Stathis N. Kalyvas is Gladstone Professor of Government and fellow of All Souls College at Oxford, where he directs the T. E. Lawrence Program on Conflict and Violence. Until 2018 he was Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he founded and directed the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence and co-directed the Hellenic Studies Program.

Kalyvas obtained his BA from the University of Athens (1986) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1993), all in political science. He taught at Ohio State University (1993-94), New York University (1994-2000), the University of Chicago (2000-03), and Yale University (2003-2017), before joining Oxford in 2018. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at numerous institutions including Sciences-Po in Paris, Oxford, the University of São Paulo, Lingnan University of Hong Kong, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the University of Witten/Herdecke, the Juan March Institute, the Max Planck Institute, and the European University Institute. He serves on the scientific advisory boards of several institutions.

He is the author, among others, of The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell University Press, 1996), The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Modern Greece: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press 2015); the co-editor of Order, Conflict, and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and the Oxford Handbook on Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has authored scholarly articles in five languages, as well as several books and edited volumes in Greek. His current research focuses on global trends in political violence and conflict. His work has received multiple awards, including the Woodrow Wilson Award for best book on government, politics, or international affairs. His research has been supported by several foundations. He has been a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and has served on various academic and public bodies in the United States and Europe.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008 and of the British Academy since 2020.

In tandem with his research activities, he is also an engaged public intellectual who has written in The New York Times, the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, the Institute of Arts & Ideas and elsewhere. He is a regular speaker on both academic and non-academic fora, including TEDX, The Economist conferences, Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO), Monocle Quality of Life, Alpha Bank Private Banking, Eurobank Private Banking, Microsoft Greece, and others. He has an additional interest in the history and politics of Greece, where he is a regular columnist for the Sunday edition of Kathimerini since 2009. Disasters and Triumphs, a seven-part documentary series about Modern Greek History based on his book and fronted by him, was broadcasted in Greece in 2022.