Patrice McMahon

Patrice McMahon is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For the 2024-25 year, she will be an International Affairs Fellow funded by the Council on Foreign Relations based in Warsaw, Poland. She received a National Endowment for Humanities grant for 2024-2026 for her research Ordinary People: how Polish society responded to Ukrainian refugees and the future of humanitarianism. In the 2022-2023 academic year, she was based at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland as a Fulbright scholar.

McMahon’s research focuses on humanitarian affairs, peacebuilding, civil society activism, and U.S. foreign policy. She is the author most recently of The NGO Game: Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in the Balkans and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2017) http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100241530 and is the co-author (with David Forsythe) of American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: U.S. Foreign Policy, Human Rights and World Order (Routledge: 2017) https://www.amazon.com/American-Exceptionalism-Reconsidered-Foreign-Policy/dp/1138956821.

McMahon is also the author of Taming Ethnic Hatreds: Ethnic Cooperation and Transnational Networks in Eastern Europe (2007) and has been involved in four other book projects, including State Responses to Human Security: At home and Abroad (2014) and State building and the International Community: Getting its Act Together? (2012). Her research has appeared in various publications, including Foreign Affairs, Political Science Quarterly, Human Rights Quarterly, East European Politics and Societies, Democratization, and Ethnopolitics and has been supported by the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), the U.S. Department of State, the National Research Council, the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research (NCEER), the Soros Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Polish Science Foundation.

Her most recent publication is an edited volume Activism in Hard Times in Central and Eastern Europe: People Power Routledge Press June 2024.

McMahon received her PhD from Columbia University in New York; her MA from The George Washington University, and her BA from The American University.