Risa Brooks

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 Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center.

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), coeditor (with Lionel Beehner and Daniel Maurer) of Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations (Oxford University Press) and co-editor (with Christoph Harig) of the forthcoming volume Politicizing the Military in Democracies (Oxford University Press), 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 public commentator on civil-military relations and her work has 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. She was recently honored to be named the Australian Army’s Keogh Chair for 2025 and is a research associate with the Barcelona based Institute for Integrated Transitions and a non-resident fellow with the Future Security Program at New America.

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