Dr. Inna Rudolf

Dr. Inna Rudolf is an Ax:son Johnson Institute Fellow at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security and Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Divided Societies (CSDS) at King’s College London. Her research interrogates the political afterlives of conflict, focusing on identity politics, the mobilisation of violent memories, and the hybridisation of security governance in heterarchical orders. Within the XCEPT consortium she has analysed how collective narratives of victimhood are instrumentalized to reshape mobilisation, contest state authority, and reconfigure local power structures.

Rudolf’s doctoral research in the War Studies Department at King’s College London examined Iraq’s paramilitary umbrella, the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), tracing their evolution from battlefield formations to political actors and their contested quest for state legitimacy. Her PhD thesis laid the groundwork for a subsequent monograph on Iraq’s Islamic resistance movement, published by Manchester University Press as Iraq’s Shi’a Warriors: From Battlefield to Parliament. Combining qualitative fieldwork, elite interviews, and institutional analysis, her work illuminates interactions between armed groups, patronage networks, and formal state institutions.

She holds an M.A. in Political Science and Islamic Studies (2012) from the University of Heidelberg, with specialisations in Conflict Resolution, Peacebuilding, and Political Islam. Rudolf has extensive regional experience, having lived and conducted field research in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, and Palestine. Her interdisciplinary training and sustained regional immersion enable her to link empirical insight with broader theoretical debates on state formation, securitisation, and memory politics in post‑conflict societies.