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Pablo de Orellana

Lecturer in International Relations, King's College London

Dr. Pablo de Orellana is an instinctively inter-disciplinary and creative scholar. Raised in four Western European countries and fluent in four languages, he graduated in French and Italian at Oxford before a Master’s in International Relations at Cambridge, leading to a PhD at King’s College London completed in December 2015. His research on how diplomatic communication constitutes the representations upon which policy is made threads together his passion for political philosophy, literary analysis, history and aesthetics. Advanced theoretical approaches are developed and put to work analysing exhaustive and extensive archival research in an endeavour determining how policy comes to understand the political identity of peoples and their contexts. These have so far been applied onto de Orellana’s two areas of regional expertise: Post-War Southeast Asia and contemporary North Africa.

His research interests focus on analytical political philosophy, particularly Nietzschean and Poststructuralist, as well as diplomacy, history and sociology, for he is a believer that the pen is a mighty sword. These are combined with and often parallel to interests in literature, drama, aesthetic theory, poetry, archaeology, and especially art history. Testament to this wide and productive interdisciplinarity, de Orellana has published on diplomacy, North African politics, European affairs, xenophobia and identity politics, Renaissance philosophy, Critical Theory, Art History, as well as reviews, essays and features on contemporary art in peer-reviewed as well as less formal publications.

In relation to his research interests, Pablo teaches in second-year theory modules for both International Relations and War Studies as well as Southeast Asian post-war diplomatic history. He is the convener for the first-year Contemporary Security Issues for both IR and War Studies, and the third-year highly specialised History of Nations, Nationalism and Theories of the State,which he created in 2015.

In addition to his research on politics, art and history, Pablo founded the highly successful Strifeblog and the peer-reviewed Strife Journal based here at War Studies. He is involved in a number of art projects at the Department, including collaborative projects with the Leverhulme 2014-15 and 2015-16 artists in residence. He has edited three books accompanying contemporary art exhibitions. A passionate lecturer and public speaker, in less intellectual moments he is interested in literature, gastronomy, historical maps, archaeology, and discovery on his Vespa.

Experience

  • –present
    Teaching Fellow, King's College London