Birgit Poopuu is an Associate Professor of International Relations and co-director of the Central and Eastern European Security Hub (CEEShub) at Tallinn University. She serves as the Principal Investigator of a Horizon Europe grant “A critical relational perspective on peace & security in CEE”, establishing Tallinn University as a key knowledge hub in the field of security. She is the associate editor of the Journal of International Relations & Development (JIRD).

She co-founded a feminist peace working group within the COST Action Peace Research Community Europe. In this role, she has engaged in the sustained, often invisible work of introducing feminist perspectives into spaces not designed to accommodate them. Her research focuses on (non)violence, resistance, critical-relational, decolonial feminist and other critical approaches to world politics, with an emphasis on imagining more caring futures. Distinctively, her work is collaborative and dialogic, engaging closely with grassroots initiatives and activists to foster more inclusive knowledge production and societies.

Birgit advances feminist IR and feminist peace studies through sustained, everyday commitment: teaching students to ask different questions; building communities by organising conferences that actually open space for new voices; and shaping debates in a field that continues to lean toward established hierarchies, combining intellectual rigour with moral clarity. She speaks out on Ukraine and Palestine in a consistent, thoughtful and deeply human manner. Rejecting easy binaries that often dominate public debate, she insists on more careful, responsible ways of engaging with questions of war, peace, and security.