Iro Särkkä

Dr. Iro Särkkä is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the research programme for Finnish Foreign Policy, Northern European Security and NATO. Her areas of expertise include Finnish, Nordic, and European foreign policy, NATO, French foreign and domestic policy, as well as questions of political behaviour. Recently, her research interests have included national NATO collective defense and deterrence, security in Northern Europe and the Baltic Sea area, Finnish foreign policy, as well as French foreign and security policy.

Särkkä has previously worked as a Senior Advisor of the Doctoral School for Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, as a Researcher and Special Advisor in the Finnish Defence Forces, as a Visiting Lecturer at the National Defence University in Finland, and as a politics teacher at the University College London, UK.

She holds both a PhD and master’s degree in political science from the University of Helsinki. In her doctoral thesis “Rhetoric of NATO in Finland’s Security Policy Debate” (2019) she focused on studying changes in Finland’s security policy and NATO during the post-Cold War period. She is also a graduate of University College London (UCL), UK and Science Po Lille in France, where she specialised in French foreign and security policy, French language, and European Union politics and law. She is also a trained subject teacher, her favorite topics being international relations and political history of modern Finland.

Särkkä actively engages in public debate on Finland, NATO, and global security issues in both national and global media. She speaks Finnish, English and French fluently, and likes to study foreign languages in her free time. Her most recent language acquisition is colloquial Arabic.

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