Renanah Joyce

Renanah Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research focuses on international security and US foreign policy, especially security cooperation and how powerful states try to shape their security environments.

Joyce’s current book project explores how the United States uses security assistance to influence partner militaries. Her broader scholarship examines the tools great powers use to build order and compete, as well as the benefits they gain from security cooperation, such as military access. She also examines these relationships from the other side: how smaller states and their publics respond to power politics. Her work has been published in International Security, Perspectives on Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of the Middle East and Africa, Political Science Quarterly, and policy outlets including The Washington Quarterly, The National Interest, Lawfare, Inkstick, and PRISM.

Joyce is a research affiliate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program. Previously, she was an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University, an adjunct political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and an external advisor for the US Institute of Peace’s Security Sector Governance and Reform Program. She has also held fellowships with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School’s International Security Program and MIT’s Security Studies Program, and George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies. Joyce holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University. Before academia, she was an analyst in the Department of Defense.