Carol Fair

The Expert is a Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She previously served as a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation, a political officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, and a senior research associate at the United States Institute of Peace.  Her most recent book is In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2018/2019).  She has authored, co-authored and co-edited several books, including Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War (Oxford University Press); Pakistan’s Enduring Challenges (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents (Oxford University Press, 2014); Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2010); Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations in Sacred Spaces (Oxford University Press, 2008); The Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan (USIP, 2008), and The Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States (Globe Pequot, 2008), among others. 

She is a member of Women in International Security, International Studies Association, American Political Science Association, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies, the American Association for Afghan Studies, and the Association for Asian Studies and serves on the editorial board numerous scholarly and policy-analytic journals. She resigned her membership with the International Institute of Strategic Studies and Council on Foreign Relations to protest their perduring refusals to address diversity issues.

She has a PhD from the University of Chicago, Department of South Asian Languages and Civilization and an MA from the Harris School of Public Policy, also at the University of Chicago. She speaks, writes and reads Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. She causes trouble in all of these languages.