Former Partners Across the Globe Fellow

Michael Cohen is Senior Lecturer at the National Security College, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. He is the author of When Proliferation Causes Peace: The Psychology of Nuclear Crises (Georgetown UP: 2017), which was reviewed by the late Robert Jervis as a "significant contribution to our knowledge," and co-editor of North Korea and Nuclear Weapons: Entering the New Era of Deterrence (Georgetown UP: 2017). His expertise on the North Korean nuclear threat has been sought by and presented to the U.S. State Department, included in a United States Strategic Command Deterrence Symposium Special Edition and news media outlets in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and elsewhere. 

His research has been published or is forthcoming in scholarly journals European Journal of International Relations, Journal of Peace Research, The Journal of Global Security Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis, Asian Security, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, The Non-Proliferation Review, Australian Journal of International Affairs and International Security (correspondence). He has also contributed a chapter on the psychological bias known as the availability heuristic and its impact on foreign policy decision-making to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Political Psychology. 

Dr. Cohen is also interested in archival research and is passionate about what the historical past does and does not teach us about current national security threats. He has completed archival research in the United States at the Truman Presidential Library, Kennedy Presidential Library (under a Kovler research grant), Johnson Presidential Library (under a Moody research grant), National Archives and Record Association at College Park, in Britain at the National Archives and in Australia at the National Archives and the National Library.    

Since joining the ANU in 2018, Dr. Cohen is (since 2020) convenor of the PhD program at the National Security College where he also designed and convenes one of two core courses in the Masters’ Program. Prior to joining the ANU he was Senior Lecturer at the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University (2016-2017) and Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Center for War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark (2012-2015). In 2014 he was a visiting fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He completed his PhD in 2012 at the University of British Columbia.

Research interests: International Relations, International Security, Nuclear Weapons, Foreign Policy Decision-Making, Alliances in Europe and Asia, the U.S.-Australia alliance