Emily Paddon Rhoads is an associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College. Her research and teaching interests span the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and peace and conflict studies.  She has conducted fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Kenya, and Iraq.

She is the author of Taking Sides in Peacekeeping: Impartiality and the Future of the United Nations (Oxford University Press, 2016) as well as several academic journal articles on civilian agency in armed conflict, peacekeeping, humanitarianism, and the United Nations. She co-edited the forthcoming Civilian Protective Agency in Violent Settings: A Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2023) and is currently working on a book project about the moral agency of frontline protectors. Her research has been supported by the European Research Council, Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Government of Canada, British Council, and the Australian Government’s Civil-Military Center.

At Swarthmore, Paddon Rhoads is faculty adviser for the College’s three-year partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and serves on the Peace and Conflict Studies program committee. She is also faculty mentor in the Richard Rubin Scholar Mentoring Program, which seeks to advance the academic, inter-personal, social, and professional success of underrepresented and first generation students at the College.

Before coming to Swarthmore, Paddon Rhoads taught at the University of Oxford where she was the Rose Research Fellow in International Relations (Lady Margaret Hall) and Associate Faculty at the Blavatnik School of Government. She has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, the International Peace Institute, and McGill University. From 2016-2019, she was a research collaborator on the ERC project: “Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Morality, Law, and Politics of Armed Conflict” at the European University Institute.

Paddon Rhoads earned her MPhil and DPhil (Phd) from the University of Oxford, and her A.B. from Brown University. She is an elected fellow of the Rift Valley Institute and co-founder of the Oxford Central Africa Forum (OCAF).