Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham, England, UK. A political scientist by background, he specialises in the management of contemporary security challenges, especially in the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts and civil wars, and in post-conflict reconstruction, peace-building, and state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies. He has extensive expertise in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union, and has also worked on a wide range of other conflicts elsewhere, including the Middle East, Africa, and Central, South and Southeast Asia. Bridging the divide between academia and policy-making, he has been, and is, involved in various phases of conflict settlement processes, including in Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Moldova, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Kosovo.
Wolff’s publications to date include twenty books and over eighty journal articles and book chapters. His latest monograph is Subnational Governance and Conflict (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2020, with Simona M. Ross and Asbjorn Wee). Published by Oxford University Press in 2006 (paperback in 2007), Wolff’s Ethnic Conflict: A Global Perspective is the first major treatment of the subject aimed at a broad general audience and has been highly acclaimed by academics, policymakers, and business leaders. His Ethnopolitical Encyclopaedia of Europe (with Karl Cordell) was published by Palgrave as the first comprehensive analysis of ethnic politics across the European continent in 2004 and has won critical praise from scholars and analysts. Among his other books are Disputed Territories: The Transnational Dynamics of Ethnic Conflict Settlement (2002); Managing and Settling Ethnic Conflicts (with Ulrich Schneckener, 2004); Peace at Last? The Impact of the Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland (with a foreword by Lord Alderdice, with Jörg Neuheiser, 2002), and Autonomy, Self-determination and Conflict Resolution (with Marc Weller, 2005), Ethnic Conflict: Causes—Consequences—Responses (Polity 2009, with Karl Cordell), The European Neighbourhood Policy in Perspective (with Richard Whitman, 2010), the Routledge Handbook on Ethnic Conflict (with Karl Cordell, 2011), Conflict Management in Divided Societies: Theories and Practice (with Christalla Yakinthou, 2011), The European Union as a Conflict Manager (Routledge 2012, with Richard G.Whitman), and The Dynamics of Emerging De-facto States: Eastern Ukraine in the post-Soviet Space (London: Routledge, 2019, with Tetyana Malyarenko).
Wolff is also the founding editor of Ethnopolitics, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of ethnic conflicts and their management around the globe.
Prior to his appointment at Birmingham, he taught at the Universities of Keele, Bath, and Nottingham and has held visiting professorships at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna Center, the Universities of Sofia, Bucharest, Skopje, and Belgrade, and at Humboldt and Free University, Berlin. He is a Non-resident Fellow of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-determination at Princeton University. In 2006, Wolff served as Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the UK Defence Academy. He earned his BA at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and holds a Masters Degree from University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science.