Dr Georgina Holmes

Professional biography

Dr Georgina Holmes is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies and joined the Department in September 2022. She also lectures in Politics at Imperial College London and is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She has previously lectured at the University of Reading, University of Portsmouth, Royal Holloway, London, SOAS and the National University of Rwanda. Dr Holmes’s research focuses on gender and global security governance, peacekeeping and security sector reform; organisational change processes in international organisations and political communication.  She holds a BA and MA in interdisciplinary gender studies from the University of Warwick and a PhD in International Relations from SOAS. Her previous career in strategic and organisational change communications, including five years in the British government, informs her theoretical work.

Research interests

Georgina is currently writing up the research findings from a five-year comparative research project funded by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust (2016-2021) which investigates how small and middle powers train and deploy female and male tactical-level peacekeepers to facilitate gender responsive peacekeeping. She has conducted extensive in-depth, qualitative fieldwork with Ghana Armed Forces, the Rwanda Defence Force and the British Army. Theoretically, Georgina’s research advances understandings of how the UN’s equality, diversity and violence prevention norms are implemented as institutional practices at the national level in peacekeeping, taking account of intersecting logics of power and emphasising the agency of marginalised institutional actors. As part of this project, she was awarded runner up of the University of Reading’s Early Career Research Impact Prize 2021 for her journal article ‘Situating agency, embodied practices and norm implementation in peacekeeping training’, published in International Peacekeeping.

A second research project investigates how organisational change processes take effect in international bureaucracies. She is Principal Investigator for a project supported by UN Women which examines men and women’s experiences of working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022), working in collaboration with NGO sector consultant and leadership coach, Sarah Newnham. A third research interest concerns how states (UK, France and Rwanda) address gender and global security governance issues in their foreign policy and international political communications practices to build legitimacy and manage reputational crises.

Teaching interests

• Module Co-Chair, DD 313: International relations: continuity and change in global politics
• Module Team Member, D818 (currently in production)
• Module Team Member, D828, MA International Relations (currently in production)

Phd supervision

Georgina is happy to supervise PhDs on any topic related to: Feminist International Relations; Gender, security and global governance; peacekeeping; Critical military studies; Political communication and the Media; International organisations and IO bureaucracies. 

Impact and engagement

Georgina is a Trustee and Executive team member of the British International Studies Association (2021-2024) and conference programme chair for BISA’s annual international conference in 2022 and 2023. She is a founding member and former co-chair of the BISA Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Working Group and served as an editor for Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal between 2020 and 2022. She is an academic advisor to the British Army on the UN’s Women, Peace and Security agenda and pre-deployment training and regularly engages with policymakers and practitioners on projects related to gender and peacekeeping.