Senior Fellow, Democracy, Conflict and Governance, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld advises governments, philanthropists, and activists on how democracies make major social change. As a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, she focuses on countries facing serious violence, polarization, democratic decline, and other problems of poor governance.  

In 2010, Time magazine named Rachel one of the top 40 political leaders under 40 in America for her decade as the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, which assisted campaigns, advocated for legislation, and fostered a new generation of military veterans and national security leaders to enhance global security, democracy, and human dignity. In 2011, Hillary Clinton appointed Rachel to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advised the Secretary of State quarterly, a role she served through 2014.  

Rachel appears regularly in national and international media and is the author of three books. Her most recent, A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security (Knopf, 2018) on political violence in the United States and overseas, became a TED talk on violence in polarized democracies that has been translated into 17 languages and viewed more than a million times. Her previous book, Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform (Carnegie, 2012), was chosen by Foreign Affairs magazine as one of the best foreign policy books of 2012.