The Georgetown Security Studies Program is delighted to welcome Renanah Joyce to the faculty starting in the fall of 2024. Renanah Joyce joins SFS as an Assistant Professor in Security Studies. Her research interests include security cooperation, military and economic statecraft, and US foreign policy. Starting her journey as a student in the Security Studies Program, Professor Joyce will be beginning a new chapter right from where it all began. “My career in security studies began in SSP as a student,” said Joyce, “SSP gave me a strong foundation in security studies and forged an intellectual curiosity that continues to shape my work. I’m thrilled to return to SSP as a faculty member and I’m ready to equip students with the knowledge and skills to navigate complex security issues in their careers–as SSP did for me.”
Before joining SFS, Joyce was an assistant professor of politics at Brandeis University from 2022-2024, where she taught courses on international relations and US foreign policy. Her current book project, Exporting Might and Right: Security Assistance and Liberal International Order, examines security assistance as a tool of statecraft. The book draws on her dissertation, which won the American Political Science Association’s Kenneth N. Waltz Award for best dissertation in security studies in 2021. Joyce’s work is published or forthcoming 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, War on the Rocks, and PRISM.
Joyce is also an external adviser for the US Institute of Peace’s Security Sector Governance and Reform Program and an adjunct political scientist with the RAND Corporation. Previously, she has held fellowships with the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Harvard Kennedy School’s International Security Program, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program, and George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies. She has also worked as a program analyst in the Department of Defense.
At SSP, Joyce is eager to work with colleagues and students to use social science tools to better understand contests over power, influence, and order in the international system—and the military, economic, and ideological tools that states use to manage those contests. Over the coming academic year, she will teach classes in international security, US national security policy, and the causes and consequences of security cooperation and assistance. We welcome back Professor Renanah Joyce to the Security Studies Program and wish her all the best for the journey ahead.