Contact Dr. Christopher C. Harmon
Dr. Harmon is a researcher, writer, and lecturer in several areas of political science.
He is a faculty member of the Institute of World Politics, the D.C. graduate school.
Terrorism and Insurgency Studies
Completing his doctoral dissertation on terrorism in Europe, Harmon began an extended run of publications on: the paradox of left-right similarity in militant ideologies; the moral dimension of terrorist action and planning; varied strategies of terrorists; and sources of funding and economic strategies. Benefiting from pre-9/11/2001 work by the eminent Dr. Martha Crenshaw, Christopher C. Harmon helped generate a national conversation about “how terrorist groups end” by lectures at the Heritage Foundation, the Pentagon Office of National Assessment, the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Capitol Hill, a dozen universities and graduate schools, military intelligence courses, the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, and headquarters of Interpol in Lyon, France. His related research-based publications appeared in May 2004, a Spring 2006 book by Cambridge University Press, his December 2007 textbook Terrorism Today, and essays of 2010.
Harmon’s latest essays on guerrilla war and terrorism consider terrorists’ “diplomats” such as Frantz Fanon (Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 2018); terrorist advocacy and propaganda (a 2018 book from Brookings Institution Press co-authored with R. Bowdish); the Filippino New People’s Army (Routledge Handbook of Democracy and Security); why there is a pattern in terrorist targeting often upon certain calendar dates (Journal of Counterterrorism and Homeland Security International). A forthcoming book chapter covers Adele Balasingham, formerly of the Tamil Tigers, an example of the wider phenomenon of women in guerrilla and terror groups on which Harmon published (with Paula Holmes-Eber) in 2016.
Great Powers, Statecraft and Churchill
Another track in Dr. Harmon’s scholarship is in statecraft, great power competition, and the statesmanship of Winston S. Churchill. His first book brought together essays in honor of Cold War expert Harold W. Rood under the title Statecraft and Power (co-edited with David Tucker). Christopher has written on Churchill as a coalition war leader and contributed to World War II magazine (2006) on that man’s unusual capability—in the early 1940s—for anticipating and planning for the end of fighting in Europe. Harmon’s new book project concerns the education and development of young statesman Winston Churchill before 1940.
Recent work includes “Innovation and Historical Continuity in Great Power Competition” for a Marine Corps journal, and podcasts for Marine Corps University’s Brute Krulak Center, where Harmon is a distinguished fellow (nonresident). In 2022 he published an inquiry into the little-known Shanghai Cooperation Organization—which Iran joined the next year.
Dr Harmon has been recognized for distinguished public service when lecturing at the State Department. Uniquely, he has directed counterterrorism studies programs for international participants at two different U.S. government schools, the Daniel K. Inoue Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies (Honolulu) and the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies (Garmisch).