Stuart Kaufman

Biography

Stuart Kaufman, Ph.D. (University of Michigan, 1991) joined the UD Department of Political Science and International Relations as a professor in 2004. Professor Kaufman previously taught at the University of Kentucky and served on the U.S. National Security Council staff. He teaches courses in international relations, international security affairs, diplomacy, ethnic conflict and Russian politics. Kaufman's research focuses on the question of why large groups of people get together to kill each other, based in part on field research in Georgia, Moldova, Philippines, Russia, South Africa and Tanzania. His books include the prize-winning Nationalist Passions (Cornell University Press, 2015) and the co-edited volume, The Balance of Power in World History (Palgrave, 2007). Kaufman was the winner of an Excellence in Scholarship Award from the University of Delaware College of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and a Fulbright scholarship in 2011. His most recent publication is “The MAD Heuristic and the Nuclear Revolution," Journal of Global Security Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (2025).