Dr Shruti Balaji

Shruti Balaji is a British Academy-funded Postdoctoral Researcher at POLIS and is a Research Associate at King's College, Cambridge.

Shruti is a theorist and historian of International Relations. Her work is grounded in gender and feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical histories and politics of South Asia. Her British Academy project seeks to develop a new theory of anticolonial women's pacifist thought by critically examining the ideas of women thinkers embedded in Afro-Asian pacifist organisations during the Cold War era. This builds on her previous doctoral research at the Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, where she wrote a thesis on the formation of elite Indian women's international thought on gender, race, and anti-imperial solidarities in late British India (c.1920-50) through multi-sited, archival research in India and the UK. 

Shruti serves as co-chair of the Historical International Relations (HIST) section of the European International Studies Association (EISA) (2026-29) and was previously the co-editor and Board of Trustee member of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vols 50/51. 

Before commencing her PhD, Shruti was a candidate of the Double Master’s in International Affairs, at Sciences Po, Paris, where she studied for an MA in International Security (High Honours) and at the London School of Economics, where she completed her MSc in International Relations (with Distinction). She holds an undergraduate degree in Political Science (Hons) and a postgraduate diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.