The School has a long standing commitment to research excellence. Post-RAE 2008, we rose 17 places and are currently ranked 25th in the whole of the UK. A recent survey published by European Political Science put the School in the top forty institutions in Europe in terms of quality of research. High quality research is also undertaken by our numerous research students who benefit from a dedicated Research School and weekly Graduate Research Training Seminars within our School. The School also hosts a bi-weekly research seminar where we invite speakers from other institutions in the UK and overseas to present a research paper to our staff and research students. 

Research in the School is coordinated through three core research groups: Conflict, Security and Human Rights, Comparative Politics and Political and Social Thought. All researchers within the School belong to one of these groups. Two internationally-renowned research centres, the Conflict Analysis Research Centre (CARC) and the Centre for Federal Studies (CFS) are embedded within the Conflict, Security and Human Rights and Comparative Politics research groups, respectively.

The vibrant research culture of the School is reflected in the volume and quality of our publications, details of which are listed on individual staff pages. The School is also one of the few in the country that is linked to an academic journal – the renowned interdisciplinary journal Global Society, which is edited within the School. Our members of staff also act as co- or assistant editors for the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Critical Terrorism Studies, Cultures and Conflicts, International Political Sociology, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics and Telos. Book series that are edited within the School include the Routledge series 'Europe and the Nation State', the Routledge Series on 'Federal Studies' and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies publications series, also published in association with Routledge.

The School of Politics and IR at the University of Kent is proud to be part of the South-East ESRC Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), in partnership with the Universities of Reading, Royal Holloway and Surrey. This centre of excellence in social science postgraduate research training provides a number of scholarships across the consortium each year for the most outstanding candidates in the Social Sciences. Students in receipt of these prestigious studentships receive funding which covers tuition fees and provides a stipend. They are also given the opportunity to apply for additional funding to cover field work costs. Those students that have already completed Masters degrees with a comprehensive research training component are funded for three years. Students that need to complete an initial year of research training can be funded for four years.