between senior academics and government and military decision-makers — has been described by senior officials as "a model of academic expertise." She also designed and led an ESRC Impact Acceleration-funded programme embedding doctoral researchers within the Cabinet Office National Security Secretariat, directly contributing to the 2021 Integrated Review and subsequent implementation.

Before joining King's in 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of History at the University of Leicester, and from 2014 played a founding role in establishing the University of Cambridge's Centre for Geopolitics.

Current Research Interests

In addition to cross-centre research activities and collaborations, Dr Ryan's current research focuses on three major programmes of work. The first is a monograph, Slavery in War: A History, 1791–2025, which explores the evolution of the slavery–war nexus from the Haitian Revolution to the present. Drawing on the Centre's interdisciplinary methodology, the book combines historical, legal, and normative analysis with new empirical data to transform scholarly understanding of how slavery has shaped, and been shaped by, two centuries of conflict.

A second programme focuses on UK strategy making and implementation. As PI, Dr Ryan has led a multi-year study of UK strategic defence reviews since the Cold war, drawing on more than sixty interviews with serving and former civil servants, military officers, and senior officials to provide the first in-depth, evidence-based, large-scale analysis of how British defence policy has been conceptualised, contested, and implemented across successive review cycles. The project combines historical methodology with contemporary policy analysis and organisational theory, and speaks directly to current debates about British defence and national security strategy.

A third programme of work—in partnership with the Ukraine and Russia Programme at CSNS—focuses on slavery and trafficking in occupied Ukraine, examining how Russian occupation has generated new forms of forced labour, coercive conscription, and human trafficking, and situating these contemporary phenomena within the Centre's broader analytical framework for understanding the slavery–war nexus.

Research Interests

• History of empire and British foreign policy

• Slavery, abolition, and emancipation

• War and slavery

• Humanitarianism and human rights

• Grand strategy and statecraft

• Contemporary security and defence policy

• Climate change and international order

• Modern slavery and trafficking

• World order and diplomacy

Selected Publications

• Humanitarian Governance and the British Anti-Slavery World System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022).

• Convergence: Climate Change and Geopolitical Futures (Edinburgh University Press: Agenda, 2026) [with Duraid Jalili and Hillary Briffa].

• "British Strategic Defence Reviews: The Jellyfish Model of Policymaking”, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (accepted, 2026), [with Jamie Gaskarth and William Reynolds].

• 'Applied History in Practice', Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Working Paper (April 2026), [with Andrew Ehrhardt and Oliver Yule-Smith].

• Choices and Challenges for UK Foreign Policy (Centre for Grand Strategy and UK in a Changing Europe, February 2025), [with Oliver Yule-Smith, Jannike Wachowiak and Anand Menon (eds.)].

• War in Ukraine: One Year On (Centre for Grand Strategy, February 2023), [with Zeno Leoni and Gesine Weber (eds.)]

• 'Britain, the Great Powers and the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815): Employing Diplomacy and Grand Strategic Visions to Reshape the European Order', Strategic Advantage in a Competitive Age, James Black et al. eds., RAND, 2023.

• 'Britain and The Great Exhibition of 1851: Building the Foundations of Future Strategic Advantage in Science & Technology', Strategic Advantage in a Competitive Age, James Black et al. eds., RAND, 2023.

• 'Grand Strategic Thinking in History', in Thierry Balzacq and Ronald Krebs (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2021) [with John Bew and Andrew Ehrhardt].

• '"It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women": Colonial Governance and the "Disposal" of Women and Girls in Early Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone', Gender & History (November 2021).

• 'Grand Strategy Is No Silver Bullet, But It Is Indispensable', War on the Rocks, May 2020, [with Andrew Ehrhardt].

• '"I Demand Justice. I Hold Them All Responsible": Advancing the Enforcement of Antislavery Legislation in Mauritania', Journal of Modern Slavery, 2020 [with Rosana Garciandia and Philippa Webb].

• 'British Antislavery Diplomacy and Liberated African Rights as an International Issue', in Richard Anderson and Henry Lovejoy (eds.), Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (University of Rochester Press, 2020).

• '"A Moral Millstone": British Humanitarianism and The Policy of Liberated African Apprenticeship, 1808–1848', Slavery & Abolition, 2016.

• 'A "Very Extensive System of Peculation And Jobbing": The Liberated African Department and The Fraud Inquiry of 1848', Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2016.

• '"A Most Promising Field for Future Usefulness": The Church Missionary Society and the Liberated Africans of Sierra Leone', in William Mulligan and Maurice Bric (eds.), A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

• 'The Price of Legitimacy in Humanitarian Intervention: Britain, The European Powers and The Abolition of The West African Slave Trade, 1807–1867', in D. Trim and B. Simms (eds.), Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

• Series contributor, Royal Irish Academy, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge University Press and the Royal Irish Academy, 2009).

• “The Reptile That Had Stung Me”: William Plunket and the Trial Of Robert Emmet’, A. Dolan, P. Geoghegan and D. Jones (eds.), Reinterpreting Emmet: Essays on the Life and Legacy of Robert Emmet (University College Dublin Press, 2007).