Nakissa Jahanbani is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences and a researcher at the Center. She studies political violence, focusing on questions of state-proxy relationships, specifically Iran’s network of proxies. Her dissertation explored related state-proxy questions through regression and network analysis.
With funding from a Carnegie Corporation grant, she is currently investigating similarities and differences between international jihadist terrorism and domestic violent extremism to best understand the most relevant, successful counterterrorism practices from the former to address the growing threat of the latter. She is also co-PI on a Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative-funded “Near Crisis Project” about escalation dynamics—including the role of violent non-state actors—leading up to international crises.
She has published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Small Wars and Insurgencies, among others. She is fluent in Persian and is learning Arabic. She is the recipient of several awards, including the U.S. Military Academy’s William F. Murdy Award for Teaching Excellence and ICPSR’s Clifford C. Clogg Scholarship.
