Tadek Markiewicz
2025-2026 cohort
Tadek is the Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Institute of Social Sciences, SWPS University in Warsaw and a Research Affiliate at King’s College London War Studies Department. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Uppsala University (Uppsala Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies). Tadek received his PhD in International Conflict Analysis at the University of Kent (UK).
Tadek is a scholar of international relations and a political psychologist. He currently leads a unique long-term project addressing Poland's adoption of Holocaust memory policies within the broader context of global politics. This interdisciplinary study combines these two fields to offer fresh insights into Poland's relationship with the Holocaust. It addresses one of the fundamental challenges faced by European civil societies, which are facing ever-growing pressure from populist forces to politicise our history.
Tadek’s research focuses on understanding the role of identity within global politics. He employs social-psychological and sociological perspectives and draw on constructivist and interpretive methodologies. His work investigates vulnerability and victimhood in wartime self-representations of strong states. These themes are explored in his forthcoming book, The Vulnerability of Strong States. It is the first systematic study analysing vulnerability narratives as a practice of warcraft and statecraft. In it, he shows that, counterintuitively, vulnerability narratives may be used by states as a trust-inducing mechanism. Building on these insights, Tadek challenges existing paradigms in security studies by problematising the traditional focus on power and agency in securitisation theory (link). By introducing the concept of vulnerability into the analysis of securitisation, Tadek argues that in research practice, we overlook the vulnerabilities experienced by securitising actors. Applying these frameworks, he studies under what conditions Israel's political elites incorporate victim narratives towards armed conflicts. Tadek offers a novel systematic investigation exposing that victim narratives can be a challenge for governance (link). The article provides an empirical account of how geopolitical context changes the role of victimhood in a state's public communication.
Tadek is also a methodologist. He recently published a research article on advanced interview methods (link). In it, he formalises two research techniques essential for conducting interviews about sensitive topics the interlocutors are unwilling to discuss. His latest piece offers a practical solution on how to use fieldwork to empirically study the role individual-level emotions play in states’ behaviour (link). It is the first study to use elite interviews to investigate whether countries experience ontological insecurity. His work has been published in Political Psychology, International Studies Quarterly, Contemporary Politics, and International Studies Perspectives. He also contributed to International Affairs. Before taking up the Alfred Landecker Lectureship, Tadek was awarded a Jacques Rozenberg Research Grant and a Conny Kristel Fellowship.
