Cynthia Roberts is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is also a Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies and Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Roberts previously served as a policy adviser at the Joint Staff, Department of Defense in J-5, Strategy, Plans and Policy and has participated for several years in Track II international dialogues on strategic stability. She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Director of the Russian Area Studies Graduate Program at Hunter and served as a member of the Executive Committee on Science, Arms Control, and National Security of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has held research fellowships at the Brookings Institution and Stanford University, received several grants, including from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and worked as a consultant on international security issues.

Roberts’ research spans international security and financial statecraft. She is the author of two books and numerous articles, book chapters and reports in scholarly and policy journals, including publications based on extensive archival research challenging accepted views on civil-military policymaking in personalist dictatorships. She has presented her work worldwide and
participated in academic, research and policy conferences from Beijing to São Paulo; Brussels and Berlin to Moscow. Roberts’ invited talks include presentations at NATO HQ in Brussels, the NATO Nuclear Policy Symposium in Riga, the NATO Defense College in Rome, the Annual U.S. Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium in Omaha, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory Director’s Strategic Resilience Initiative Workshop in Santa Fe.

Roberts received an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University and also a certificate from the Harriman Institute at Columbia.

 

 

Books

Cynthia Roberts, L. Armijo, and S. Katada, The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Cynthia Roberts, Russia and the European Union: The Sources and Limits of ‘Special Relationships’ (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2007).

Principal Articles

Cynthia Roberts, “Russia at War: The Consequences for Great Power Politics, the BRICS and the Global South,” Transatlantic Policy Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 4 (March, 2024).
Cynthia Roberts, “Revelations about Russia’s Nuclear Deterrence Policy,” War on the Rocks, (June 2020).
Cynthia Roberts, “Russia’s BRICs Diplomacy: Rising Outsider with Dreams of an Insider,” Polity 42, no. 1 (January 2010).
Cynthia Roberts, “Challengers or Stakeholders? BRICs and the Liberal World Order,” Polity 42, no. 1 (January 2010).

Book Chapters

Cynthia Roberts, “Complexity, Nonlinearity and other Essential Jervisian Insights on International Security Problems,” in Richard Immerman, Stacie Goddard, and Diane N. Labrosse, eds., The Jervis Effect, (New York, Columbia University Press, 2025).
Cynthia Roberts, “Foreword,” Andrea Gilli and Pierre de Dreuzy, eds., in Nuclear strategy in the 21st century: continuity or change? (NATO Defense College, December 2022).
Cynthia Roberts, “Trapped on the Eve of War, 1941: Stalin and his Generals Failing Separately and Together,” in B.A. Chotiner and L.J. Cook, eds. The Post communist World in the Twenty-First Century: How the Past Informs the Present (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022).
Cynthia Roberts, “First Principles of Great Power Competition. Avoid Allowing Opponents to ‘Beat America at its Own Game’: Ensuring US Financial and Currency Power,” Chinese Strategic Intentions, (White Paper, U.S. Department of Defense, 2019).

Other Articles, Testimony and Reports

Cynthia Roberts, “The Challenges of Decoding Russian Coercion,” Review of The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War by Dima Adamsky, Texas National Security Review Roundtable (September 2024).