Lise Morjé Howard is a tenured Professor at Georgetown University, with joint appointments in the Department of Government and the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. For AY 2022-23 she is on leave from Georgetown to work with the Russia-Ukraine Team as a Senior Fellow in Residence at the United States Institute of Peace. She also serves as President of the Academic Council on the UN System (ACUNS). She teaches and conducts research on matters of war and peace.
Dr. Howard earned her A.B. in Soviet Studies from Barnard College of Columbia University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She studied Philology at Leningrad State University, and then Soviet Constitutional Law at the re-named St. Petersburg State University, during the collapse of the constitutional order. She has held pre- and post-doctoral fellowships at Stanford University (CISAC) and Harvard University (Belfer Center).
Dr. Howard researches and teaches courses about international relations, war termination, peacekeeping, and U.S. foreign policy. She has conducted fieldwork in conflict zones in Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, and Eurasia. Her articles and book chapters have appeared in top peer-reviewed outlets such as International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, The British Journal of Political Science, International Peacekeeping, Global Governance, and with Georgetown and Oxford University Press. Her book, UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2008), won the Book Award from the Academic Council on the UN System for the best book on the UN system published in the previous three years. Another book, Power in Peacekeeping (Cambridge University Press, 2019) won the Book Award from the International Security Studies Section of the International Studies Association.
Howard’s essays have appeared in a variety of outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Conversation, the Journal of Democracy, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. She has provided commentary for National Public Radio, Voice of America, France 24, UN Web TV, Australian Public Radio, Al Jazeera English, The Hoya, Military Times, and The New York Times. She served as scholarly adviser for a one-hour documentary film about UN peacekeeping entitled ''The UN: Last Station before Hell'' (available on Amazon); delivered a TEDx talk about her book; and is featured in the UN Story video, “Does UN Peacekeeping Work? Here’s the data.”
Dr. Howard is fluent in French and Russian, and speaks some Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Spanish, and German. She had served in many leadership roles at Georgetown, in the American Political Science Association, and the International Studies Association. She also serves as a member of the editorial committee of the book series, « relations internationales » Presses de Sciences Po, Paris. She has received numerous awards, fellowships, and grants for her research. Prior to beginning graduate school, she served as Acting Director of UN Affairs for the New York City Commission for the United Nations.
