Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili is an award-winning scholar of governance, security, and statecraft — named one of the world’s top fifty thinkers by Prospect magazine — whose work shapes how governments, international organizations, and scholars understand political order in the world’s most contested regions.
She is Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Economics and Political Science, and the founding director of the Center for Governance and Markets. Her regional expertise spans Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and the former Soviet world. She is the author of Informal Order and the State in Afghanistan (Cambridge, 2016), winner of the Central Eurasian Studies Society Best Book Award, and, with Ilia Murtazashvili, Land, the State, and War: Property Institutions and Political Order in Afghanistan (Cambridge, 2021). Her recent work on pluralism and polycentric governance includes Governing Differences (Edward Elgar, 2025, edited with Paul Dragoș Aligică). Her research honors include the Elinor Ostrom Award from the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research.
Her expertise is sought at the highest levels of policy. She has testified before the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and has advised the World Bank, the United Nations, USAID, and governments across Eurasia. She is a nonresident scholar in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, president-elect of the Public Choice Society, and a contributing editor at The National Interest.
That influence is grounded in decades in the field. Before her academic career, she served as a USAID democracy and governance officer in Tashkent, a Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan, and a senior research officer at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul; she was formerly a nonresident senior fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Atlantic Council and has conducted research in Afghanistan, across Central Asia, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and Guatemala. She holds a Ph.D. in political science, with a minor in constitutional and comparative law, and an M.A. in agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. In 2026 she is a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar at Tel Aviv University.
She uses philanthropy as a tool to bridge divides — bringing together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners across diverse values and geographies. Her work has been supported by private foundations, the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, and many others.
