Professor Michelsen completed his doctoral research in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He served as Associate Dean for Student Success in the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy from February 2023 to October 2025, and as Interim Head of the Department of European and International Studies from November 2025 to August 2026.

His research centres on the changing international order and how reactionary trends, combined with shifting global power relations, are reshaping international society. His current work explores how climate change and extreme weather are transforming patterns of international cooperation, economic development pathways and global order. He is Principal Investigator of the ESRC-funded project The International Relations of Tropical Storms in the Caribbean, undertaken with the University of the West Indies, in partnership with the Caribbean Meteorological Organization and the World Meteorological Organization.

He has extensive experience in education strategy, people management, departmental and faculty leadership, and academic editorial and research leadership.

Research

• International political thought
• Reactionary internationalism
• Climate change
• International order
• Caribbean region
• Meteorological cooperation
• Extreme weather, tropical storms and hurricanes
• Geoeconomics
• Disciplinary history
• The New Right and far right
• Populism
• Strategic communications and soft power
• Insurgency, extremism and violence
• Military affairs and strategy
• Twentieth-century European philosophy
• Central and Eastern Europe

His new book, Weather Politics and Security in the Caribbean, is forthcoming in 2027 with Bristol University Press. Other recent books include Unmapping the 21st Century: Between Networks and the State (Bristol University Press) and Global Nationalism: Ideas, Movements and Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century (World Scientific Press).Recent articles include:

• “Global Weather Politics,” Review of International Studies (2026).
• “Weather Politics and the Making of International Order: Hurricanes in the Rise and Fall of the West Indies Federation,” Global Studies Quarterly (2026).
• “Cyclicality in reactionary internationalism: A genealogy of Realist, Spenglerian, and New Right theories of historical change”, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (2026).
• “Reactionary Governmentality: Nature, Society and the Apocalypse”, European Journal of Social Theory (2026).
• “The reactionary internationale: the rise of the new right and the reconstruction of international society”, International Relations (2025).

He also contributed the chapter “The EU and reactionary internationalism: Policy paradigms for a changing world order” to Europe’s World (Bristol University Press, 2025), pp. 35–64.

Teaching

Professor Michelsen has taught across a broad range of topics in international relations, including Global Polics, International order, climate change, transnational movements, network theory, contemporary international theory, the history of international thought, nationalism, contemporary conflicts, strategic communication, terrorism and insurgency.He has supervised PhD students working on values and persuasion, the discourse of loss in international relations, the international politics of home, the history and sociology of international relations, and the online transnational far right.He is currently particularly interested in supervising projects examining the international relations of climate change or global reactionary politics. He also welcomes proposals for interesting projects on other subjects.