Scott W. Harold is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and an affiliate faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He specializes in the foreign and defense policies of China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Taiwan.
Prior to joining RAND in August 2008, Harold worked at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton China Center from 2006 to 2008. In addition to his work at RAND, since 2006 he has been an adjunct professor of security studies in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is also an adjunct professor of international affairs in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University where he has taught on East Asian security and Chinese politics. He has also served as an adjunct professor of international affairs in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University.
From 2012 to 2017, Harold was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has also held visiting fellowships at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, Germany, in 2018 and Institut Montaigne in Paris, France, in 2019. He is currently a member of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future, Cohort V. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. His Ph.D. is in political science from Columbia University, where he wrote a thesis on China's foreign policy decisionmaking with respect to joining the World Trade Organization.
