Muhammad Omar Afzaal is a 2026-2027 Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program’s Center for Nuclear Security Policy. He served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Government at Bowdoin College in 2025/26.
Dr. Afzaal’s scholarly expertise is in nuclear strategy, limited war, and civil-military relations. His research focuses on tacit bargaining between rival states to manage escalation and the causes of unintended conflict.
His book project focuses on escalation management under a nuclear shadow. Despite states using cross-border violence in protracted territorial disputes, why do only some skirmishes escalate to war? What facilitates and what disrupts conflict management and escalation control? Afzaal argues that adversaries tacitly work together to limit escalation on the battlefield. His research demonstrates that civilian intervention in battlefield decision-making disrupts this tacit escalation management, resulting in escalation. At MIT, Dr. Afzaal extends his work on tacit escalation management to understand the stability-instability paradox, which is core to rethinking the limits of nuclear deterrence. His research explains the puzzle of why and how nuclear rivals engage in tacit bargaining towards predictable conventional behavior if conventional predictability is expected to undermine nuclear deterrence. In doing so, he addresses how tacit bargaining shapes the credibility of nuclear postures.
Dr. Afzaal’s related work on Pakistan’s Strategic Imagination of Civil-Military Relations is forthcoming in “Insecurity and Ambition: Understanding Pakistan’s Strategic Debates,” an edited volume by Georgetown University Press. He shows that political elites tacitly eschew security policymaking in exchange for military support in forming or retaining the government.
His research was awarded the USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar Fellowship by the United States Institute of Peace, the Joukowsky Summer Research Award from Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs, and the Graduate Research Fellowship from the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia.
Dr. Afzaal holds a BA in Economics from Grinnell College, along with a Masters in Public Affairs, a Master of Arts in Political Science and a Ph.D. in Political Science all from Brown University.