Welcome

Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Professor in the Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. His research focuses on international order and security, especially as related to energy and the environment.

In 2024-2025, he is on sabbatical leave at Oxford University, at Nuffield College and All Souls College. 

He is also Director of the Climate Solutions Lab at Brown University.

His triple award-winning book, Partial Hegemony: Oil Politics and International Order, draws lessons from oil history about how states and other actors create and maintain international governance arrangements (Oxford University Press, 2021). The book then applies those lessons to other problems like climate change, peacekeeping, finance, and nuclear politics. It won the APSA Jervis-Schroeder Best Book Award in International History and Politics, the Best Book Award (co-winner) from the APSA International Collaboration section, and the Best Book (Energy Policy--Non-Fiction) award from the American Energy Society.

His previous book, Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War, was published in 2013 by Cambridge University Press. He has published work in International Organization, Foreign Affairs, World Politics, International Security and elsewhere. On BlueSky he is @JeffColgan.bsky.social and on Twitter/X, he is @JeffDColgan

Professor Colgan previously taught at the School of International Service of American University 2010-2014, and was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC in 2012-13.  He completed his Ph.D. at Princeton University, and was a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley, where he earned a Master’s in Public Policy.  Dr. Colgan has worked with the World Bank, McKinsey & Company, and The Brattle Group.