We are thrilled to welcome back Jack Snyder as Acting Director for the 2025-26 academic year (Snyder previously served as Acting Director of the Institute from 2006 to 2007).
Snyder is Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia. His books include Human Rights for Pragmatists; Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War, with Edward D. Mansfield; From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict; Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition; The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914. He is also editor of several volumes including Human Rights Futures, with Stephen Hopgood and Leslie Vinjamuri; Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance, with Alexander Cooley, and Religion and International Relations Theory. Select articles include: “The Modernization Trap,” Journal of Democracy, April 2017, on populist nationalism, and “The Cost of Empty Threats; A Penny, Not a Pound,” American Political Science Review, August 2011, with SIPA Professor Erica Borghard Lonergan. Professor Snyder is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Snyder received a B.A. in Government from Harvard in 1973 and the Certificate of Columbia’s Russian Institute in 1978, as well as a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia in 1980.
As many of you know, Harriman Institute Director Valentina Izmirlieva will be on leave this year pursuing a fellowship at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, where she will be working on a monograph about the militarization of Russian Christianity under Putin.
We are grateful to Izmirlieva for all her hard work and dedication to the Institute during her first term as Director.
