Risa Brooks

Risa Brooks is Allis Chalmers Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, a senior fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute, and a non-resident fellow in the International Security Program at New America. She is the author of Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton University Press), coeditor (with Elizabeth Stanley) of Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford University Press), and most recently, coeditor (with Lionel Beehner and Daniel Maurer) of Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: Politics, Society and Modern War (Oxford University Press). Her research and commentaries have appeared in venues such as Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, The Washington Post, The New York Times and in the academic journals International Security, Annual Review of Political Science, Journal of Strategic Studies, European Journal of International Security, Security Studies and others. Brooks received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and formerly held positions as research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, U.K. and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Her primary research focus is on the U.S. and global/comparative civil-military relations, and she also maintains interests in political violence and militant organizations in the U.S. and abroad, and armed forces in the Middle East and North Africa region.