Risa Brooks

Biography

Dr. Risa Brooks is Allis-Chalmers Professor of Political Science at Marquette University, and for the 2026-2027 academic year is a visiting fellow at Notre Dame’s O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.

Brooks is the author of Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton University Press), coeditor (with Elizabeth Stanley) of Creating Military Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford University Press), and coeditor (with Lionel Beehner and Daniel Maurer) of Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: Politics, Society and Modern War (Oxford University Press) and co-editor (with Christoph Harig) of the forthcoming volume (Oxford University Press), Politicized Militaries in Democracies, which examines civil-military relations on twelve democracies around the globe. Her research has appeared in the Annual Review of Political Science, International Security, Security Studies, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, among others. She is a regular commentator on civil-military relations and her articles and remarks have appeared in venues such as Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Brooks received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, and formerly held positions as Senior Fellow at West Point’s Modern War Institute, research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, U.K. and postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. In 2025 she was honored to be named the E.G. Keogh Chair by the Australian Army, which included giving a keynote lecture in the parliament house in Canberra to an audience of 700.

Her primary research interests lie in questions related to U.S. and comparative civil-military relations, military professionalism, military effectiveness, and strategic assessment.