Xymena Kurowska is an interpretive International Relations scholar and social theorist whose research examines how security and knowledge practices co‑produce global order and disorder, with recent work crystallising around the synthetic lens of ‘epistemic security’. She develops the concept of epistemic security to capture how actors seek safety in particular truths and experts during crises of knowledge, introducing the figure of the ‘guardian expert’ to show how ritualised expertise simultaneously stabilises authority and legitimises transgression. These ideas build on and extend her earlier contributions to critical security studies and International Political Sociology, including award‑winning work on trickstery and stigma in international society (with Anatoly Reshetnikov). As co‑editor of Knowledge and Expertise in International Politics: A Handbook, she also helps consolidate and systematise the field of knowledge studies in IR, positioning debates on expertise, authority, and contestation within a shared conceptual and empirical landscape.
Her research practice is anchored in interpretive and psychosocial methodologies understood as sensibilities rather than fixed procedures, which keeps her conceptual repertoire deliberately ‘in motion’ and resistant to hardening into a small paradigm. This orientation underpins her work on the ‘ethics of opaqueness’ in research encounters and on ‘fieldwork failure’ as an analytic entry point into politics, where breakdowns, misrecognitions, and non‑transparency are treated as data rather than mere obstacles. Across projects on ritual, trolling and neutrollization, European and Russian security policy, and global cyber relations, her contributions foreground how meaning, affect, and practice interweave in the production of (in)security.
At CEU, her courses translate these research interests into thematic and methodological seminars which are organised around shared inquiry into how concepts travel between texts, field sites, and lived experience. She received CEU’s Teaching Excellence Award for combining analytical systematicity with generous mentoring. Her interpretive insights also inform policy and public engagement: she has served as academic rapporteur for the EU Cyber Direct project and contributed expert statements in UN processes on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace.
She previously held a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie fellowship at Aberystwyth University, led CEU’s participation in the Global Norm Evolution and Responsibility to Protect project, facilitated setting up the 'Europe Revisited' research cluster at CIVICA, served as editor of the Journal of International Relations and Development and as chair of the International Political Sociology section of the International Studies Association. Across research, teaching, peer review and public work, she seeks what some call ‘passionate humility’: staying invested in ideas and communities while centring caution about claims to leadership and definitive breakthroughs. For details on approach to research, writing and teaching, have a read of her interview for E-IR; on academic journey have a listen at The Hayseed Scholar Podcast.