Anna Stavrianakis is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex and Director of Research and Strategy at Shadow World Investigations in London. She works with civil society researchers and activists, journalists, lawyers and members of parliament on issues of the international arms trade and arms export controls. 

Stavrianakis did her first degree at Bristol University (BA Politics and German, 2000), her Masters at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (MScEcon Security Studies, 2001) and returned to Bristol for her PhD (Politics, 2007). Her main research interests are the arms trade, UK arms export policy, international arms transfer control, and militarism.

Her first book, Taking Aim at the Arms Trade. NGOs, Global Civil Society and the World Military Order (Zed Books, June 2010), analysed the way that NGOs such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, Saferworld and Campaign Against Arms Trade work for tighter controls on the arms trade. She is the co-editor (with Jan Selby) of Militarism and International Relations: Political Economy, Security, Theory, published by Routledge (August 2012). She is also an Associate Editor at Security Dialogue, which recently published a Special Issue on "Militarism and Security: Dialogue, possibilities and limits". More recently, she has written about the UN Arms Trade Treaty, which sets common international standards for the regulation of arms transfers.  ​