Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer in War Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. His research interests concern armed conflict between the West and the non-European world in historical and contemporary perspective. He has written on colonial armies, 'small wars' and imperial warfare, the Cold War in the Third World, and on counterinsurgency and the "War on Terror". More generally, he is interested in the place of armed force in histories and theories of globalisation, modernisation and imperialism, especially from a postcolonial perspective. He has also written on International Relations theory, the so-called 'democratic peace', and strategic studies.

Tarak earned his PhD in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, under the supervision of Raymond Duvall. He was previously educated at George Washington University and the London School of Economics. He has held fellowships at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University; the Department of War Studies, King's College London; the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University; and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Ohio State University. He has held faculty positions at the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth; and at the School of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College.

With Brendan Simms, Tarak is co-editor of the Crises in World Politics book series, published in the UK on Hurst and in the US on Columbia University Press. With Shane Brighton, he is co-editor of the Critical War Studies series, also published on Hurst and Columbia.

Tarak is currently completing his long delayed PhD book, on the Indian Army in the Second World War. It is a postcolonial critique of military sociology and the 'why soldiers fight' literature. During his sabbatical year 2010/11, he will be researching his new project on Orientalism at War in Korea. This project uses Orientalism to understand the shock delivered to the US military, government, and public by the events of the first year of the Korean War. It is an attempt to understand why and how 'small wars' generate political and cultural crisis in metropolitan countries.

In terms of smaller projects, Tarak is involved in two edited volumes, one on the problem of knowledge and expertise in contemporary counterinsurgency and one on Orientalism and war. With Shane Brighton, he has recently produced a paper on the idea of a war studies, critiquing the failure of the Enlightenment social sciences and humanities disciplines to take seriously the generative powers of war in society and politics. He is also drafting an article with Josef Ansorge on the significance of 'form' (e.g. powerpoint, smart cards, handbooks) for the ways in which militaries access knowledge of other cultures and peoples in counterinsurgency campaigns and small war.