Keren Yarhi-Milo

Keren Yarhi-Milo is a political scientist specializing in the study of interstate communication, crisis bargaining, reputation and credibility, and the psychology of leaders and decision makers. She is the dean of the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University and the Arnold A. Saltzman Professor of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. She is also a former director of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia.

Biography

Keren Yarhi-Milo earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and completed her post-doc at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Her dissertation won the Kenneth Waltz Award for the best dissertation in the field of International Security and Arms Control in 2010. She subsequently earned her tenure at Princeton University, where she taught at the Princeton School of International and Public Affairs for 10 years before joining the faculty at Columbia University in 2019. In 2022, she won the Emerging Scholar Award from the International Studies Association, an award that recognizes “scholars who have made through their body of publications the most significant contribution to the field of security studies.” She is best known for her scholarship about credibility and reputation, as well as her study of the psychology of leaders. She was a student of Robert Jervis, who became a deep personal mentor to her.

Her book Who Fights for Reputation? The Psychology of Leaders in International Conflict (2019) earned the Best Book Award on Foreign Policy from the American Political Science Association and won the Biennial Best Foreign Policy Book Award from the International Studies Association. Her 2016 book, Knowing The Adversary: Leaders, Intelligence Organizations, and Assessments of Intentions in International Relations, received the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award and was a co-winner of the 2016 DPLST Book Prize, Diplomatic Studies Section of the International Studies Association. She is known for coining selective attention theory.

Yarhi-Milo grew up in Israel, where she served as an intelligence officer while completing mandatory military service, and graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in political science in 2003. She previously worked with several NGOs promoting peace in the Middle East, including the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.

Yarhi-Milo lives on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, NY with her husband and two sons.