Dr. Susan Yoshihara is a writer and researcher, a former U.S. Navy Commander and combat logistics helicopter pilot, and a Gulf War veteran.
Her scholarly work on human rights has influenced the debate at the UN for more than a decade. Her research has sought to popularize new ideas in the field of demographics, one that has been dominated by academic dogma.
She was among the earliest to alert the UN Security Council to the issue of children born of sexual violence in conflict. She published the go-to studies in law review and other peer-reviewed journals on how UN agencies and committees have engaged in systematic overreach unnoticed by the mainstream.
Her book on humanitarian intervention, Waging War to Make Peace: U.S. Intervention in Global Conflicts (Praeger, 2010), examines why the great powers enter small wars and alerts policymakers to the moral dimension of armed conflict and its basis in the just war tradition. She is co-editor of Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics (Potomac Books, 2012), which challenges a widely-held, but false, view that population growth harms global security and demonstrates the way contracting population is making the world less secure. The study has been translated into Japanese as The Life and Death of Nations (2014) and has inspired several international conferences on the nexus of population and security.
Dr. Yoshihara has given expert testimony before UN and U.S. government bodies, including the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, UN Security Council, and the UN Economic and Social Council, on the human rights treaty system, human trafficking, women and children in post-conflict peace building, and the role of the family in sustainable development.
As a White House Fellow, she conducted research on Nazi theft of gold and other assets of Jewish families (the Nazi Gold Project) for the Under Secretary of Commerce, Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat. The effort led to the repatriation of $8 billion to the victims of the Nazis.
Dr. Yoshihara is a frequent public speaker and her commentary has appeared in Fox News, Yomiuri Shimbun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Washington Times, Providence Journal, the Hill, Roll Call, Human Events, and National Review Online.
Dr. Yoshihara is the president and founder of the American Council on Women, Peace, and Security, a group of women experts in the fields of international security, development, law, and religious freedom that advance American values in foreign policy. She holds a Ph.D. in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, received an M.A. in National Security Affairs from the Naval Postgraduate School, and a B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy.
She is an MFA candidate in creative non-fiction at Antioch University, Los Angeles. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband Dr. Toshi Yoshihara and their two daughters.
