Karin Johnston

Karin L. Johnston is the research director at Women In International Security (WIIS) and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and American University. She is an experienced policy analyst and project manager with government, non-profit, and academic experience in international security, foreign policy analysis, U.S.-European relations, and gender, peace and conflict analysis.

A recipient of the U.S. Department of State’s Franklin Fellowship, Johnston served in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, focusing on the Bureau’s security sector portfolio and stabilization strategies. She helped expand CSO’s security sector expertise in security sector reform (SSR), Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) of armed groups, and foreign assistance and stabilization strategies. While at CSO, Johnston co-authored a practitioner’s guide on DDR and defections with the UK Stabilization Unit that has been utilized in SSR efforts in Cameroon, Mozambique, and West Africa. Johnston has served as a WPS trainer at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Institute for Security Governance in Monterey, California, and Bogota, Colombia, and as a speaker on gender and WPS for the Inter-American Defense College and the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies in Washington, DC.

Johnston has written on German policy decision-making and the politics of military intervention, international public opinion and media and politics, U.S. and transatlantic foreign and defense policy, and gender equality in the European Union. Fluent in German, Johnston was a Mercator Fellow at the University of Duisburg-Essen and a former fellow of the Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship Program. She received a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park and an MA in International Studies from the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies.