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Meghan O'Sullivan

Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School

Member of the Board, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Contact:
Telephone: 617-496-4308
Fax: 617-495-8963
Email: meghan_osullivan@ksg.harvard.edu

Experience

Meghan L. O'Sullivan is the Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University.  She teaches courses on American foreign policy generally and the Middle East and South Asia in particular.  Her areas of research include nation-building, counterinsurgency, the geopolitics of energy, decision making in foreign policy, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  From July 2004 to September 2007, she was Special Assistant to President George W. Bush and also held the position of Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan for the last two years of this tenure.  She spent two of the last five and a half years in Iraq, most recently in fall 2008 at the request of Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Raymond Odierno to help conclude the security agreement and strategic framework agreement between the United States and Iraq.

As Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, Dr. O'Sullivan led a team of military and diplomatic personnel, lawyers, economists, and political appointees in the Iraq and Afghan directorates at the National Security Council.  With the help of her team, her primary responsibilities were to staff the President and National Security Advisor on all matters associated with Iraq and Afghanistan and to coordinate all agencies of the U.S. government with equities in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this capacity, she helped run two strategic policy reviews: one on Afghanistan in the summer of 2006 and one on Iraq in late 2006 and early 2007.

Prior to being named Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, Dr. O'Sullivan was with the NSC staff as Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Southwest Asia.  Before joining the NSC, Dr. O'Sullivan was political advisor to the Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Deputy Director for Governance in Baghdad, Iraq from April 2003 to June 2004.  There she was a key negotiator of the agreement for the early transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis.  She also helped the Iraqis create the institutions which became the foundations of their new political system, such as the Transitional Administrative Law (interim constitution) and the Iraqi Interim Government.

From November 2001 to March 2003, Dr. O'Sullivan worked at the Office of Policy Planning at the Department of State, where she was the chief advisor to the presidential envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process and helped advance efforts to promote reform in the Muslim world.  From 1998-2001, Dr. O'Sullivan was a Fellow at the Brookings Institution.   During that time, she was also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and published several books and articles on American foreign policy, including the single authored Shrewd Sanctions: Statecraft and State Sponsors of Terrorism (2003) and edited volume (with Richard Haass) Honey and Vinegar: Incentives, Sanctions, and Foreign Policy (2000).

Dr. O'Sullivan is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.  She is an editorial board member of The Washington Quarterly and a board member of TechnoServe, a non-profit organization using business solutions to help alleviate poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  She has been awarded the Defense Department's highest honor for civilians, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, and three times been awarded the State Department's Superior Honor Award.  In October 2008, Esquire magazine named her one of the most influential people of the century.

Dr. O'Sullivan received a B.A. from Georgetown University; she received a masters of science in Economics and doctorate in Politics from Oxford University.