Sechser

Todd S. Sechser is the Pamela Feinour Edmonds and Franklin S. Edmonds, Jr. Discovery Professor of Politics; Professor of Public Policy at the Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy; and a Senior Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs.

Dr. Sechser's research interests include coercive diplomacy, nuclear security, political violence, and foreign policy. He is coauthor of the book Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and his research has appeared in academic journals such as International Organization, the American Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and the Non-Proliferation Review. His writing on policy issues has been published in media outlets such as the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and the Christian Science Monitor, and he regularly consults for several government and military agencies. He is also the principal investigator of the Program on Strategic Stability Evaluation, a multi-university working group studying the effects of nuclear weapons and emerging technologies on international security.  His work has been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Stanton Foundation, and the U.S. Air Force.

Dr. Sechser is the director of the Democratic Statecraft Lab, which conducts academic research and public policy analysis about challenges in international security, U.S. foreign policy, and democratic leadership in international affairs.

He was previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a John M. Olin National Security Fellow at Harvard University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, where he wrote an award-winning doctoral dissertation. Before entering academia, Dr. Sechser worked as a nuclear policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.