Cynthia Roberts

Cynthia Roberts is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is also a Research Scholar at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Roberts is a member of the John J. McCloy Roundtable on Setting the National Security Agenda at the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously she was Director of the Russian Area Studies Graduate Program at Hunter and served as a member of the Executive Committee on Science, Arms Control, and National Security of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has held research fellowships at the Brookings Institution and Stanford University, received several grants, including from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and worked as a consultant on international security issues.

Prof. Roberts is a specialist on Russia and European security problems and also publishes widely on international power shifts and the economic and financial statecraft of rising powers. Her book, The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (with L. Armijo and S. Katada), was published by Oxford University Press in November 2017. She is the editor of and contributor to a special issue on Challengers or Stakeholders? BRICs and the Liberal World Order (Polity, 2010) and co-author, most recently, of “The Varieties of Collective Financial Statecraft: the BRICS and China” in Political Science Quarterly (Fall 2017).

Recently, Prof. Roberts has focused on the re-emergence of nuclear threats as a source of insecurity in Europe and the erosion of European defense capabilities. She is the author of numerous articles on European security issues and a monograph on Russia and the European Union: The Sources and Limits of ‘Special Relationships’ (2007). Her work is published in scholarly journals, online in The European Financial Review and Foreign Affairs and in reports and edited volumes.

Education

• PhD, Columbia University
• MA, MPhil, Columbia University
• Certificate from the Harriman Institute, Columbia University