Monica Toft


Monica Duffy Toft is an American international relations scholar. Her research interests include international security and strategy, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars, and the relationship between demography and national security. Among her researches, her theory of indivisible territory explains how certain conflicts turn violent while others not, and when it is likely for a conflict to become a violent. Since 2017 she holds the position of Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Director of the Fletcher School's Center for Strategic Studies.

Life and career

Education

Toft graduated from the U.S. Army's Defense Language Institute in 1984 with highest honours. She then completed the Associate of Arts General Curriculum of the University of Maryland's European Division in 1987. In 1990 Toft graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in political science and Slavic languages and literature from the University of California Santa Barbara. She went on to Chicago University where she completed both an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science. The title of her doctoral dissertation was The Geography of Ethnic Conflict.

Career

Toft's professional career began in the U.S. Army where she worked as a Russian linguist from 1983 to 1987. After completing her education, Toft joined the faculty at Harvard University where she was a professor of international politics at the Kennedy School of Government and Assistant Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. When the Olin Institute closed in 2007, Toft then established and directed the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Kennedy School. In September 2012, Toft joined the faculty of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford as Professor of Government and Public Policy. During this period, she also spent four months as Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She left Oxford in 2017 to join Tufts University.
Toft is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Minorities at Risk Advisory Board, and the Political Instability Task Force. She is also Principal Investigator of the Commonwealth Initiative on Religious Freedom or Belief and a senior research scholar with the Modeling Religion Project, Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, Boston University.
Her work has been recognised through numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including being named Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Foundation of New York for her research on religion and violence in 2008, awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Norway in 2012, and granted Princeton's World Politics Fellowship in 2015.

Personal life

Toft is married to Ivan Arreguín-Toft, also a scholar of international security and strategic studies and an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University.

Books