Katherine Irajpanah is a Rosenwald Postdoctoral Fellow and an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her book project examines the relationship between norms around the use of force and patterns in international conflict. She 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.
Katherine’s other in-progress work considers the implications of her book project for learning in counterinsurgency and U.S. intelligence estimates of non-state actors. Her co-authored work—on post-1945 norms and the disappearance of war declarations—is featured in Security Studies. 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.
Previously, Katherine was a Research Fellow with the International Security Program at the Belfer Center, a Minerva-USIP Peace and Security Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, and a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at Notre Dame’s International Security Center. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and her B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University. Katherine is originally from Santa Monica, California.
