Katherine Irajpanah

Katherine Irajpanah is a Research Fellow with the International Security Program and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University, where she studies political violence and U.S. foreign policy. Her dissertation examines the relationship between norms around the use of force and patterns in international conflict. Her project investigates this question through discourse analysis of strategic and legal texts, historical case studies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and macro-level statistical analysis of cross-sectional conflict data between 1800 and 2022.  

Her co-authored work—on post-1945 norms and the disappearance of war declarations—is featured in Security Studies. Her other in-progress work considers the implications of her dissertation research for learning in counterinsurgency and U.S. intelligence estimates of non-state actors. She has brought her international relations perspective to the study of presidential power, as well, in an article on unilateral military action, available at Presidential Studies Quarterly. 

During the 2024-2025 academic year, Katherine is also a Peace Scholar Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. Previously, she was a Hans J. Morgenthau Grand Strategy Fellow at Notre Dame’s International Security Center and an adjunct policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where she worked on issues related to space governance and norms. She is originally from Santa Monica, California.