Frances Z. Brown

Dr. Frances Z. Brown is a vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She writes on U.S. foreign policy, conflict, and democracy. She also co-directs Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance program, and oversees the Africa program and Global Order and Institutions programs at the vice presidential level.  

Before joining Carnegie in 2017, Brown served as director for democracy and fragile states on the White House National Security Council (NSC) staff, where she helped manage policy processes on democracy support and conflict stabilization efforts, serving under both the Obama and Trump administrations.  Prior to the NSC, Brown served at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives, managing political transition programs in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Africa from the field and Washington.  

Other experience includes consulting for the Quadrennial Defense Review; two years in Beirut, Lebanon; a year at the Kabul-based Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit; shorter project-management roles in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Pakistan; and political risk forecasting. Previous research roles include fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations, Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, the U.S. Institute of Peace, as well as her doctoral work at Oxford, which examined donors’ bottom-up state-building in conflict-affected states.  

She has published field research projects on Afghanistan stabilization and subnational governance with the U.S. Institute of Peace, on Syria stabilization with Carnegie, and shorter analyses in the American Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the International Herald Tribune, and elsewhere. On television, Brown has commented on U.S. foreign policy for BBC World News, ABC News (Australia), al-Jazeera, and elsewhere. She is a security fellow with the Truman National Security Project.