Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer is Professor of War Studies at King's College London (2025-). She is the founding director of the Oslo Nuclear Project at the University of Oslo, where she was appointed Professor of Political Science in 2020. Prior to this position, Dr. Braut-Hegghammer was a doctoral fellow and an associate professor at the Norwegian Defence University College. She has been a Junior Faculty Fellow at CISAC, Stanford University (2012-13), and a pre- and post-doctoral fellow at the Belfer Center, Harvard University (2008-10).

She received her doctoral degree from London School of Economics in 2010, which received the Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize from BISA the following year. She published Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya Failed to Build Nuclear Weapons (Cornell University Press, 2016) based on her dissertation research. She is the co-editor of the Norwegian Handbook of Politics (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2025). Her work has been published in numerous outlets including International Security, The Middle East Journal, the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Monkey Cage and War on the Rocks.

Research Interests 

• Nuclear weapons
• Nuclear Strategy
• Nuclear Proliferation
• Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Cheating and compliance
• High North

Publications

Books

• Kristoffer Kolltveit, Elin H. Allern, Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer and Bjørn Erik Rasch, The Oxford Handbook of Norwegian Politics and Governance (forthcoming 2025, Oxford University Press).
• Unclear Physics: Why Iraq and Libya failed to build nuclear weapons, Cornell University Press, 2016.

Articles

• Birds of a Feather? Probing Cross-National Variation in Nuclear Inhibitions, Security Studies 32.1 (2023): 172-180
• Engaging North Korea: The Warming-up Phase, Survival 63.6 (2021): 119-125
• Cheater’s Dilemma: Iraq, Deception, and the Path to War, 1991–2003 International Security (2020) 45 (1): 51–89. https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00382
• Proliferating Bias? American Political Science, Nuclear Weapons, and Global Security (Journal of Global Security Studies, Volume 4, Issue 3, July 2019, Pages 384–392)
• “Revisiting Osirak: Preventive Attacks and Nuclear Proliferation Risks,” International Security, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer 2011), pp. 101-132

Book chapters

• “Norwegian Foreign Policy: Shifts Beneath the Surface”, in The Oxford Handbook of Norwegian Politics and Governance, chapter in Kristoffer Kolltveit, Elin H. Allern, Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer and Bjørn Erik Rasch, (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).
• “Generating Theory from Iraqi Archives: Insights from Two Challenging Decades” chapter in Ba‘thist Iraq through Archives: Reflections, Explorations, and Opportunities, Lisa Blaydes and Samuel Helfont, eds. (Forthcoming, Stanford University Press).
• Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer & Or Rabinowitz, Proliferation in the second nuclear age: The cases of Iraq, Libya and Syria, chapter in Leopoldo Nuti and Christian F Ostermann, eds., The Cambridge History of the Nuclear Age (Cambridge University Press).

Teaching

• Considering PhD supervision (not for the 2025-2026 academic year)

Research Centres

• Humanitarian Consequences of Nuclear Use (PI, 2025-2026) 
• Deterrence Challenges in the High North (PI, Professor Mats Berdal co-PI, 2025-2027)