Dr Oisín Tansey

Dr Tansey is a Professor of International Politics, and joined King’s College London in 2012. He holds an MA degree in International Relations from Cambridge and obtained a DPhil from Oxford (Nuffield College) in 2007. He held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford in 2007, before joining the Politics and International Relations Department at the University of Reading as a Lecturer in International Relations for five years from 2007-2012. His research focuses on the international politics of authoritarian rule, regime change, and post-conflict peacekeeping. 

Research Interests

Dr Tansey's research interests focus on democracy, authoritarianism and post-conflict political transitions.

He was Principal Investigator of an ESRC-funded research project on United Nations peacekeeping and authoritarianism from 2017-22. Along with Sarah von Billerbeck (Reading), Birte Gippert (Liverpool) and Kseniya Oksamytna (City University of London)), the project team examined the ways in which UN peacekeeping missions contribute to both democratic and non-democratic outcomes in conflict and post-conflict settings. The project website can be found here: https://democratizationandpeacebuilding.org/

From 2012-2016, Dr Tansey oversaw a €1million grant from the European Research Council on ‘The International Dimensions of Authoritarian Rule’. The project examined the ways in which international factors influence authoritarian transitions and consolidation, with a particular focus on state-driven sponsorship of authoritarian governments.

Teaching

Dr Tansey currently teaches on the following modules:

• 5SSW2069 Research Methods in War Studies and International Relations
• 7SSWM140 Security and Development
• PhD Research Methods Workshop Series

PhD Supervision

Dr Tansey is happy to offer supervision in the following broad areas:

• Democratization and authoritarian politics
• International democracy/autocracy promotion
• International peace-building and state-building
• Post-conflict political reconstruction

Publications

Books

• The International Politics of Authoritarian Rule (Oxford University Press, 2016)
• Regime-Building: Democratization and International Administration, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Recent Articles

• 'Theorizing Decision-Making in International Bureaucracies: UN Peacekeeping Operations and Responses to Norm Violations’, with Sarah von Billerbeck, Birte Gippert and Kseniya Oksamytna, International Studies Quarterly (forthcoming).  
• 'Do Institutions Matter in a Crisis? Regime type and decisive responses to Covid-19’, with Alexander Schmotz, Democratization 30 (5), 2023, 938-959.
• ‘Explaining Divergent Trends in Coups and Mutinies: The End of the Cold War and the Role of Military Agency’, with Maggie Dwyer, Security Studies,
• ‘Enabling Autocracy? Peacebuilding and Post-Conflict Authoritarianism in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, with Sarah von Billerbeck, European Journal of International Relations, Vol.25, No.3, 2019.
• Regional Autocratic Linkages and Regime Survival’, with Alexander Schmotz, European Journal of Political Research, 57 (3), 2018.
• ‘Lowest Common Denominator Norm Institutionalization: The Anti-Coup Norm at the United Nations’, Global Governance, 24 (2), 2018.  
• (with Kevin Koehler and Alexander Schmotz) ‘Ties to the Rest: Autocratic Linkages and Regime Survival’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 50, No. 9, 2017. 
• The Fading of the Anti-Coup Norm’, Journal of Democracy, Vol.28, No.1, 2017.

For a full list of publications, please refer to Dr Tansey's PURE Profile and Dr Tansey's Google Scholar profile