Robert D. Lamb
Research Scholar
Robert Lamb is a senior fellow and director of the Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation (C3) at CSIS, researching governance and development amid conflict. He is also a research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland (CISSM). His research addresses subnational and nonstate governance, complex violence, legitimacy, and alternative models to centralized state building, with a current focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Colombia.
He joined CSIS as a visiting fellow in late 2009 after completing 10 months of field research on gang governance and legitimacy in Medellín, Colombia. In 2006 and 2007, he was a strategist in the Defense Department’s Strategy and Policy Planning offices, where 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, where he researched civil violence and cooperative security as a CISSM graduate fellow, and was elected president of the Policy Student Government Association. 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.