Inwook Kim is a nonresident fellow with the empowerME Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. He is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul. He specializes in the history and geopolitics of oil, the politics of alliances, and international security. Before joining Sungkyunkwan University, he held academic positions at Korea Military Academy, the University of Hong Kong, and Singapore Management University. Over a decade-long academic career, he has widely published in premier journals including Foreign Affairs, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Contemporary Security Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, and others. He has also appeared as a commentator on television and radio. 

He holds a PhD in political science from George Washington University where he was a Fulbright scholar, an MSc in politics of the world economy from the London School of Economics, and a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from the University of Oxford. He speaks English and Korean.