Security Faculty

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Abdullah Antepli is a scholar, clergy and leader of cross-religious and cross-cultural dialogue and faith based reconciliation and diplomacy in American higher education and in the non-profit world. His research and public intellectual work primarily focuses on track-two diplomacy efforts to create values based context for potential peace and de-escalation of confrontation and lead strategic counter terrorism strategies and programs. He has decades long experience working with various groups involved in Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Turkish-Armenian reconciliation efforts and post 9-11 governmental and non-governmental countering violent extremism efforts in South and South East Asia, East Africa and the Middle East.

Kyle Beardsley is a political scientist with research that focuses on the quantitative study of international conflict and peace processes. He is particularly interested in questions related to the role of third parties in shaping conflict dynamics, the interdependence of networks of conflict and cooperation, the links between armed conflict and gender power imbalances, and the impact of nuclear weapons on international crisis behavior. He is currently working on a project that considers how proxy conflicts like those in Ukraine, Syria and Yemen are embedded in global and regional rivalries. A lens of international politics as the coevolution of networks of support, threat and civil war uncovers tradeoffs as states cultivate ``support groups,'' receiving security assistance from other states. Tools from social network analysis are used to evaluate an intergroup security dilemma logic that explains patterns of interstate and intrastate conflict worldwide, with implications for emerging alignments and rivalries in the Indo-Pacific. 

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Admiral Dennis Blair is an Adjunct Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and the first Knott Distinguished Visiting Professor of Practice at UNC Chapel Hill. In addition, he serves on the boards of Freedom House, the National Bureau of Asian Research, the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, No Labels, and chairs the Strategic Advisory Group of Lockheed Martin Space. Prior to retiring from the Navy in 2002 after a career of 34 years, Admiral Blair was the Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Command. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Admiral Blair earned a master’s degree in history and languages from Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar.

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Frances Tilney Burke is an Adjunct Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is an operating partner at Exactus Advisors, where she focuses on organizational design, leadership, and strategy for corporate clients. From 2022-2023, she was the George P. Shultz Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Washington, DC. Burke was a special assistant to two Deputy Secretaries of Defense, a counterterrorism analysist at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve. 

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Doug Brook is a former senior Defense Department official having held three Presidential appointments in financial management and budgeting, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Financial Management & Comptroller) and Acting Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer. At Sanford he has taught the introductory MPP course in national security and national security budgeting in both the MPP and MSNP programs. His most recent research has been in support the Congressional Commission on PPBE Reform and in examining the DoD’s presence on the GAO’s high-risk list.

Philip J. Candreva is an Adjunct Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is also a Senior Lecturer of Budgeting & Public Policy at the Department of Defense Management in the Naval Postgraduate School and a Professor of Law at the Monterey College of Law. Candreva retired from active duty in 2006, after a 22-year career including operational assignments and financial management responsibilities at which time he entered academia. Candreva authored the book, National Defense Budgeting and Financial Management, and numerous peer-reviewed articles in the areas of performance-based budgeting, appropriations law, and managing fiscal stress.

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Susan Colbourn is a diplomatic and international historian interested in questions of security, strategy, and international order since 1945. Her research fits in five broad clusters: the history of the Cold War, the history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the politics of European security, US foreign policy, and Canadian foreign policy. She is the author of Euromissiles: The Nuclear Weapons That Nearly Destroyed NATO (Cornell, 2022). At present, she is working on a series of projects about NATO’s place in the international order.

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Peter Feaver is a political scientist whose research focuses on the politics of American national security policy and American grand strategy.  His current projects fall into several large baskets.  One concerns U.S. civil-military relations, which involves understanding how senior civilians and military leaders interact in the setting and implementation of national security as well as how the military as an institution interacts with the broader society and how the public thinks about the military.  Most recently, he published a book on this topic –Thanks For Your Service: The Causes and Consequences of Public Confidence in the US ;Military (Oxford University Press, 2023) – and he regularly leads professional development workshops for senior military and civilian leaders on best practices in this area.  Another research focus is on American grand strategy – America’s role in the world and how it seeks to navigate the challenges and opportunities it confronts.  In this area he has written or co-authored numerous pieces examining the assumptions underlying American grand strategy and specific policy options under consideration today.  He also has active research interests in the areas of public opinion and foreign policy, nuclear command and control, and nuclear proliferation. 

Emily Goldman is an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is a Cyber Strategist at the U.S. Cyber Command and National Security Agency. Goldman previously served as the Cyber Advisor to the Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department. She was a Residential Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a John M. Olin Fellow at Harvard University, and a MacArthur Fellow in the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University, where she earned her PhD in political science.

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Elizabeth Grasmeder is an Adjunct Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She served since 2015 as an instructor teaching US Government officials and foreign service officers’ courses on Africa and the Middle East, among other topics. Among her teaching duties, Dr. Grasmeder was the Lead Instructor for the Military Analysis Seminar for the US Government from 2019 to 2020, and since 2015 has led or co-led courses on the modern Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and insurgency and counterinsurgency. She has published her research in International Security, the Washington Post, and War on the Rocks. 

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Laura A. Hall is an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She is a senior inspector at the Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of State, where she oversees reviews of U.S. foreign assistance programs. Hall has served at the U.S. Department of State for more than twenty years, including as the Director for the Near East and North Africa in the Office of U.S. Foreign Assistance Resources from 2011-2019. 

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David Hoffman focuses his research on how technology impacts individuals and democracy. He has published on both privacy and cybersecurity. He currently leads research projects on the impacts of data brokers, how governments can hold technology platforms accountable, and how to build cybersecurity leadership capacity in government and the private sector. Within the data brokerage area, his research has specifically looked at the extent to which data brokers collect, process and sell the data of members of the U.S. military and veterans and the degree to which other countries can purchase that data. His cybersecurity capacity building work concentrates on developing world countries where democratic institutions may be most fragile. He is also currently running a research project to examine the global semiconductor supply chain and potential policy levers to increase its flexibility and robustness.

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Bruce Jentleson is a public policy and political science professor focusing on contemporary American foreign policy. His most recent publications include Sanctions: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press) and a series of articles on American public opinion and other domestic politics of the Ukraine war. Prior work includes American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21^st Century, The Peacemakers: Leadership Lessons from 21^st Century Statesmanship and other books and numerous scholarly and policy journal articles. His current research focuses on American grand strategy in the context of the 21^st century international system and American domestic politics. Policy positions include the State Department, U.S. Senate and presidential campaigns. Visiting appointments include University of Oxford, International Institute of Strategic Studies, Fulbright Research Scholar in Spain, Brookings Institution and Australia National University. Other current positions include Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He was the longtime Co-Director and now Senior Advisor for the Bridging the Gap project promoting greater policy engagement among academics.

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Shelley Liu is a political scientist whose research lies at the intersection of political violence, development, and state-building in post-conflict states. Her research explores how war shapes politics and development under rebel governments that win power through force, and how citizens engage with each other and with the state during periods of fragility and instability. Liu’s forthcoming book, Governing After War: Rebel Victories and Post-war Statebuilding (Oxford University Press) explores how rebel governments facing existential threat allocate resources to consolidate control and eliminate rivals. Combining qualitative and quantitative evidence, Governing After War explains how rebel victors prevent civil war recurrence once coming into power, while building the foundations for authoritarianism. In other ongoing work, Liu is currently examining the long-term legacies of war, focusing on how violent experiences affect political attitudes and participation. 

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Edmund Malesky’s broad research interests are in political economy, particularly the interactions between businesses and policymakers. In that space, he looks closely at the impact of institutions and governance (i.e. transparency and corruption reforms) on business performance. 

In the realm of security, he has published work on burden-sharing within NATO and on which forms of power-sharing are best for post-conflict governance.

He is the director of the Duke Center for International Development (DCID), a unit within Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy that advances international development policy and practice through interdisciplinary approaches to post-graduate education, mid-career training, international advising, and research.

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Mark Mazzetti is an Adjunct Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is also a Washington investigative correspondent Correspondent for The New York Times, a job he assumed after covering national security and intelligence for a decade.

He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and a three-time winner of the George Polk Award.

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Simon Miles is an international historian and Assistant Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is the author of Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War, published in fall 2020 by Cornell University Press. Between 1980 and 1985, US-Soviet relations improved so rapidly and so profoundly that scholars regularly use the case as an example of longstanding rivals setting aside prior disagreements and beginning to cooperate. Engaging the Evil Empire uses archival materials from both sides of the Iron Curtain to show how shifts in the perceived distribution of power catalyzed changes in the strategies which US leaders used to engage the Soviet Union and vice versa, bringing the Cold War to its largely peaceful conclusion. Simon’s second book, On Guard for Peace and Socialism: The Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991, is under contract with Princeton University Press.

Natalia Mirovitskaya’s professional focus is on political economy of development and peacebuilding. She has led and participated in numerous projects on the design, implementation and effectiveness of international resource regimes, environmental security, sustainable development, and conflict prevention. Her most recent book is on Development Strategies and Inter-Group Violence (with William Ascher, Palgrave 2016). Mirovitskaya’s most recent project is on Governance for the New Arctic: challenges of coordinating a complex international regime against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

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Tim Nichols explores the development, training, and preparation of select special operations forces for gray zone activity (short of conflict) and for crisis response and counterterrorism operations which do not appear to be concluding. He has published articles on Special Operations Forces (SOF) in Great-Power Competition, the employment of SOF in cost imposition activities, and the important changes underway in the force structure and training of SOF. Tim has recently begun a project on Arctic security design. In this project, he will pursue the development of policy themes related to emerging threats as well as emerging opportunities to advance U.S. interests in the Arctic region.

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Jon Rosenwasser is an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He is also the Budget & Policy Director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Rosenwasser previously served as Program Manager for the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency and as a Senior Strategist at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Thomas Ross is an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.  His professional experience includes duties as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security Cooperation (2014-2017), the Chief of Staff for the Department of the Navy (2021-2022), and the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition (2022-present). 

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David Schanzer’s research has focused on domestic and international terrorism, counterterrorism policy, and homeland security. His research on “combatting violent extremism” resulted in a trilogy National Institute of Justice reports: Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim Communities (2010), The Challenge and Promise of Using Community Policing Strategies to Prevent Violent Extremism (2016) and Engaging with Communities to Prevent Violent Extremism: A Review of the Obama Administration’s CVE Initiative (2019). Recently, he has been writing about how extremist movements at home and abroad are presenting threats to modern democracy, which is the focus of a Substack newsletter – Perilous Times https://perilous.substack.com/.

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Jennifer Siegel’s research agenda lies in the fields of European international history and security studies.  Her work focuses on the international and transnational nature of foreign relations and international security in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the ways in which those relations were driven by political, cultural, social, and economic forces.  Siegel’s work is centered in the areas of international diplomacy, finance, the origins of wars, the nature of alliances, and modern intelligence, with a particular focus to date on relations between and among the Entente powers of Britain, Russia, and France on the European continent and in the imperial periphery.  Her most recent book, For Peace and Money: French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars, examines the globalized interconnectivity of finance and foreign policy in the context of British and French private and government bank loans to Russia in the late imperial period up to the Genoa Conference of 1922. 

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Erika Weinthal is a Professor of Environmental Policy and Public Policy at the Nicholas School of the Environment, with a secondary appointment at the Sanford School of Public Policy. She specializes in global environmental politics, environmental security, and environmental peacebuilding with an emphasis on water and energy. She is author of State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic Politics and International Politics in Central Asia. She co-authored Oil is not a Curse and co-edited Water and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding. Her current project is on the targeting of civilian infrastructure and humanitarian responses in war. She is a founder member of the Environmental Peacebuilding Association and helped launch the journal Environment & Security. In 2017 she was a recipient of the Women Peacebuilders for Water Award under the auspices of “Fondazione Milano per Expo 2015.”

Giovanni Zanalda is an economic historian specialized in the history of the international economy, finance, globalization, development, and space economics.  His research has focused on financial crises, emerging markets, external shocks, global supply chains resilience and more recently on space diplomacy, space economy, and the partnership between science and diplomacy.  On the latter he is the guest editor of a special issue on Anticipatory Diplomacy: Science-Diplomacy partnership to address global challenges for the Global Perspectives Journal (California University Press, 2024).  At Duke he has led programs on global studies, Asian/Pacific Studies, and Europe.  He also served as a consultant in the Office of the Vice President, Development Economics and Chief Economist at the World Bank. He taught and conducted research in Europe, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Argentina, and the US. He is currently Director of the Rethinking Diplomacy Program and co-founder of the Space Diplomacy Lab.