Stephen Watts
Former Research Fellow and Associate, International Security Program/Program on Intrastate Conflict
Experience
Stephen Watts was an Associate with the International Security Program and the Program on Intrastate Conflict at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. His research interests include military interventions, state-building, ethnic conflict, transatlantic relations, and norms governing the conduct of warfare. He received his Ph.D. in February 2007 from Cornell University, where he wrote his dissertation comparing national strategies of military intervention with particular emphasis on the relationship between military force and political inclusion. He has also co-authored a chapter (with Valerie Bunce) on federalism and ethnic conflict in Sustainable Peace (Cornell University Press), edited by Philip Roeder and Donald Rothchild, and has authored a chapter on the manner in which public opinion regulates the conduct of warfare (Routledge, under contract). He has held fellowships from the Brookings Institution, the American Council on Germany, and the Peace Studies Program and Institute for European Studies at Cornell University. Before beginning his doctorate, he served for two years with the U.S. State Department’s Office of International Security and Peacekeeping and worked at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Germany.
April 2007
"Military Interventions and the 'Lessons of Iraq'"
Journal Article, PS: Political Science and Politics, issue 2, volume XL
By Stephen Watts, Former Research Fellow and Associate, International Security Program/Program on Intrastate Conflict
"The disastrous invasion of Iraq has shed a stark light on the
limitations of military interventions. Much of the ensuing
skepticism is quite healthy. But there is a risk that 'the lessons
of Iraq' will be learnt to the exclusion of lessons that can be
drawn from the more than two dozen other interventions of the
post-Cold War era...."
