#  Katherine Irajpanah 

 



   ![Katherine Irajpanah photo](/sites/g/files/omnuum6596/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/kirajpanah/files/irajpanah-shot.jpg?itok=XaH0QvFn) 

 

I am a political scientist studying international conflict and U.S. foreign policy. I completed my Ph.D. from Harvard's Department of Government in May 2025. My dissertation, "The Balance of Restraint: An Analysis of Warfighting Norms and Global Conflict Patterns," examined the relationship between norms around the use of force and patterns in international conflict. My project investigated 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.

My co-authored work—on post-1945 norms and the disappearance of war declarations—is featured in [*Security Studies*](https://doi.org/10.1080/09636412.2021.1979842)*.* My other in-progress work considers the implications of my dissertation research for learning in counterinsurgency and U.S. intelligence estimates of non-state actors. I have brought my international relations perspective to the study of presidential power, as well, in an article on unilateral military action, available at [*Presidential Studies Quarterly*](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/psq.12869).

During the 2024-25 academic year, I was an International Security Program Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center and a Minerva-USIP Peace and Security Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. Previously, I was a Hans J. Morgenthau Grand Strategy Fellow at Notre Dame’s International Security Center and an adjunct policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where I worked on issues related to space governance and norms. I am originally from Santa Monica, California and will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College's Dickey Center for International Understanding in July 2025.