Ruth Blakeley is a senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Kent and co-director of The Rendition Project. Her research focuses on the use of state violence and state terrorism, particularly by liberal democratic states. She is involved with the International State Crime Initiative run by Harvard, KCL and Hull Universities, and she is Associate Editor of the Journal Critical Studies on Terrorism.

She completed her doctorate on Repression, Human Rights and US Training of Military Forces from the Global South, funded by the ESRC, at the University of Bristol. While completing her PhD, Blakeley conducted interviews with US Department of Defense staff involved in the training of Latin American military forces, and spent two months observing training at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas).

Blakeley is the Honorary Secretary of the Board of Trustees for the British International Studies Association. She acted as academic consultant to investigative journalist John Pilger for his documentary War on Democracy, screened in UK cinemas and on ITV1 during 2007. 

She is the author of State Terrorism and Neoliberalism: The North in the South (London: Routledge, 2009), and has published articles on state terrorism and torture in various academic journals.