Dr. Namrata Goswami is an author and educator specializing in international relations and space policy whose work focuses on great-power competition, strategic culture, grand strategy, and ethnic identity. She currently serves as Professor of Space Security with the United States Space Force (USSF) Schriever and West Space Scholars Program at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches courses on spacepower development, strategy, policy, and space as a warfighting domain. She has also held a professorship at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University, and served as a guest lecturer at Emory University.
She holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University, with early research on just war theory and humanitarian intervention. Her scholarship has since expanded to include ethnic identity, counterinsurgency, comparative space policies, spacepower theory, international relations theory, and the strategic implications of emerging technologies. Her academic career includes several international research fellowships. She was an Endeavour Postdoctoral Research Fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia; a visiting research fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in Norway; and held a Heinrich Böll Foundation-supported visiting professor position at Heidelberg University in Germany.
Dr. Goswami’s professional experience spans academia, policy institutions, and defense-oriented research. She has worked with the United States Institute of Peace, the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, and the Joint Special Operations University. She was a co-investigator on a Minerva Initiative grant, funded by the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, examining great-power competition in outer space. She has a long-standing engagement with transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security networks. Since 2013, she has served as a resource person with NATO’s Partnership for Peace Consortium at the George Marshall European Center for Security Studies, contributing to work on emerging security challenges, hybrid warfare, and technology-driven security risks, and building reference curricula for NATO leadership. She has also contributed to space module and security studies at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies as a resource person, focusing on space security and regional strategy.
Dr. Goswami’s publication record includes multiple books with major academic presses. These include Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury, 2020), The Naga Ethnic Movement for a Separate Homeland: Stories from the Field (Oxford University Press, 2020), Indian National Security and Counter-Insurgency: The Use of Force versus Non-Violent Dissent (Routledge, 2015), and ISIS 2.0: South and Southeast Asia (Joint Special Operations University Press, 2018). She has also published widely in journals and policy and media outlets, including Strategic Studies Quarterly, Asia Policy, Small Wars & Insurgencies, The Diplomat, The Space Review, and The Washington Post. She is currently working on a book on spacepower theory.
Her policy engagement includes testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on China’s space program, presentations to U.S. congressional staffers, and contributions to U.S. defense and space strategy discussions, including long-range space futures workshops with the U.S. Space Force and U.S. Air Force. Her work has been supported by fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship at the United States Institute of Peace, and research funding from the U.S. Department of Defense through the Minerva Initiative.
In addition to her academic and policy work, Dr. Goswami delivered a TEDx talk addressing her intellectual journey, the role of fearlessness in scholarship, and the purpose of research in addressing complex global challenges. She is a trained mountaineer who has scaled peaks to 17,000 feet in the Himalayas in northwest India as part of her university’s executive mountaineering club and has since hiked in the Appalachian, Smoky, and Blue Ridge mountains in the U.S. and the Blue Mountains in Australia.
