Joseph Torigian is an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a center associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.
Previously, Torigian was a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover History Lab, Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, postdoctoral fellow at Princeton-Harvard’s China and the World Program, a postdoctoral (and predoctoral) fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), a predoctoral fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, an IREX scholar affiliated with the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, a Fulbright Scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, and a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research has been supported by the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation, MIT’s Center for International Studies, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, the Critical Language Scholarship program, and the FLAS program.
Torigian studies the politics of authoritarian regimes with a specific focus on elite power struggles, civil-military relations, and grand strategy. He uses primary sources, rare books, and interviews to provide new accounts of historical milestones in two nations of crucial geopolitical importance: China and Russia. In particular, Torigian investigates how leaders in those nations secure themselves against threats at home and abroad. His research contributes to several fields and disciplines: international relations, comparative politics, security studies, history, and Chinese and Russian studies.
He is the author of Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion: Elite Power Struggles in the Soviet Union and China after Stalin and Mao (Yale University Press, 2022) and The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, June 2025). The latter was nominated for a Financial Times Book of the Summer and an Economist Best Book of the Year. Torigian's current research agenda looks at nuclear weapons and the military-industrial complex in China and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
He contributed to media outlets such as the BBC, Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Economist, Financial Times, New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, Wall Street Journal, and CNN. Torigian has also published in general-interest journals such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.
