About

Dara Kay Cohen is a Ford Foundation Associate Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests span the field of international relations, including international security, civil war and the dynamics of violence, and gender and conflict.

Cohen's most recent book, Lynching and Local Justice: Legitimacy and Accountability in Weak States (Cambridge University Press, 2020), coauthored with Danielle F. Jung, draws on original survey and focus group data collected during fieldwork in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 

Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Global Security Studies, and Stanford Law Review, amont others. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), the United States Institute of Peace, Folke Bernadotte Academy (Sweden) and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), among others.

Cohen was the recipient of the 2019 Emerging Scholar Award from the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) of the International Studies Association. She holds a PhD in political science from Stanford University.