Robert D. Lamb is a senior fellow and director of the Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation (C3) at CSIS and a research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (CISSM). Dr. Lamb studies governance and development amid conflict, with recent field research in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Pakistan. His current research touches on complex violence, hybrid political orders, nonstate-controlled territories, political transitions, international intervention, absorptive capacity, and alternatives to state building.

Dr. Lamb has presented his work to policymakers and experts in Afghanistan, Colombia, Germany, India, Pakistan, Romania, Sweden, and the United Kingdom; has appeared on CNN, NPR, and NBC News; and has been quoted in USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, and other media outlets. He lived for nearly a year in Medellín, Colombia, studying gang governance and legitimacy and joined CSIS as a visiting scholar after returning to Washington in late 2009. As a strategist in the Defense Department’s Strategy office in 2006 and 2007, he advised defense policymakers on terrorist, criminal, and insurgent networks and comanaged an interagency study of “ungoverned” areas and illicit havens. He earned his Ph.D. in policy studies in early 2010 from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy in a program combining security, economics, and ethics. He received his B.A. in interdisciplinary studies from Gettysburg College in 1993, spent half a year in Nicaragua with a microdevelopment project, then worked for nine years as an editor and journalist, winning a National Press Club award in 2001, before changing careers after 9/11.

Economic Development, Corporate Governance, Foreign Policy, Economy Finance, Leadership,