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), Yale University (2003-2017), before joining Oxford in 2018. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at Sciences Po-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 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 the co-editor of Order, Conflict, and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and the Oxford Handbook on Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2019). He has also authored over seventy 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. 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 documentary series about Modern Greek History based on his work and fronted by him, was broadcasted in Greece in 2022.

His work has received multiple awards, including the Woodrow Wilson Award for best book on government, politics, or international affairs, the Luebbert Award for best book in comparative politics, the European Academy of Sociology Book Award, the Luebbert Award for the best article in comparative politics (three times), and the Greenstone Award for best book in politics and history. His research has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the United States Peace Institute, the Folke Bernadotte Academy, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ECRC), and the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 2007. He 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.