Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Editor-in-Chief
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT-Austin, where she directs UT's Asia Policy Program, a joint initiative of the Clements Center for National Security and the Strauss Center for International Security & Law. She is currently a visiting associate professor of Indo-Pacific security at the U.S. Army War College, and is also a non-resident scholar affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Chestnut Greitens' research focuses on security, East Asia, and authoritarian politics & foreign policy. Her first book, Dictators and their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence (Cambridge, 2016) received multiple academic awards. Her second book, Politics of the North Korean Diaspora(Cambridge Elements Series in East Asia, 2023), addresses how authoritarian perceptions of security shape diaspora politics. She is currently finishing her third book manuscript, which examines the effect of internal security concerns on Chinese grand strategy.
Her work has appeared in academic journals and edited volumes in English, Chinese, and Korean, and in major media outlets. Her research has been published in International Security, International Organization, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Governance, Asian Survey, China Quarterly, and the Journal of Korean Studies, as well as Foreign Affairs and the New York Times, among other outlets. She regularly testifies to Congress on challenges to security and democracy in the Indo-Pacific.
From 2015-2020, Chestnut Greitens was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and founding co-director of MU's Institute for Korean Studies. She was also previously a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Korea Chair. In 2017-18, as First Lady of Missouri, Chestnut Greitens co-led the state's trade missions to China and South Korea, and ran an interagency policy initiative that resulted in major legislative and executive-branch reforms to Missouri's policies on foster care, adoption, and prevention of child abuse and neglect. An advocate for women's leadership in public policy, she also worked to appoint women to statewide boards and commissions.
She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University; an M.Phil from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor's degree from Stanford University.
Author's Articles
Psychological Biases in the Era of Nuclear Weapons and AI
Rose McDermott explains how common judgment biases can undermine nuclear deterrence and strategic stability, especially under time pressure and with emerging technologies like AI, using Kahneman’s Type 1 (fast, intuitive) and Type 2 (slow, analytic) thinking…
Understanding Schelling’s Nuclear Paradigms with Francis J. Gavin
Francis J. Gavin explains why Thomas Schelling remains foundational to nuclear strategy despite being an economist, and argues that “strategic stability” is often invoked without clear definition. He highlights tensions between mutual vulnerability and US…
Strategic Stability in a Rapidly Changing World
Harold Trinkunas previews our special issue on strategic stability by explaining how Cold War deterrence assumptions rooted in a bilateral US–Soviet relationship no longer hold amid more nuclear-armed actors, wider access to AI, cyber, hypersonics, and the…
A Dystopian Take on Rising Authoritarianism and Resistance
Melissa Chan joins to discuss her career reporting across Asia and why she pivoted from journalism to co-creating the graphic novel "You Must Take Part In Revolution" with activist-artist Badiucao. We discuss the book’s visual style, the subversive…
The (Elusive) Search for Strategic Stability
The combination of technological and geopolitical change puts pressure on the search for strategic stability in the contemporary international environment.
Navigating a World Adrift with Shivshankar Menon
Shivshankar Menon, a former national security advisor to the Indian prime minister, joins the podcast to discuss the mythology of world orders and why current global nostalgia for a "golden age" can be strategically dangerous. He analyzes how Indian and…
The Principle of Distinction in the Autonomous Age
Are concerns about autonomous weapons overblown? In our latest episode, Nathan Wood argues that we must move past catch-all terms and focus on the distinct legal and ethical challenges of specific systems.
Ensuring US Military Readiness in the Indo-Pacific
Eyck Freymann and Harry Halem argue that the United States can sustain conventional deterrence against China into the 2030s through targeted investments in logistics and the industrial base. They join our editors to discuss why a holistic view of the military…
US Military Primacy and Alliance Resilience
In 1956, the Suez Crisis revealed the limits of British power. Could a similar event hollow out the US alliance system today? Bence Nemeth applies his "five factor theory of defense cooperation" to answer this critical question.
Conventional Options Theory in the New Nuclear Era
Tyler Bowen from the US Naval War College joins us to discuss the logic of conventional coercion in nuclear crises. As the US faces nuclear-armed adversaries like Russia and China, understanding how to "thread the needle" between defense and escalation is…
The Art and Science of Grand Strategy
Marina Henke argues that grand strategy is more than just a list of goals—it is the art and science of allocating resources to achieve core objectives under conditions of uncertainty. We explore why so many governments struggle to prioritize, the dangers of…
Trade, Technology, & the US–Korea Alliance: A Conversation with Ambassador Kang
Sheena Chestnut Greitens sat down with Ambassador Kang Kyung-wha, the Republic of Korea’s ambassador to the United States. Recorded before a live audience at The University of Texas at Austin on December 3, the conversation explores the deepening alignment…