Heidi Hardt, UCI political science associate professor, has been named a 2021-2022 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow through the Tenured International Relations Scholars program. The honor will support her one-year placement in the Office of European Security and Political Affairs, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs (EUR/RPM) at the U.S. State Department. The fellowship is designed to expose faculty to the inner-workings of the government, and will provide a better sense of how foreign policy is made, rather than just reading about it, says Hardt.

“As a scholar, I spend a lot of time reading about how national governments work and observing international cooperation in indirect ways, such as interviews and surveys,” Hardt says. “This opportunity will be much closer to a participant observation experience.”

Hardt is an expert on transatlantic security, national security and European security and defense, including NATO, the EU and OSCE. She’s the author of NATO's Lessons in Crisis: Institutional Memory in International Organizations (Oxford UP, 2018), which draws on 120 extensive interviews she conducted with NATO’s high-level elites about the organization’s culture of addressing strategic failures in military operations. She’s also the author of Time to React: The Efficiency of International Organizations in Crisis Response (Oxford UP, 2014), which focuses on the role institutional culture plays in determining an organization’s crisis response. Her research, which appears in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Politics, Review of International Organizations, European Security and Global Governance, has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright and NATO.

As international travel restrictions lift, the fellowship will include supporting her travel to participate in key NATO conferences.