Welcome
I am an Assistant Professor of Security Studies in the Walsh School of Foreign Service and Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University. My research focuses on international security and US foreign policy, especially security cooperation and how powerful states try to shape their security environments.
My book project explores how the United States uses security assistance to influence partner militaries. The United States, like other great powers, uses training and advising to shape its partners, one officer at a time. But these bottom-up approaches to influence often fail to produce alignment—a limitation that, I argue, reflects the difficulty of aggregating from individual preferences to higher-order policy outcomes.
My broader scholarship examines the tools great powers use to build order and compete, as well as the benefits they gain from security cooperation, such as military access. I also examine these relationships from the other side: how smaller states and their publics respond to power politics.
My work is published in International Security, Perspectives on Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of the Middle East and Africa, Political Science Quarterly, and policy outlets including The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Lawfare, Inkstick, and PRISM. My research has been supported by the Defense Security Cooperation University, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Eisenhower Institute.
I am a research affiliate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program. Previously, I was an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University, an adjunct political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and an external advisor for the US Institute of Peace’s Security Sector Governance and Reform Program. I have also held fellowships with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, a joint production of Princeton’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point; Harvard Kennedy School’s International Security Program and MIT’s Security Studies Program; and George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies.
I received a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. Before academia, I was an analyst in the Department of Defense.
Contact:
Email: rj602 (at) georgetown (dot) edu Twitter: @RenanahJoyce