Sam Selvadurai

Dr Sam Selvadurai serves as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London's Department of War Studies since January 2021, concurrently maintaining a civil service career at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) since 1993. His diplomatic postings include the UK Delegation to NATO in Brussels, the British Embassy in Moscow, and the Home Office in London, with expertise spanning Counter Proliferation, Counter Terrorism, Human Rights, and International Security Policy.

His academic credentials feature a PhD in War Studies and MA in International Peace and Security from King's College London (completed part-time while serving at the FCDO), alongside a BA in Economics and Politics from the University of Warwick. Educational milestones are detailed in this unordered list:

• PhD in War Studies, King's College London (2020)
• MA in International Peace and Security, King's College London (part-time, completed circa 2013)
• BA in Economics and Politics, University of Warwick

Dr Selvadurai's research critically examines legal and factual uncertainty in international security contexts, focusing on the jus ad bellum (law governing resort to force), vagueness in international law, and extra-legal reasoning in military crises. His methodology integrates legal/political theory with socio-legal research, including textual analysis of International Court of Justice cases and empirical surveys of international lawyers. This interdisciplinary approach reveals how decision-makers navigate ambiguous legal frameworks during high-stakes security operations.

His publications demonstrate consistent thematic focus on legal-security intersections, with the 2022 monograph analyzing penumbral uncertainty in use-of-force decisions and the 2013 article dissecting asymmetric warfare dynamics in Sri Lanka. Both works reflect his signature methodology of blending theoretical rigor with empirical analysis of real-world security dilemmas.

As an active member of King's War Crimes Research Group, he contributes to scholarly discourse on war crimes and conflict studies. His career uniquely synthesizes frontline foreign policy experience—including authorship of the UK's 2015 National Security Strategy and FCO Human Rights Reports—with rigorous academic scholarship, exemplifying practitioner-scholar integration in security studies.