Muhammad Omar Afzaal

Professor Muhammad Omar Afzaal holds a BA in Economics from Grinnell College, a Masters in Public Affairs, a Master of Arts in Political Science. and a Ph.D. in Political Science all from Brown University.

Professor Afzaal’s research and teaching specializations lie in international relations, comparative politics, foreign policy, and security studies. His substantive scholarly expertise is in limited war, nuclear strategy, security decision-making, conflict management, adversarial collusion, and civil-military relations. He studies tacit bargaining between rival states to manage escalation and the causes of unintended conflict.

Professor Afzaal’s book project, Dangerous Borders: Civil-Military Decision-Making and Unintended Escalation on the India-Pakistan Frontier, is motivated by the empirical puzzle of escalation: many states use force and violence across protracted territorial disputes, yet only some of these skirmishes escalate to war. How do rival states control escalation, and why do some skirmishes nonetheless explode into unintended warfare? His book project answers this empirical puzzle by focusing on how adversaries work together and tacitly bargain to manage escalation on the battlefield and what at times disrupts that tacit bargaining to cause unintended conflict.

Professor Afzaal’s research was awarded the USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar Fellowship by the United States Institute of Peace. His research is also the recipient of the Joukowsky Summer Research Award 2024 from Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs and the Graduate Research Fellowship 2022 from the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia.

His related work on Pakistan’s Strategic Imagination of Civil-Military Relations is forthcoming in “Insecurity and Ambition: Understanding Pakistan’s Strategic Debates,” an edited volume by Georgetown University Press. His research shows that political elites tacitly eschew security policymaking in exchange for military support in forming or retaining the government.

In addition to his book project, Professor Afzaal has working projects to study i) tacit bargaining between adversaries to manage fighting on the battlefield in the Sino-Soviet Ussuri River dispute, the Korean Peninsula conflict, and the Middle East; ii) why and how adversaries routinize informal conflict resolution mechanisms of hot lines and flag meetings by borrowing practices from UN peacekeeping missions; and iii) escalation management between state and non-state actors in irregular warfare.

Professor Afzaal has presented his research at APSA, ISA, NEPSA, UCLA, and Brown. He has also been invited to Bridging the Gap’s New Era Workshop in Denver and to University of California’s IGCC Public Policy & Nuclear Threats Bootcamp in San Diego.

In his previous teaching experience at Brown University, Professor Afzaal was twice awarded the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Excellence in Teaching.

His past research experience has encompassed projects for Harvard University, Oxford University, the United Nations University (Maastricht), and the World Bank.

Professor Afzaal grew up in Karachi, Pakistan and enjoys Sufi music, watching the New England Patriots, and spending time with his nieces.