Nazli Choucri

Nazli Choucri, Professor of Political Science, is Senior Faculty at the Center of International Studies (CIS), and Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Data, Science, and Society (IDSS). Her main focus is on international relations and cyberpolitics—with special attention to sources of conflict and threats to security, on the one hand, and strategies for sustainability and global accord, on the other. She is the architect and Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD), an evolving and distributed knowledge networking system centered on sustainability problems and solution strategies.

Dr. Choucri’s research extends the theory of Lateral Pressure, framed earlier with Robert C. North at Stanford University. By highlighting interactions among the driving variables shaping prevailing propensities for expansion— population, resources, and technology—she explores powerful international dilemmas in three overarching “spaces” of 21st century politics, i.e. (i) the traditional geo-political arena, (ii) the natural environment, and (iii) the constructed domain of cyberspace - and the intersecting challenges.

Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Professor Choucri is the author and/or editor of twelve books, notably, Cyberpolitics in International Relations (2012) and International Relations in the Cyber Age: The Co-Evolution Dilemma, with David D. Clark (2019). She directs CyberIR@MIT, the interactive knowledge networking system at the intersection of cyberspace and international relations suggested at the MIT-Harvard project on Explorations in Cyber International Relations (ECIR), for which she served as principal investigator.

A member of the European Academy for Science, and honored by the International Studies Association, Dr. Choucri’s international service includes two terms as President of the Scientific Advisory Committee of UNESCO's Management of Social Transformation Program, and for near-twenty years, as Associate Director of the MIT's Technology and Development Program (TDP), a flagship research program. Her international collaboration with scholars and policy analysts includes work in Algeria, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Japan, Kuwait, Mexico, Pakistan, Qatar, Sudan, Switzerland, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Professor Choucri has served as General Editor of the International Political Science Review and,  for two terms  each, on the Editorial Board of the American Political Science Review and the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute. She  is the founding Editor of the MIT Press Series on Global Environmental Accord. Currently, on the Board of the Boston Global Forum, she is also a founding member of the Artificial Intelligence World Society (AIWS).

Professor of Political Science
Fellow, AAAS
E53-493, MIT
+1 (617) 253-6198
nchoucri@mit.edu

Assistant: 
Kathleen Searle
E53-456, MIT, 
+1 (617) 253-3119
ksearle@mit.edu

Research Websites