Kate Kizer is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy, and a leading progressive foreign policy strategist and writer. Kate has spent nearly a decade in Washington advancing prevention and peacebuilding alternatives to US security policies, with a particular focus on the confluence of human rights, corruption, conflict, and democratic change. Her expertise centers on U.S. grand strategy; the United States post-9/11 military strategy; US foreign policy in the Middle East, with a particular specialization in Yemen and the Arab Gulf States; national security politics and legislation; US arms export, security assistance, and nonproliferation policy; and democracy promotion in the post-Cold War period. Kate is also a skilled organizational manager — she has built multiple, successful NGO policy-advocacy programs in Washington. She also has led game-changing digital growth and legislative campaigns that have freed people from inhumane detention and resulted in bipartisan majorities of Congress passing and advancing unprecedented national security legislation to end US military support for the war in Yemen.

Previously, Kate was the Policy Director at Win Without War, where she was at the forefront of the legislative strategy and grassroots organizing surrounding national security legislative fights in Congress. Prior to Win Without War, Kate served as Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Yemen Peace Project, where she established the organization's policy-advocacy program. At Demand Progress, she crafted narratives to mobilize online activists for surveillance reform and led the digital campaign that helped free government whistleblower Chelsea Manning during the Obama administration. Kate entered foreign policy at the Project on Middle East Democracy, before moving on to lead U.S. policy-advocacy targeting the executive branch at a Bahraini diaspora-led human rights organization. Prior to moving to Washington, Kate was an early staff member of Dropbox before joining the Charlie Crist for Governor campaign as its Deputy Research Director.

Her writing and commentary have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy magazine, among others. She holds an M.A. in Democracy and Governance from Georgetown University and a B.A. in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from UCLA. In addition to her work at CIP, Kate is also a columnist at Responsible Statecraft, Inkstick Media, and the Foreign Exchanges substack. In 2021, Kate was chosen as an International Strategy Forum Fellow with Schmidt Futures, and she has been a steering committee member of the Forum on the Arms Trade since 2018.