James took up his current role at Coventry University’s Centre for Peace and Security in 2022, having moved from the School of Humanities at the same institution. He holds a PhD in Political Science from UCL, where he also served as Director of MSc Democracy and Comparative Politics from 2013-15. He has also held academic posts at King's College London and University of Graz, Austria and his research has been funded by awards from ESRC, British Academy and CEELBAS.

He has given invited lectures and keynote speeches at the Royal College of Defence Studies, the Serbian Political Science Association and Berlin Free University. In terms of engagements beyond the university walls, he has done consultancy work for Westminster Foundation for Democracy and reviews for the EU, including on Horizon and Civil Society calls. He has also written numerous journalistic articles, including for Foreign Policy magazine, Open Democracy and has appeared as a pundit on BBC Radio 4.

James has published widely on contentious politics, democratization and ethnic nationalism using both qualitative and quantitative methods. 

After his monograph Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria (2014; paperback 2016) was awarded the BASEES George Blazyca Prize, his papers in Journal of Democracy (2016), East European Politics (2018) and JCMS (2019) helped to set the terms of conversation about “democratic backsliding”. More recent papers in Comparative European Politics (2024) and Problems of Post-Communism (2025), have extended this research agenda, considering by means of quantitative analysis of 500 randomly-sampled articles, how the optimistic narrative of “the successful democratisation of Central and Eastern Europe” prevailed in both EU policy-making circles and the political science scholarship in the early 21^st century. 

This decade, his research agenda has shifted to consider why the Western-led liberal order is evidently so vulnerable despite the continued popularity of ‘Western’ democracy as a form of government and the West’s position at the centre of the global economy. This gave rise, firstly, to a comparative survey analysis considering the variable support for liberal democratic norms in East and West Europe, published in Journal of European Public Policy (2023). More recently, his British Academy-funded project (2023-25) and an ongoing comparative project (with colleagues at UCL) both examine the resurgence of illiberal and pro-Russian politics in Eastern Europe in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Finally, another current research project addresses the EU’s efforts to “onshore” the extraction of critical minerals in the context of geostrategic competition with China, which has created a tension between the Western policy imperatives of the green transition and promoting democracy. In Serbia, for example, a grassroots pro-democratic mobilization threatens an incumbent regime blamed for eroding democracy, with the EU's silence in the face of state repression often blamed on the bloc's interest in maintaining access to critical lithium deposits.

James has won a Trailblazer Award to fund an incoming PhD student on the project "Contentious Civil Societies and Democratization in Southeastern Europe" from Septmeber 2024.