Caroline has a First-Class Honours Degree in History, an MSc Econ in Strategic Studies and a D-Phil in International Relations. She was before joining Loughborough, Professor of War Studies at the University of Warwick and at the University of Hull as well as Professor of International Relations at Sheffield University.

Caroline has published extensively on Russia, the Cold War and its legacies but also studies war, strategy and terrorism. She has managed funded research projects on IEDS, on suicide bombers and on drone warfare.

Currently, Caroline works on Arctic Security, Russia and the High North as well as writing a book urban warfare.

Caroline sits on the Green Book of the Pakistan Army, is a member of the Mackinder Forum and is a former Chair of the British International Studies Association.

In 2018 Caroline was Visiting Fellow at the Rothermere Institute, University of Oxford and in 2018-2019 she was a Specialist Advisor to the House of Commons Defence Committee.

Caroline studies and writes on contemporary war and political violence. She is interested in how the Cold War developed after the Second World War and how the United States and the Soviet Union conducted foreign policy under the shadow of nuclear weapons. She is also studying the legacies of the Cold War on current Russian foreign policy and how the 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grew out of the fractured politics of the 1980s and 1990s. Here, Caroline looks at both traditional and new forms of terrorism. Over the last 10 years she has been working on the impact of IEDs on warfare but is also now researching how the use of armed drones affects counter terror policy and particularly how civilians are affected by drone warfare. On this topic, Caroline published with colleagues ‘Drone Chic’ for the Oxford Research Group in April 2016 questioning how precise drones might actually be in terms of civilians affected during and after a ‘strike’. This piece is available online.

A second part of Caroline's current research looks at the possibility for confrontation in the High North and how global warming will affect both human and hard security in the Arctic. Caroline's latest publication is 'Turkey: A New Polar Power?' written with Duncan Depledge and Ali Bilgic in The RUSI Newsbrief, 9 April, 2020. 

A recent publication is ‘Liberal Feminisms, Militaries and War’ in The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military. Palgrave, 2017. Pp. 23-39 which examines how female soldiers are incorporated in to and affected by combat. Caroline is currently working on a book project entitled  'Counter-Insurgency and getting the Woman Question Wrong' and a second book on Urban Warfare after Ireland. 

Caroline was visiting Fellow at the Rothermere Institute at the University of Oxford in 2018 and is currently a specialist advisor to the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence.

Caroline teaches modules on Small Wars and 21st Century War and from the autumn of 2019 will be teaching a module on Urban Warfare.

Caroline supervises doctoral students in any area of contemporary war.

Current postgraduate research students

  • Tomas Helgas: Small States and Peace
  • Seyma Bicer Hazir: Remembering Nagorno-Karabakh
  • Felix Aubock - The German Campaign in Afghanistan
  • Wooyun Jo - The Politics of a Divided Peninsula - South Korea and the US
  • Martin Thorp - Command, Combat and Trauma.
  • Lewis Sage Passant - The Private Intelligence Sector
  • Stalin’s Cold War in James Ryan and Susan Grant, Edited, Chapter 7: Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions and Controversies. Bloomsbury, 2020.
  • Depledge, Dodds and Kennedy-Pipe, The UK’s Defence Arctic Strategy negotiating the slippery geopolitics of the UK and the Arctic in RUSI Journal, 25 April, 2019.
  • Terrorism Studies: What We Now Know and What We Have Forgotten’  in Government and Opposition.  Pp366-384. April  2018
  • With James I Rogers, Dying for Peace? in International Peacekeeping. Vol.21. No.5. 2014. pp.658-672
  • With Sophia Dingli, The Aden Pivot in Civil Wars. Vol.16.no.1.  Spring 2014. Pp 66-84. 
  • ‘Liberal Feminisms and the Military’ in Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson Edited The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender, Palgrave.  2017. pp.23-37.
  • ‘In Conversation with Jean Bethke Elshtain’ in Richard Ned Lebow, Peer Schouten and Hidemi Suganami,  edited  The Return of the Thinkers  Palgrave, 2016 pp. 352-360.
  • Suicide Bombers, Martyrs and IEDs.’in Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, Gordon Chubb and Simon  Mabon, Terrorism and Political Violence, Sage, 2015.  pp 153-167.