Dr. Kimberly Marten

Kimberly Marten is a Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, and a faculty member of Columbia's Harriman Institute for Russian and East-Central European Studies, and Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. She specializes in international relations and international security, with a keen interest in Russia. Her current research focuses on the politics of the changing Arctic, which she spoke about at the Climate Change and (In)security Project of the UK Army and Oxford University (starting at about minute 34.00 here). The Harriman Institute and Eurasianet published a podcast interviewing her about her new research on Russian Arctic extractive enterprises and climate change.

Marten is also interested in a broad range of Russian security and foreign policy issues. She has analyzed Russia's Wagner Group "private" military company and its uses by the Russian state in Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Mozambique, and Libya, in Post-Soviet Affairs, three PONARS-Eurasia memos (here, here and here), Lawfare, and War on the Rocks. She was honored to give congressional testimony about the Wagner Group in July 2020 (written testimony here). She also explores Russia's overall aims in Africa in the Washington Quarterly.

Another strand of her research unpacks and analyzes the history and status of Russia's relationship with NATO and NATO enlargement, in International Politics, the European Journal of International Security, an H-Diplo International Security Studies Forum roundtable, and a Council on Foreign Relations report. In January 2022 she was interviewed about the Russia/US and Russia/NATO security dialog meetings by Voice of America and Al Jazeera English.

She has also analyzed Russia’s intelligence agencies under Putin (Routledge Handbook and the Journal of Slavic Military Studies), and explained (International Politics) Putin's decision to meddle in the 2016 U.S. elections, and to intervene militarily in Ukraine (The Washington Quarterly). Other Russia-related work is in The New Republic, ForeignAffairs.com, H-Diplo, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Post's Monkey Cage Blog (here, here, here, here, here, and here). Marten has discussed Putin's foreign and security policy on the The Daily Show (extended interview here) with Jon Stewart, CBS This Morning Saturday (here and here), the Charlie Rose Show, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show and The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, PBS NewsHour Weekend with Hari Sreenivasan (here, here, here, here, and here), NPR's All Things Considered with Ari Shapiro and Audie Cornish, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The 1A (here, here, and here) with Joshua Johnson, Here and Now with Robin Young, KQED's Forum, and WNYC's The Takeaway, among others.

Before this, Marten analyzed the politics of warlords, asking how their patronage networks impact sovereignty and state failure. In Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States (Cornell University Press, 2012), Marten traces the development of warlordism and its consequences in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Sunni Arab areas of Iraq, and post-Soviet Georgia and the Republic of Chechnya in Russia. She discussed the book on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show and Wisconsin Public Radio. The book was reviewed in an H-Diplo/International Security Studies Forum roundtable. In International Security, she compared warlordism in Afghanistan and Somalia to medieval Europe and Republican-era China. She researched militias and security sector reform in weak states, including work on the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, published in International Peacekeeping and in the International Herald Tribune/New York Times. Her chapter on the Afghan Local Police appears in an edited volume on The Transnational Governance of Violence and Crime, following an earlier opinion piece in the IHT/NYT. With Olga Oliker she wrote about the threat of warlordism in Ukraine's patriotic militias in War on the Rocks.

Her prior books include Engaging the Enemy: Organization Theory and Soviet Military Innovation (Princeton, 1993), which received the Marshall Shulman Prize; Weapons, Culture, and Self-Interest: Soviet Defense Managers in the New Russia (Columbia, 1997); and Enforcing the Peace: Learning from the Imperial Past (Columbia, 2004).

Marten earned her A.B. in 1985 at Harvard magna cum laude and Ph.D. in 1991 at Stanford. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation; a visiting scholar at Harvard's Olin Institute for Strategic Studies; a visiting scholar at Tokyo's Institute for International Policy Studies (via a Hitachi/Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship); and a visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. She has served as chair of the Barnard Political Science Department twice (2006-2009 and 2018-2021), and held the 5-year term Ann Whitney Olin Professorship from 2013-18. Her research has been supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Social Science Research Council/MacArthur Foundation, and the Government of Canada. She is a founding member of PONARS-Eurasia, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.