World-leading Research

Our research looks at big and broad-ranging topics and answers important questions through rigorous analysis and strong theoretical approaches.

With access to expertise in a wide range of quantitative and qualitative methods, our people apply their academic and methodological skill to help us understand the political worlds of today—and shape those of the future.

Funding opportunities

Research Excellence

REF

DPIR achieved excellent scores in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021, confirming the excellence of our research. The proportion of Oxford’s research outputs judged to be world-leading has also risen significantly since the last REF exercise in 2014.

Pluralism

DPIR's diverse community bridges International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Political Theory. It creates a rich intellectual environment for interdisciplinary engagement.

Global Expertise

Our research community holds in-depth, area-specific expertise in the politics of Europe, Russia and the Former Soviet Union, the US, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

A nexus for big questions and big ideas. We develop innovative new ways for gathering, processing and analysing data; we create new theoretical frameworks; and our research projects tackle some of the most-pressing challenges around the globe.

Research Networks

OxPo network

Programme for Global Leadership

Centre for Democratic Resilience

image of a pair of hands holding a mobile screen

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

image of two hand shaking in front of a globe icon

Oxford Computational Political Science Group

Hall, T. and Bailey, H. (2026) “Beijing’s Campaign for a Greater Global Leadership Role”, Survival [Preprint].

Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2026.2620294

Capoccia, G. (2026) “Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies: Information, Legacies, Temporalities”, Comparative Political Studies [Preprint].

Available at https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140261418663

Bernhard, R., Eggers, A. and Klašnja, M. (2026) “A Rich Woman’s World? Wealth and Gendered Paths to Office”, Legislative Studies Quarterly, 51(1).

Available at https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.70055

Hall, T. and Nguyen, P. (2026) “Between power and powerlessness: Families and politicised captivity”, European Journal of International Security [Preprint].

Srinivasan, A. (2026) “Whistling a Thin Tune: Williams, Wittgenstein and Genealogical Anxiety”, Philosophy [Preprint].

Kim, W. et al. (2026) “Strategies of political control and regime survival in autocracies”, Democratization, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–25.

Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2025.2611256

Owens, P. (2026) “‘What’s His Name?’”, Global Intellectual History, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–12.

Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2025.2603373

Billingham, P. (2026) “What public reason liberals do and do not need to say about epistemology”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly [Preprint].

Fawcett, L. (2026) “The Middle East amid the changing global politics of regionalism”, in A. Acharya et al. (eds.) Essays on Global Regionalism I: The Past, Present and Future of Regionalism Studies. Springer.

Read all