Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D. is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Chenoweth’s research focuses on political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked her among the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2013 for her efforts to promote the empirical study of civil resistance. Her next book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, forthcoming 2019), explores in an accessible and conversational style what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance.

Chenoweth’s other books include Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence (Oxford, forthcoming 2020), with Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy D. Sisk; The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (Oxford, March 2019) with Richard English, Andreas Gofas, and Stathis N. Kalyvas; The Politics of Terror (Oxford, 2018) with Pauline Moore; Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (MIT, 2010) with Adria Lawrence; Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011) with Maria J. Stephan; and Political Violence (Sage, 2013). Chenoweth has also published her work in International Security, The Journal of Politics, American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Peace Research, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, and Political Research Quarterly, among others.

In 2014, she received the Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under the age of 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research. And together with Maria J. Stephan, she won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, which is presented annually in recognition of outstanding proposals for creating a more just and peaceful world order. Their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, also won the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, given annually by the American Political Science Association in recognition of the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the United States in the previous calendar year.

Along with Marie Berry of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, she is founding co-director of the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative (IGLI) Summer Institute, which brings together women-identified activists and organizers and engaged scholars from around the world to share knowledge, build capacity for mobilizing effective grassroots movements, and increase global solidarity toward the promotion of gender equity, justice, and the reduction of direct and structural violence around the world.

And along with Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut, Chenoweth is founding co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a collaborative public interest project that collects data on the size of political crowds protesting within the United States since the first Women’s March of 2017.

Before coming to Harvard, Chenoweth taught at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at DU, as well as at Wesleyan University, where she was the 2010 recipient of the Carol A. Baker Memorial Prize for excellence in junior faculty research and teaching. She has also held prior visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford University, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. She was an Associate Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), co-chair of the Academic Council at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and a Councilor at the Peace Science Society International. Currently, she is a Fellow at the One Earth Future Foundation, a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Research Fellow at the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. At Harvard, she is a Faculty Affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Chenoweth has presented her research all over the world at various academic conferences, government workshops, and international governmental organizations including at the 2013 World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates held in Warsaw. Her research and commentary has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Economist, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, TEDxBoulder, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.

Along with Barbara F. Walter of UCSD and Joseph K. Young of American University, Chenoweth hosts the blog Political Violence @ a Glance, which has won multiple OAIS Awards for Best Group Blog in 2018 and 2014 and Most Promising New Blog in 2013. In addition, Chenoweth has also won two individual OAIS blogging awards for Best Blog Post in 2018 and 2014. She hosts a blog called Rational Insurgent and has been an occasional blogger at The Monkey Cage and Duck of Minerva.

Chenoweth received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton. She resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts and spends much of her free time fly-fishing and hiking in the Mountain West.

Chenoweth was an International Security Program Predoctoral Fellow (2006–2007), a postdoctoral fellow (2007–2008), and an associate (2008–2010).