Our Visiting Scholars

William Favell is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University, a Civil War Paths Fellow at the University of York, and a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Washington State University. His research examines peacebuilding, civic trust, political behavior, and intergroup relations in environments facing ethnic conflict, resource competition, and violent extremist mobilization. His book project, Bridge or Barrier? International Peacebuilding Initiatives in Africa, draws on multi-year fieldwork in Ghana, and access to original multi-method data from projects in Benin, and Zimbabwe. Using field experiments, randomized interventions, multi-year surveys, geospatial indicators, and social network analysis, the project evaluates how international peacebuilding interventions reshape cooperation, legitimacy, and social cohesion under dual climate and conflict stress.

William’s broader research agenda focuses on how individuals and communities navigate uncertainty, risk, and changing security conditions. His work engages central debates in political behavior, the microfoundations of peacebuilding, the political economy of development, and the dynamics of local-level conflict. In addition to his academic contributions, William has extensive applied experience working with international development and peacebuilding initiatives. He served as the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Specialist and Project Manager for a major USAID peace and civic resilience program in northern Ghana, co-authored and served as Co-PI on a successful Minerva Research Initiative grant, and worked on DFID (UKAID)-funded development programs. These experiences shape his commitment to producing empirically grounded, policy-relevant research that reflects the realities of communities facing insecurity and institutional constraints.

William holds an MSc in Democracy and Comparative Politics from University College London (UCL) and an MA in Political Science from Washington State University. He is expected to complete his Ph.D. in April 2026.

Dr. Zoltán Fehér is a diplomat-scholar and a geostrategist with more than twenty years of experience working in government, academia, and the private sector on international relations, foreign policy, grand strategy, and geopolitical risk. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (ISCS), Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, and a Nonresident Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

Previously, he served as a professional diplomat for Hungary for 12 years, working as foreign policy analyst at the Hungarian embassy in Washington DC, and as Hungary’s Deputy Ambassador and Acting Ambassador in Turkey. He has taught International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Summer School, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tufts University, and leading Hungarian universities. He worked as an assistant to Joseph Nye at the Harvard Kennedy School.

He earned his PhD in International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, in 2023. His doctoral dissertation, The Sources of American Conduct: U.S. Strategy, China’s Rise, and International Order, focuses on the origins of U.S.-China strategic competition and examines the evolution of U.S. strategy toward China in the early post-Cold War period. He has served as an America in the World Consortium Predoctoral Fellow at the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin, a Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at the Notre Dame International Security Center at the University of Notre Dame, a Mason Fellow and a Ferenc A. Vali Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a World Politics and Statecraft Fellow with the Smith Richardson Foundation.

To date, he has authored 5 journal articles and 4 chapters in edited volumes on international relations and international security. He has also published extensively in policy and scholarly publications, including Global Security Review, H-Diplo, The Duck of Minerva, New Atlanticist, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, and several policy blogs. His policy commentary has been featured in various outlets, including War on the Rocks, This American Life, Czech State Television, Deutsche Welle, TVP World (Poland), Aljazeera, New York-based RTVi, Forbes Magazine, and The South China Morning Post.

He is also an Associate Research Fellow at the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs and a Nonresident Fellow at the John Lukacs Institute for Strategy and Politics at Ludovika University of Public Service – Hungary.

Lori Helene Gronich focuses attention on issues of international peace and security, American foreign policy, decision-making processes, research design, and the dynamics of individual and group cognition.  She has taught at Haverford College, Rutgers University, Johns Hopkins University-SAIS, Georgetown University, George Washington University, and the National War College, and she has been a research fellow at Harvard University, Princeton University, the Brookings Institution, Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, USC, and UCLA.  She has received numerous grants for her scholarship and innovative approaches to teaching.

Dr. Gronich has been a consultant to the International Peace Academy, the US Department of Defense, the US Department of State, the US Agency for International Development, the US Department of Commerce, the Rand Corporation, the Stockholm International Peace Institute North America, the US Institute of Peace, and the Academy for Educational Development. She has served as the Director of the Office of Education and the Successor Generations at The Atlantic Council of the United States, and as a Program Officer with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Committee on International Peace and Security at the Social Science Research Council.

Dr. Gronich is a recipient of the Best Faculty Paper Award from the Foreign Policy Analysis Section of the American Political Science Association, and she has been nominated for the Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the American Political Science Association meetings. Among her most recent publications are “Expertise and Naïveté in Decision-Making: Theory, History, and the Trump Administration,” in the H-Diplo/International Security Studies Forum Policy Series, America and the World—2017 and Beyond, May 3, 2017, http://issforum.org/roundtables/policy/1-5AH-expertise; and “Psychology” (with Richard H. Immerman) in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations 3rd edition, eds. Michael Hogan and Frank Costigliola (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). She is currently at work on a monograph, Choosing Force or Diplomacy: The Cognitive Calculus Theory and Foreign Policy Decision-Making; and she is developing a study integrating prospect theory, domestic political coalitions, and foreign policy change.

Dr. Gronich has lectured widely in the US and internationally, and she has served as a reviewer for several professional journals and presses.  She has been member of the Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University, and the Honor Board of Women in International Security.  She received her BA in political science from UC Santa Barbara, and her MA and PhD in political science from UCLA.

Jason Luo is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Political Science. He studies how China’s use of AI is reshaping politics and governance—both domestically and through global diffusion. His research interests include information technology and politics, political economy, Chinese politics, and computational social science. Luo holds a PhD and MA from Stanford University and a BA from Peking University.

I am a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington University. My research focuses on the impact of military strategy and technology on foreign policy, the politics of nuclear weapons, and prestige and reputational motivations in international affairs. My current book project, based on my recent PhD dissertation, develops a strategic reputational theory to explain why great powers often engage in peripheral conflicts at the expense of core national interests and tests the theory with several twentieth-century cases. At George Washington, I teach for both the Security Policy Studies MA program and the Department of Political Science. Previously, I taught at the South Korean Air Force Academy. I hold a BA and MA in Political Science from Korea University and a PhD in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.