Biography

Kelly M. Greenhill is a former associate in the Belfer Center's International Security Program and a professor and the Director of International Relations at Tufts University. Her research focuses on foreign policy, the use of military force, the politics of information and what are frequently called "new security challenges," including civil wars; the use of forced migration as a weapon; (counter-) insurgency; and international crime as a challenge to domestic governance. She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M. from M.I.T., a C.S.S. from Harvard University, and a B.A. (with distinction and highest honors) in Political Economy and in Scandinavian Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Greenhill also serves as Chair of the Conflict, Security, and Public Policy Working Group at the International Security Program and as Associate Editor of the journal International Security. She has previously held pre- and/or post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, at Columbia University's Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and at the Belfer Center.

Professor Greenhill is author of Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs), which won the 2011 International Studies Association's Best Book of the Year Award; and co-author and co-editor (with P. Andreas) of Sex, Drugs and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (Cornell University Press), (with R. Art) of the eighth edition of The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics (R&L) and (with P. Krause) of The Power to Hurt: Coercion in Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Greenhill's research has also appeared in a variety of other venues, including the journals International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Civil Wars, European Law Journal, and International Migration, media outlets such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs and the British Broadcasting Company, and in briefs prepared for argument before the U.S. Supreme Court and for use by other organs of the U.S. government. She is currently completing a new book, a cross-national study that explores why, when, and under what conditions, "extra-factual" sources of political information (EFI)—such as rumors, conspiracy theories, myths, and propaganda—materially influence the development and conduct of states' foreign and defense policies; the book is provisionally entitled Fear and Present Danger: Extra-factual Sources of Threat Conception and Proliferation.

Greenhill's research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Eisenhower Foundation and the Neubauer Foundation. Outside of academia, Greenhill has served as a consultant to the Ford Foundation, to the World Bank and to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as a defense program analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense, and as an economic policy intern in the Office of then Senator John F. Kerry. She sits on the editorial boards of Sage Publications as well as of the journals of Security Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies,  and Texas National Security Review. She previously served as Associate Editor of Security Studies.

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