Ivanka Barzashka

Ivanka Barzashka is the CEO and co-founder of Strand Analytica, a British-American tech startup dedicated to powering the emerging science of wargaming through technology for national security and defence applications.

Barzashka was a founding director of the Wargaming Network at King’s College London, serving as its co-director (2018-2019) with Professor Philip Sabin, director (2019-2020) and managing director (2020-2022) working with Dr David Banks as academic director. In these roles, she was responsible for the WN’s strategic direction, fundraising, international partnerships, management of research and administrative staff, including graduate and undergraduate students, and external advisors and consultants.

Research Leadership

During her tenure at King’s, School of Security Studies (SoSS) leadership recognised wargaming as a ‘priority growth area’. In 2020, an independent review of research groups at the SoSS found that the WN, was ‘highly active in an area of great potential’, had ‘achieved a great deal in the short time since it was established’, ‘moved quickly to establish an impressive network that crosses academic and policy arenas’ and was ‘one of the more active research groups’ in the department.

At King’s, Barzashka has led research projects sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (2015-2021), the UK Ministry of Defence (2021-2022), King’s Together Fund (2020) and the SSPP Research Fund (2018-2019).

Barzashka’s applied academic research has been at the intersection of security and defence strategy and military and dual-use technologies, including nuclear weapons, nuclear fuel cycle technologies, missile offence and defence, space, and cyber weapons. She has examined questions related to grand strategy, integrated deterrence, nuclear deterrence, crisis and war escalation and termination, proliferation and arms control verification, with a geographic focus on the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Ukraine, Russia and Iran.

Barzashka’s fundamental research interests include epistemology, methodology, research integrity and ethics in analytical wargaming. She has developed new methods combining strategic analytical wargaming, decision and risk analysis. Barzashka has also developed and applied physics-based methods to evaluate missile defence effectiveness, uranium enrichment performance and measure nuclear latency.