Dr. Scott Straus

Professor of Political Science

Professor of Political Science, American Academy of Political and Social Science

Dr. Scott Straus is Professor of Political Science and the 2023 Mahatma M.K. Gandhi Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He studies political violence, genocide, human rights, and post-conflict politics with an empirical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Improving World Order, the Lepgold Prize from Georgetown University, the Best Book in Conflict Processes from the American Political Science Association, and the Best Book in Human Rights from the International Studies Association. Straus also wrote The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War (Cornell, 2006), which won the Best Book in Political Science from the Association of American Publishers and Honorable Mention for the Melville Herskovits prize from the African Studies Association. He is a coeditor of Vol III of the Cambridge World History of Genocide (Cambridge, 2023), the author of Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016), and co-author, with Barry Driscoll, Introduction to International Studies: Global Forces, Interactions, and Tensions (Sage, 2022, 2nd ed.). In 2016, President Obama appointed him to the Council of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Straus continues to serve on the Museum’s Committee on Conscience. Prior to his academic career, Straus was a freelance journalist based in Nairobi; he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 coverage of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.